David J. Leonard is Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He regularly writes about issues of anti-black racism, media culture, inequality, and the criminal justice system. His forthcoming book is entitled Playing While White Privilege and Power on and off the Field (University Washington Press). He is currently working on a monograph entitled All Lives Don’t Matter: White Angels, Black Th*gs and America’s Racism Problem (University of Washington Press).

He is also the author of After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness (SUNY Press, 2012). He is also author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema (Praeger, 2006); he is co-editor of Visual Economies of/in Motion: Sport and Film (Peter Lang, 2006), and Commodified and Criminalized: New Racism and African Americans in Contemporary Sports (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011).

His work has appeared in Journal of Sport and Social Issues, Cultural Studies: Critical Methodologies, Game and Culture, as well as several anthologies. Leonard is a past contributor to The Undefeated, NewBlackMan, the Feminist Wire, Huffington Post, Chronicle of Higher Education/Vitae, and Urban Cusp. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, BBC, The Root, Ebony, Slam, Racialicious, Loop21, The Nation, Layupline, The Grio, and The Starting Five.

Mark Anthony Neal, professor of African American Studies at Duke University, describes Leonard as “one of the sharpest minds writing about race and sports in America today. Race is serious business and no one understands better than Leonard how that extends to the arenas and stadiums that have long been the site of confrontation between black bodies and spectators”

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