Asian Racialization Through Parenting in Youth Ice Hockey: An Ethnography of a Korean Immigrant Family

This ethnography examines the cultural meanings of sport, focusing on how Asian Americans learn, contest, and negotiate their racialization. Using the ethnographic study of a Korean immigrant family living in the Midwestern United States, this paper theorizes the socially underrepresented contours of Asian racialization in sport. It explores how U.S. youth ice hockey culture reinforces and essentializes whiteness and how Korean Americans subtly naturalize it as an ontologically inevitable hegemonic identity through their parenting in this context. The paper concludes by discussing the role of sport as a racialized public pedagogy, where racialization is mobilized through everyday identity politics, consistently racializing Korean Americans. Additionally, it demonstrates how sport functions as a form of epistemological ethnic cleansing, compelling Korean Americans to reform their identities within the cultural domain.