Tom Matlack examines the racial implications of playing, watching, and supporting American sports.
My son is the starting outside linebacker on the 10th-grade Boston College High football team. Varsity, JV and 10th grade squads share a locker room at the Jesuit school. The majority of the kids are white, but a handful of the best players are African-American. The black kids control the music in the locker room, and this is the song they play before and after every practice and every game. It’s become a theme song that each kid knows by heart:
So I ball so hard muhf*ckas wanna fine me
But first ni**as gotta find me
What’s 50 grand to a muhf*kaa like me
Can you please remind me?
This sh*t crazy
Ya’ll don’t know that don’t sh*t faze me
The Nets could go 0-82 and I look at you like this sh*t gravy ball so hard,
This sh*t weird
We ain’t even ‘spose to be here,
Ball so hard, since we here
It’s only right that we be fair
Psycho, I’m liable to be go Michael
Take your pick, Jackson, Tyson, Jordan, Game 6
Got a broke clock, Rolleys that don’t tick tok
Audemars that losing time, hidden behind all these big rocks I’m shocked
Too, I’m supposed to be locked up too
If you escaped what I’ve escaped
You’d be in Paris getting f*cked up too
Let’s get faded, Le Meurice for like six days
Gold bottles, scold models, spillin’ Ace on my sick J’s
B**ch behave, just might let you meet Ye,
Chi-town’s D. Rose, I’m movin’ the Nets to BK
“Niggas in Paris,” Jay-Z and Kanye West
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I’ve spent enough time in places like Harlem, Dorchester, and South Central L.A. to realize that drugs and sports are viewed as the most reliable ways out of the ghetto. Sure, there are African-American mothers living below the poverty line who understand that education is a far better bet than perfecting a jump shot or becoming a gang kingpin, but for the most part they are helpless to do anything about it. There is no credible public education system in those places. And since they as parents have no experience with education, they have little ability to understand what their children will even need to become a lawyer or banker or even president. The only programs that seem to work are total immersion—programs like the Epiphany School here in Boston or Homeboy in Los Angeles—where children attend school from morning to night and even on weekends to keep them off the streets and infuse them with the most basic concepts that white children of college-educated parents get every night before going to sleep.
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Early on in the Boston Celtics’ championship 2007-2008 season, I found myself inside the locker room, a middle-aged, obsessive sports fan pretending to be a reporter for a night. (Yes, a wet dream of epic proportions.) I had managed to sell the idea of writing a very brief piece about the team’s Russian masseur, Vlad Shulman, to Boston Magazine (“The Best Hands in the Game”). The team’s suits had made clear that they didn’t want staff quoted during the season, but they were more than happy to grant me a one-day press pass and send me into the locker room to see what I could find out.
I wandered among my heroes, a pass around my neck, trying to get them to talk to me while they changed into their uniforms. What I got was an up-close-and-personal look at what many professional basketball players are really like: African-American and functionally illiterate. Few of the players would engage with me. They knew the big-time reporters and grudgingly talked to them, but I was clearly a new face, a scrub. They grunted at me. Two stars, Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett, refused to talk to anyone except during the postgame press conference.
There were two exceptions: Tony Allen and Ray Allen. Ray asked me who I was and what I wanted. After I replied,
he asked me to wait while he put on his shorts, then turned around and sat down to talk to me for 20 minutes. Within thirty seconds, I had all that I needed for the article and just started asking him about his background and his game. I found him so unlike the rest of the players. Where they seemed to me to have very little real education, he was thoughtful and articulate. I fell in love. I wore a Ray Allen jersey to every game the rest of the year. To this day, he is perhaps my favorite athlete.
But it was my talk with Tony Allen that actually stuck with me. Tony is known as a freak of nature in terms of his athletic ability, particularly as a defensive specialist. He doesn’t even look that big, but he can stop pretty much anyone in the league when he has his wits about him. His wits are the problem both on the court and off. From what I could tell he is borderline mentally challenged.
I taped all my interviews. The clip of Tony became a favorite among my friends because to an Ivy League guy, Tony sounds like he is out of his mind (you can listen to it HERE). We laughed our asses off listening to him, but inside it made me sad. Really sad.
