Beyond Intolerance through Sports

Sport contributes to the social construction of reality: it creates a social order and helps in conveying the image of the other, and in some cases in solidifying "stereotypes" or in confirming a meaning of normality, therefore helping to marginalise some social categories, such as immigrants. A new paradigm is thus being established in sports culture, made explicit today in the slogan "sport for all". There are actually many experiences using sport as a means to stimulate the contact with the other, thus facilitating the processes of inclusion and integration of migrants. For example, sports calling for a "team spirit", by bringing together the local youth and young foreigners, are good examples for understanding how differences are forgotten, thanks to the "cooperation" and the sense of belonging arising from the game. It is no coincidence that the White Paper on Sport provides for a series of measures aimed at countering racism, that emerges strongly in the sports world. It will be up to the institutions, therefore, to promote a new concept of sport as a useful tool aimed not only towards competition, but also at promoting new forms of openness and reciprocity towards the immigrant. For these reasons, this paper presents a research which gives an account, through sport, of relations between immigrant's acceptance and secondary school pupils in the Campania region. The goal was to see whether and to what extent some common misconceptions about diversity (black people, gays / lesbians, the disabled) are widespread - where diversity is here considered only as in the case of black people. The study has resorted to multiple factor analysis for the construction of an intolerance index. The data shows that the cultural capital affects the degree of rejection / acceptance of black people: the higher the cultural capital of the respondents, the lower the attitudes of rejection towards these individuals. The index obtained was used for supporting a cluster analysis which produced a typology of subjects based on the orientation of closure or openness towards black people: "closed" and "friendly". The research findings highlight how pupils in secondary school in Campania are friendlier and more open towards "ethnically" different people. This is a result of considerable importance, since intervening on the acceptance of differences, through sport, we will be able to avert incidents of racism and discrimination periodically happening.