Could Dr. King Watch Big Time College Sports? Race Beyond Shame
by David Leonard and C. Richard King | NewBlackMan
In “Shame of College Sports,” legendary American historian Taylor Branch turns his college sports in this month’s The Atlantic. Focusing on the profits generated through college sports, the lack of power available to student-athletes, and the absurdity to claims of amateurism and student-athletes, Branch exposes the exploitation and hypocrisy that is as much part of the NCAA experience as March Madness and Bowl Games. Almost hoping to disarm critics who often scoff at ‘slavery analogies,’ Brand avoids that comparison instead embracing one that centers on colonialism.
Slavery analogies should be used carefully. College athletes are not slaves. Yet to survey the scene—corporations and universities enriching themselves on the backs of uncompensated young men, whose status as “student-athletes” deprives them of the right to due process guaranteed by the Constitution—is to catch an unmistakable whiff of the plantation. Perhaps a more apt metaphor is colonialism: college sports, as overseen by the NCAA, is a system imposed by well-meaning paternalists and rationalized with hoary sentiments about caring for the well-being of the colonized. But it is, nonetheless, unjust. The NCAA, in its zealous defense of bogus principles, sometimes destroys the dreams of innocent young athletes.
Providing readers with an amazing history, including the origins of the term student-athlete (as part of a systematic effort to avoid paying workers’ compensation claims for injured football players) and illustrating the methods used by NCAA and its partner schools to maintain the illusion of amateur sports all while raking in the dough, Branch surprisingly avoids the issue of race. The colonial analogy notwithstanding, there is virtually no discussion of the racial implications in this system, the larger history of the NCAA in relationship to race, and the ways in which white racial frames help to justify an acceptance of such a system.
Branch seems to point to the racial implications here in a section entitled, ““The Plantation Mentality,” where he quotes Sonny Vaccaro:
“Ninety percent of the NCAA revenue is produced by 1 percent of the athletes,” Sonny Vaccaro says. “Go to the skill positions”—the stars. “Ninety percent African Americans.” The NCAA made its money off those kids, and so did he. They were not all bad people, the NCAA officials, but they were blind, Vaccaro believes. “Their organization is a fraud.”
The reference to the “Plantation mentality” and the explicit acknowledgement that the bulk of profits are generated within sports that in recent years have been dominated by African American athletes generates surprisingly little discussion of the radicalized political economy of college athletics today. Over a decade ago, D. Stanley Eitzen observed
These rules reek with injustice. Athletes can make money for others, but not for themselves. Their coaches have agents, as many students engaged in other extracurricular activities, but the athletes cannot. Athletes are forbidden to engage in advertising, but their coaches are permitted to endorse products for generous compensation. Corporate advertisements are displayed in the arenas where they play, but with no payoff to the athletes. The shoes and equipment worn by the athletes bear very visible corporate logos, for which the schools are compensated handsomely. The athletes make public appearances for their schools and their photographs are used to publicize the athletic department and sell tickets, but they cannot benefit. The schools sell memorabilia and paraphernalia that incorporate the athletes' likenesses, yet only the schools pocket the royalties. The athletes cannot receive gifts, but coaches and other athletic department personnel receive the free use of automobiles, country club memberships, housing subsidies, etc.
To our minds, then, Branch clearly misses an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which the system is built around generating profits through the labor of young African American men. Those profits – the billions of dollars earned through television contracts, merchandizing, video game deals, concessions, booster donations, ticket sales – find there way into the hands of overwhelming white constituency, coaches and athletic directors, in support of a largely white establishment.
Much of the money generated by football and basketball programs funds those other non-revenue generating sports; those that are not only overwhelmingly white but also reflect a larger history of segregation and inequality. That is, the labor of black student-athletes pays for sports that many African Americans have no chance of securing scholarship in because those sports are not available in high school.
In “The Color Gap in Girls' Sports,” Sara Clarke Kaplan highlights this inequality, comparing the sports offered at Washington D.C. schools compared to those Arlington County, Virginia and Montgomery County, Maryland, concluding that whereas D.C. (and most urban school districts) offer “varsity basketball, volleyball, softball, and track for girls” those neighboring suburban districts offer the “big 4” along with “soccer, field hockey, tennis, swimming, gymnastics -- even crew.” According to studies, roughly 85-95% of suburban youth play sports, compared to 15-25 percent of those living in urban areas. EuroAmericans play high school sports at far greater levels (more sports=more opportunities) than African Americans and therefore have a greater chance of securing a scholarship. According to the Women’s Sports Foundation, “African-American females represent less than 5% of all high school athletes, less than 10% of all college athletes.”
We can see a similar reality with boys sports, with golf, tennis, volleyball, baseball, lacrosse, and countless others. The pipeline to a college scholarship comes from America’s suburban public school and private school; yet, it is the profits generated from football and basketball that pays the ticket for those other athletes. Indeed, without the labor of black athletes in college football and basketball, support and subsidies for other sports would wither away. Importantly, it is this radicalized labor, moreover, that enables more elite or rarefied sports to thrive on many Division I campuses: on the one hand, black athletes subsidize white privilege; on the other hand, they make it possible for many schools to recruit and retain white student-athletes, arguably making historically white institutions more competitive in their efforts to attract white students.