This guy has zero chance in life, I kept thinking to myself. He can play basketball but beyond that he barely knows what planet he is on.
♦◊♦
When I was in college, one of my professors, Peter Kilby, developed what he called the “oil slip hypothesis” in which he showed that citizens of countries where oil was discovered actually fared worse than those in Third World countries where economies were forced to develop more broadly. When oil was discovered, wealth became extreme both in magnitude and concentration. There was remarkably little spillover from the owners of oil to the nations’ citizens who were struggling to survive.
Terrific wealth of the few, it turned out, further impoverished the many. The scene in the Celtics locker room brought me back to Professor Kilby and made me wonder whether eliminating pro basketball altogether might actually do more for the African-American community than continuing the charade of success for the genetically-gifted few.
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I live a short walk from Fenway Park. I have grown tired of the Red Sox after spending 46 years living and dying by every pitch, and so these days I go to a few games a year just to catch up with friends. The games drag on forever, so my buddies and I bet on pretty much everything to pass the time. Dollar bills change hands and end up back where they belong by the end of the game.
We have two favorite bets, beyond the obvious baseball-related ones. The first is called “grass or dirt.” It’s a bet on where the ball will end up when the umpire rolls it out at the end of each inning: on the dirt of the mound, or on the infield grass just off the mound. The second bet is based on who is the first to point out an African American anywhere in the stands of Fenway Park.
At first, I resisted the second of these two bets as blatantly racist. Then I embraced it as a sociological study of just how segregated and hypocritical so-called liberal Boston really is. As the innings pass by and we all fruitlessly scan the crowd for a black face, the common refrain is, “This is just fucking insane!” Half the players are black, and yet none of the fans are. Once we went into the seventh-inning stretch before a dollar changed hands.
♦◊♦
As much as Charles Barkley might say, “I am not your role model!” adult men in America worship professional athletes. In Boston, we have not one but two 24-hour sports radio stations devoted exclusively to dissecting every player, play, and team. ESPN has become the most valuable media franchise in America for the very same reason: guys love to immerse themselves in sports.
From an African-American perspective, this idolatry of sports is tragic. It is not good to have a few dozen men become enormously wealthy—with those who can ‘t handle it, squandering that wealth through bad behavior—while a million black men are in prison (43 percent of the total inmate population) and the majority of African-American boys can expect not to find a decent job and live in poverty.
From a white perspective, this athlete worship is hypocritical. It turns grown men into circus characters. We adore them for one thing and one thing only: what they do with the ball. We refuse to look under the covers at what is really there. It may be that athletics is great for teaching discipline and hard work to youngsters, but from the NCAA to the NBA it’s all about money and winning—not about character or even a 7th-grade reading level—and things get more than a little out of whack.
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I was sitting with a group of rich, white, finance guys when one of them brought up the fact that the Jets cornerback, Antonio Cromartie, has nine children with eight women in six states. “Four of his kids, each by a different woman, are three years old,” my friend pointed out. “They all delivered at the same time.”
He went on to point out that the Jets had to front Cromartie $500,000 to try to deal with his status as a deadbeat dad. “He had six probate courts, each of which had assigned a percentage of his salary to a different mother for child support. None of the cases was consolidated, so when you added them up, he owed 300 percent of what he made,” my buddy claimed.
Another friend pointed out that Cromartie had recently been on HBO’s football show Hard Knocks, trying unsuccessfully to name all of his children.
I laughed. I then I got quiet as I thought about Wilt Chamberlain’s claim that he had slept with 10,000 women, and Antoine Walker going broke after making $110 million as a player… and I thought of Tony Allen, in his lovable way, talking nonsensically to me when I asked him about Vlad.
♦◊♦
I don’t blame African-American pro athletes. Most are making the best of a horrific situation. Between unemployment and a good chance at jail or tens of millions of dollars, which one would you choose?
No, I blame us for drinking the Kool-Aid of pro sports: the packaging, the theme music, and the talk shows all aimed at obscuring the underlying truth of how narrow these men’s skills truly are, and the role of race in everything that is going on.
My friend Stephen Locke, an African-American artist, wrote a compelling piece about why he doesn’t want to talk about race. That’s his right. He’s been on the receiving end of racism all his life. But I do want to talk about race. I want to talk about how insane it is that my son listens to rap songs about “niggas” every day, about Tony Allen and every other functionally illiterate NBA player, about Jackie Robinson’s number being enshrined in segregated Fenway Park, and even about Antonio Cromartie’s nine kids—because all those things aren’t a poor reflection on them. They reflect the truth of race in American right here, right now.
How about we look at sport not just as a male obsession where our favorite players run, jump, hit, and catch balls with amazing agility, but where our deepest vulnerabilities as a nation get played out just below the surface? We like to believe that we aren’t racist—that the Civil Rights Movement is over and done with—and yet it’s nearly all white fans who go to basketball games to watch these freakishly large, predominantly black men perform like circus performers. We don’t want to know what’s going on underneath because that will lead us back to the larger truth of staggering poverty, illiteracy, and hopeless circumstances among large numbers of black American across this country.
How about we start talking about high school graduation rates rather than triple doubles? Who gives a shit about winning a game when people are suffering systematic discrimination?
So let us not talk falsely now
The hour is getting late
“All Along the Watchtower,” sung by Jimi Hendrix, song by Bob Dylan
—Photo desbyrnephotos/Flickr
About Tom Matlack
How about we talk about High school graduation rate instead of triple doubles? Good question. Tom I can assure you, your sincerity in writing this article as a White male is sufficient to get you into even. You are a good man. Thanks for not keeping quite.
Whites people admire black men’s physical ability, but why do blacks not admire white intelligence or their achievements?. This i believe is the right way to ask this questions,And in my opinion, I think it is because the black mind evades knowledge, avoids mentally challenging task. Instead of embracing it. I am an African, I came to american and became and engineer, received american education. I embarked on a serious journey to search for knowledge. This journey i challenge my fellow African Americans to embark on.
Peter, I’m curious to know why you believe “blacks do not admire white intelligence” or “the black mind evades knowledge?” I’m black–at least last time I checked I was–and I’ve always admired and pursued knowledge. Actually I was unaware knowledge came in a color, a sentiment I learned from my parents–black–and shared by all of my black friends.
JFB
Jackie, race has a way of influencing out inclination. Black people favor physical activities such as hustling, sports, music. Than personal development to make money and when you don’t invest in the mind it reflects in the society. We rather play basketball, football, rap, fight boxing before we favor education. Unless our parent set us on the path of education as youth. Then we stick to it. Without this influences our natural inclination is our physical abilities.
For thousand of years our ancestors have harnessed this ability in farming, hunting (Not philosophy, not chemistry, not politics like the romans) so we are genetically more physical and this is the precursory to sporting success. So we thrive at it. But in this modern day we need to invest in our intelligence more. My friends and i have this saying “If you want to hide anything from a black man put it in a book” every day i find this irrefutable true every day. I see blacks struggle with the ability to understand and manipulate nature to better their living conditions.
Let me give you an example for the past 10 years only 2,000 African americans graduate in engineering yearly . This number remains constant. Over the same period of time the Hispanic graduation rate has increased from 2,000 to 6,000. I am privileged to know this cause i am a member of National Society of Black Engineers. I stand to be corrected but the information i perceive make me reach this conclusion if you know other statistics that can strengthen your position please share it.
“Black people favor physical activities such as hustling, sports and music?” CLEARLY were not hanging around the same black people. My father was a jazz musician. My mother was a research scientist. My eldest brother was the chief civilian officer of the Port Authority before he retired. My sister is Chief Counsel to The Mayor of NYC on Environmental issues.
I could continue but the point I’m making is: if your sample group only reflects what you know, it’s easy to be myopic.
JFB
Myopic is when your example of success is citing your immediate family. But in a larger society where African American American success is in sports and entertainment, wheras engineering graduation remains constant over a 10yr period there is a problem, a larger problem , one of a racial magnitude , where a segment of the societies success is celebrated in sports by largely successful white population. Then may be its time to look at the root cause of our problem our self, our history, our society. What roles do they play in this situation.
http://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/the-invisible-man/
I’m not only a member, I’m also the president.