And here, the historian of Civil Rights Movement misses a fundamental connection between those struggles for freedom and the bondage of the black student-athlete. The most prestigious and profitable college sports programs in the country are all historically white institutions, some which resisted for decades efforts to integrate them. Now, ironically, even as these ivory towers remain disproportionately white, they happily exploit those too long excluded and marginalized. Moreover, these white dominated institutions of higher learning still refuse to properly educate African Americans. Where, historically, it was the color bar, Jim Crow, and separate-but-equal that enabled them to avoid their obligations, today, it is the primacy of on-field performance, overt and covert efforts to discouraging thinking and learning, and the threat of losing one's scholarship. Graduation rates for black athletes should remind us how little interest or care most institutions of high learning have for their black student-athletes: it as if most colleges and universities regard them as chattel that can be easily replaced with another disposable body. This pattern of denying access and blocking education attainment, same as it ever was, multiplies the exploitation.
Big time college sports feeds on a system of primary and secondary education that under-educates African Americans, skimming of the most talented, while rarely giving the communities from which they corm and to which they will return a second thought. The NCAA has structured a system in which coaches, scouts, and administrators are all too happy to channel the dreams and desperation of young black men who often have no other options and nothing to fall back upon but their bodies. In the process, they not only reinforce tacitly the notion of black physicality--in contrast with white intellect, but they also strengthen racial hierarchies, including the barriers that have kept African Americans from participating fully as students and as athletes.
But then, perhaps, this should not surprise us. The very notion of amateurism and its later complement, the student athlete, emerged as meaningful social and political forces during an era in which intercollegiate athletics were almost exclusively white only spaces--and in the case of amateurism elite white spaces. And importantly, both constructs took shape to contain threats to big time college sports: amateurism to rebuff scandals and corruption, the latter to squash the rights of athletes. The invocation of the ideals (if that is the right word) often works to contain threats to the status quo and do so by cleansing or forgetting the radicalized history of the NCAA and sport more generally in the USA.
In post-Civil Rights America, African Americans now find themselves awkwardly crowded under ill-fitting ideas of the past, but try as it might big time college sport cannot hide the proliferation of racial hierarchy. One need only glance at studies of stacking and until recently the paucity of black quarterbacks to see the truth; but it is perhaps more visibly seen in the small numbers of African American coaches, athletic directors, and university presidents. Big time college sport may be one of the few domains in American life where the people with most experience in pursuit have the smallest representation in its management and leadership.
In responding to Branch’s piece, Kenneth Shropshire points to the missed opportunity in expanding upon the colonialism analogy when he writes, “Colonialism was shrouded in, "Europe knows what's best for Africa, and by colonizing them we will guide their savage ways toward ours." The ubiquitous references that celebrate college sports as a place of discipline, as a place of teaching values, “seasoning,” maturation, enlightenment, and otherwise HELPING student-athletes points to a larger history encapsulated by the ideology of white man’s burden. The celebration of college sports as a vehicle to secure the “American Dream” and to secure the requisite skills and discipline needed to excel in society reeks of colonialism and race given that (1) it is so often used in reference to African American athletes, and (2) because it is used as evidence of the compensation provided to those excelling in revenue sports.
White owners and overseers then, white administrators and coaches now: in both cases systems of slavery. To return to Eitzen,
Slaves, by definition, are not free. The slaves of the antebellum era did not have the right to assemble or petition. They did not have the right to speak out or freedom of movement. Those conditions characterize today's college athletes as well. The NCAA, schools, and coaches restrict the freedom of the athletes in many ways. By NCAA fiat, once athletes sign a contract to play for a school, they are bound to that institution. They make a four-year commitment to that college, yet the school makes only a one-year commitment to them. If an athlete wishes to play for another big-time school, he is ineligible for one year (two years if his former coach refuses to release the athlete from his contract). Yet, if a coach wants to get rid of an athlete, the school is merely bound to provide the scholarship for the remainder of that academic year. Coaches, on the other hand, can break their contracts, and immediately coach another school… The right to privacy is invaded routinely when it comes to college athletes…Freedom of choice is violated when athletes are red-shirted (held from play for a year) without their consent. Athletes may have little or no choice in what position they play. They may be told to gain or lose weight, with penalties for noncompliance. Coaches may demand mandatory study halls and determine what courses the athletes will take and their majors.
While we, with Eitzen, acknowledge that the analogy between athletes and slave can be "overdrawn," we remain mystified that did not foreground the racial politics of big time college sports. Even if only an element in his larger analysis, discussing race would surely have produced a more hostile reception and may have led some to dismiss his reading of the NCAA now. As it, "Shame of College Sport" affirms common sense understandings of the racial contours of contemporary American life, allowing most Americans, the NCAA, and sport off the hook precisely when we should insist on engagement, equality, and inclusion. Dr. King would expect nothing less of us.
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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris.
C. Richard King is the Chair of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University at Pullman and the author/editor of several books, including Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy and Postcolonial America.