JFB
I am certainly not trying to make blanket statements about black men and intelligence. I know many very successful, brilliant men who happen to be african-american. What I am saying is that sports, it seems to me, plays a role in perpetuating racism in America. A white crowd watching black men who are valued purely for their athletic ability–specifically NOT their minds–seems to me to be at its core more of a problem than a solution to widespread poverty and truly incredible prison rates.
Tom, you wrote: “I want to talk about how insane it is that my son listens to rap songs about “niggas” every day, about Tony Allen and every other functionally illiterate NBA player, about Jackie Robinson’s number being enshrined in segregated Fenway Park, and even about Antonio Cromartie’s nine kids—because all those things aren’t a poor reflection on them. They reflect the truth of race in American right here, right now.”
These things aren’t a poor reflection on them? Antonio Cromartie knocking up all those women like a sperm lawn sprinkler isn’t his fault??!!? That is pure and utter bullshit. It is his fault. Use a condom. Or, if you make a mistake that many people have made, learn from it. Don’t repeat it EIGHT MORE TIMES!! But don’t excuse inexcusable behavior simply because black MILLIONAIRES choose to be idiots. In fact, I’d argue we should hold black millionaires even more accountable for being illiterate jackasses, since they’re the ones who have the resources to improve that portion of their lives.
But instead, there’s the all-too-familiar mantra here which is blame everyone else except the people involved. Whether it’s Hugo talking about women’s issues or you talking about black men in prison, it’s always everyone else’s fault. Which is disappointing.
And I don’t care that black people don’t go to Fenway Park or Gillette Stadium. I don’t think it reflects poorly on society at all. I don’t care who is at the games, because I’m there to watch the game and enjoy it. Not to play “Mound Ball” or conduct sociological experiments. The Harvard professors can have fun with that. It’s a damn game. No more, no less.
I care about high school graduation rates, the impacts of racism, etc. I also care about sports. Why do they have to be mutually exclusive Tom? You don’t have to pick one, you can care about them both. If I want to go to a game or watch a game and escape for a few hours, I’m not about to feel guilty for it. Screw that. I work hard enough to enjoy that time. We don’t have to spend every second of every day focusing on societal problems. No one operates like that. Even if it was possible, I certainly wouldn’t want to live like that.
Aaron I do believe in free will but only up to a point. Do you blame a kid growing up in the slums of mexico city for failing to go to Harvard? I don’t.
What you fail to acknowledge is that there is no level playing field in the Unites States. It’s rich and poor. And African Americana are disproportionately poor with categorically less access to quality education than other groups. We have a separate and unequal education system by class. But the correlation is also to race. My point is simply that putting pro black athletes on a pedestal does far more harm than good for us all in how we think about this problem.
(yesyes)
Dear God Peter, you write as if every university and corporation doesn’t bend over backwards to accept more blacks into their ranks. Yes, there are socioeconomic differences. Time for the black community to step up to the plate.
Tom, I’ve got a proposal: Bet your buddies 10/1 that you’ll see a black man in the stands before the 3rd inning. I’ll show up, you win, we split the difference.
JFB
PS: At 5’10″ in my prime I could dunk. I also entered 1st grade reading on a 12th grade level. Parenting is where the magic or the damage happens.
I had good parents Jackie, I could never dunk.
“Who gives a shit about winning a game when people are suffering systematic discrimination?”
I don’t view the two as mutually exclusive.
To solve this we have to end the prejudice in housing. A deghettoisation is necessary for all white,black,red,brown yellow. Remember that black males had very few career opportunities for generations. The harassment of achievers (police who enforced social ranking ) Made achievement moot. We in this country love to segregate poor from rich etc. Instead of building “low income housing” use the tax code to spread the people into the general population so they can learn how to be educationally assertive. There are few stupid athletes esp in football as the highly complex dance is an art form as much as a sport. If a dancer can attend college to be a professional dancer or actor,or any one of physical careers then there is no shame to raise a professional athlete with wealth building knowledge. Also since most millionaires do NOT have a college degree. Mere education in the wrong area is as damaging as none as the very high cost to reward ratio is seen daily.
I think this is a great example of how we can slowly move towards change just by shifting the way social networks operate. I applaud you, Tom, for writing about these issues and not pretending to have all the answers but to at least get the questions out there so we can think about things differently.
Up until a few months ago, I had one black friend. Yeah, it was a case of “my black friend” in living color, but I hadn’t a clue how to change it. And – as @daddyfiles points out – it wasn’t as if I was going to devote my life to sociological experiments or social change that didn’t have an impact.
But suddenly Tom, you start talking about race and now I have four people I am proud to call my friends who also happen to be black. And I can say to those people “hey, tell me what it’s like, help me understand, let’s figure this out.” Not to mention that I’m always asking them “errrr, can you tell me if what I’m about to say is racist or not?”
And I think that’s how things change. Stereotypes are stereotypes because we don’t have any other information. To break down stereotypes, we need more real information, not from people complaining how broken the system is, but from people who we love to associate ourselves with because they are great people, who add value to our life, who have succeeded and failed both, just like the rest of us, and who can show us a side of the world we might never have seen. Thanks for being the catalyst for that.
From the perspective of an athletic Canadian female who pokes her head in on NFL, MLB and NBA games only sporadically this is an intriguing subject. We do not have the African-American population found in the United States, nor do we have the number of professional sports teams. Our public education system, while not perfect, graduates record numbers of kids who go on to university both with and without academic and athletic scholarships.
That being said, perhaps it is only in part a question of color. If athletic prowess is as revered as Tom says, and God-like reputations wait for those who achieve glory, why are there not more white athletes? Could it be that a part of the answer lies in a very real difference in potential ability due to both environmental and genetic histories? Not at all attempting to lay a blanket generalization we should not be afraid to look truth in the eye, either.
Also, I suspect that despite what seems to be slow progress, our histories are short and progress is still being made. I suspect that outgrowing cultural norms takes more than verbal change and percentages of celebrated academic African America men will grow. The younger generation is far more color blind than my generation. At least in Canada, they are schooled alongside each other and Anglo Saxon children are often outnumbered by other ethnicities who work with equal diligence both academically and athletically.
Last, is it not perhaps a larger issue of the pedestals we place ALL our professional athletes upon? And perhaps these pedestals serve to take the edge off insidious guilt in white America that there remains a distinct and unequal opportunity for education. How expensive are those seats at Boston’s baseball games? Is it possibly a question not of color but of economic status who buys spectator seats and who doesn’t? Maybe there’s a lack of responsibility at the college level when scholarships are granted to athletes and academic expectations are waved. Who then to point fingers at? Huge broadcast networks demanding players, white and black, who are not intellectually ready to live in the glittering world of professional sport without the indiscretions mentioned. Given all the toys in the world but no support in how to use them, perhaps we should not be surprised.
Where are the “evo bio” people on this issue? Cromartie is a genetic juggernaut, just like Sean Kemp. He’s a Darwinian success story. (All those children with all those women? He’s a reproductive All-American!) Someone out there knows the math better than I do, but if you have nine children, there’s a good chance that in a few hundred years a big chunk of the country’s population will be descended from you. In 500 years, probably a quarter of Americans will be able to claim Cromartie blood in their veins. Maybe he’s just thinking really long term?
Kidding aside, I wonder why we should think of someone like Cromartie as an example of an irresponsible black man. Perhaps he’s just an irresponsible, impulsive person who happens to be African American and happens to be male. I’m sure many of the mothers of his children are not very clear-thinking, responsible people. I find it hard to believe none of them knew about any of the others. (Just wondering if there are discussions on other blogs about how these women are bad role models….)
I tend to think a lot of the issue here is about of wealth and celebrity culture, maybe more than race. Cromartie was probably pretty confident that someone would bail him out, and lo and behold someone did. Perhaps he was thinking like a big, irresponsible bank and was convinced he was “too big to fail.” A lot of us in the American public are willing to accept total imbecility if you are in sports, entertainment, or politics. As long as you can dunk, look good on screen, or vote the way my party tells you to vote, I ignore the fact that you’re an ignoramus. In fact, as an American consumer of celebrity culture, I’d even prefer it if you weren’t smarter than me, so I can make you rich and famous and still feel superior to you.
As for the idea that pro sports gives a false hope for too many poor people, I could not agree more.
I always love what you write, Tom, mostly for the way you make the uncomfortable important enough to be stayed with.
I am uncomfortable commenting on sports, or men and sports, or sports and African American men, because I don’t know shit about sports. They bore me. I do not understand them. Generally, I quickly agree: there is something profoundly race skewed, and money skewed, and just awe-full about the whole industry. You are immediately and in-arguably right: to shut the whole thing down would probably do most communities a world of good. Billions and billions of dollars of good, in a country where a fifth of us can’t eat.
But you’ve made it important enough to stay with my discomfort and think it a little bit.
It seems to me that whenever a society finds it’s entertainment in the body of a human being, there is something not quite moral at work. I listened to an NPR interview months ago, sleepy and trying to stay awake on a long drive home: some author had written on the ‘machine’ of college sports, how woefully it ‘educates’, how terribly unprepared it leaves it’s athletes, how little it actually cares about where they end up. We use their bodies until the bodies break, and then we look at something else fast and shiny.
Kinda like at a titty bar.
This strange equation, by which one kind of human becomes ‘entertainment’ for the other humans, is easily called out to be wrong. But it’s shrugged off pretty quickly. We like it, and it would take away some pleasure to change the rules. It would be inconvenient to be fair. It would be a drag to worry about race and education and bodies in such a legendary place as Fenway Park. Immorality, unfairness, is hard to reckon with because it’s not really ‘sin’, it’s not really our fault; we’re as hard pressed as anybody and we’re just trying to have a little fun.
(you know, a guy said that to me once, after cupping my left ass cheek on the subway. Easy, baby. We’re just trying to have a little fun. It was a full subway car. Nobody really paid any attention. Nobody could really be bothered.)
Like you, Tom, I don’t think I can blame the black athletes. And I don’t think I can disparage the dream. But it makes me wonder about heroes of any kind….how monospecialized, how unfit for life on this planet, how not-normal one must be to excel. Heroes are kind of a sacrifice, the ones who must be destroyed in order for the herd to go on. The ones who take our ideals to sick extremes, and die there, so that we have something to entertain us.
The point, I think, you hit in the first few paragraphs. But it wasn’t a point, it was an allusion. That bit about what white, college educated parents give their kids every night before bed. You don’t say what that is. I think you are right. But I don’t know what that is, either. I don’t know how to measure it, if it’s quantifiable. If it’s a thing white boys get, or a thing they don’t have to live with.
Maybe dreams and goals and heroes are things white men have. Not us. Fenway Park. Superbowls and halls of fame. Flat screen television, fantasy football, cheerleaders and beer. Tradition, legacy, privilege. Entertainment, the right to be entertained, might be some measure of opportunity. The right to not be inconvenienced by ‘fair’.
Maybe.
But I also know that I have worked with urban youth, with boys. I know I have had a young man ask me to play catch with him. I was awful. I could hardly hold the thing, let alone throw it. It wobbled a petty arc in his direction. But it felt like the right thing to do.
“(you know, a guy said that to me once, after cupping my left ass cheek on the subway. Easy, baby. We’re just trying to have a little fun. It was a full subway car. Nobody really paid any attention. Nobody could really be bothered.)”
Okay I laughed out loud because you took my discomfort and raised me one. I hope you smacked that guy.
As for the thing that white boys get at night. I think its as simple as reading and a father. As my friend Jackie rightly points out there are many, many smart, successful black men in America these days including our President. But there are also a huge number of poor, fatherless black boys who don’t have a dad and don’t get read to at night.
I agree, fathering and reading. But it’s also bigger. After all, Obama didn’t have his dad.
Re: earlier comments does it have to be one or the other, Tom?! I both hear what they’re saying and want to say but that’s what he’s asking! It is difficult to poke our favorite things and find honesty: where we buy our groceries is connected to slavery, etc etc etc. You are neither shifting the blame, destroying free will, nor eternally taking the big boy’s toys away. You’re simply being honest, and honest is where both trouble and goodness are. Our culture is not big on honesty.
Honest is looking for a black face at Fenway.
Wow! very interesting stuff from all who have replied to the article and being a black man from England I don’t know If I qualify to raise any valid points on sports as such, but as a person of colour i can surely add something.
It wasn’t unitl I read ‘The Blind Side’ that i fully understood the state of sports in America. It appalled me that such an educational system could exist that is there merely to ensure the continued success of the NBA, NFL etc etc etc by finding the biggest, most athletic and most agile people in America from as young an age as possible. But until someone takes true responsiblity nothing can change.
I also question whether much of what you say is a colour thing, or a male thing, an american thing or just a social thing. In a world where we care about winners someone has to lose. Where we care about success, someone must fail. When I look at the whole thing from far above (I like to do this because it gives a better context for the whole thing), I see the treatment of athletes as not to dissimilar to parading slaves on a raised platform so the plantation owners could purchase the best pickers! .
A country built on racism will forever stay racist because it is because of said racism that it is where it is today. America is succesful because of what it has managed to produce using cheap labour. Sports are successful money makers becasue of who they have managed to get to play in them. And the money thing makes me laugh. In this country there is a huge furore about how much football (soccer) players earn (not as much as NBA but we are a small island). My point has always been that the focus is on the wrong person. As a business owner, if youc an pay your star player £100,000 a week, how much must you be making anyway? But i digress.
I loved the article because it raised some questions from a white perspective and as a black man I am always interested in this perspective. How many kids someone has is irrelevant because this happens everywhere and has nothing to do with status. Is it possible that we place too much on these playeres because we see the accumulation of wealth as something that goes hand in hand with common sense? Really and truly a young man with millions of dollars is a very desirable person indeed, but I digress again.
@Peter – regarding education, black people have got role models to look up to and they predate the Greeks, Romans and all the other pretenders to the philosophical thrones. The only way to find out who these people are is through education though and in a country where the main priority doesn’t seem to be the welfare of said group, I don’t see too much changing any time soon.
@Peter and JFB, you are both right and both wrong at the same time. but rather than argue with each other to score points, look at ways in which what you both have experienced and know can be used for the better, otherwise it just seems like a case of divide and conquer…and we know where that has gotten us in the past!
Random thoughts, no answers.
When I began teaching in a junior high (long, long ago before there were middle schools in LA), it was predominantly upper middle class and white. Then came bussing. Old guard teachers spoke up at faculty meetings saying, “What are we going to do when the influx hits?” Well, what we did was teach. And I could only hope my students would develop an affinity for learning.
It’s sad that there’s a perceived road to success through sports, because how few student athletes ever manage to make it to the pros. I was a student at UCLA during the Wooden years, and during the rise of “black power” a reporter asked one of Wooden’s team (I think it was Curtis Rowe, but memory fails me) if there was a problem being black. The response was, “Coach doesn’t see color.” I only wish we could get beyond that.
When I was in elementary school, a black dentist and his family moved in. His daughter was the only black in the school. She was nice enough, but could get loud and outspoken. My mother told me that when you’re in the minority, you have to work twice as hard to fit it. We all have our prejudices, although I wish we didn’t. Our neighbor, upon finding out we were Jewish, said, “I’d never have thought it. You’re so nice.”
A colleague of mine, who also worked as a trainer for a Florida football team in Homestead said the boys would brag about putting holes in condoms so they could brag about how many girls they knocked up.
When my son was 3 or 4, I was driving carpool to pre-school. He said, “Do you know why (and he named a neighbor of ours) has black skin? I braced myself for how I was going to handle answering him. He went on to say, “Because they have more melanin.”
Maybe you have valid points, but I find the underlying premise of this particular article to be very stereotypical. I am an African-American male. I graduated in the top 10% of my H.S. class. I was in art, advanced symphony and marching band and was a stud in basketball and track. I went on to play basketball for The Ohio State Buckeyes after high school. I graduated from Ohio State with honors in Education and even returned to receive my M.A. in Education two years later. I played basketball in Germany, France and Switzerland immediately after finishing my B.S.
Today, I am a Special Education Teacher, an avid painter and still play drums from time to time. I learned to speak German fluently and mastered Spanish before I left High School. Unless a person meets all black men, it is an embarrassing misjudgement to think one can understand all of them or can lump us all into some particular “problem phenomena”. To have played in the Division I athletics in the Big Ten, lived in Europe and have a Master’s Degree with honors completely goes against the stereotype of the black male in America.
I often hate being tall and muscular sometimes because White Americans assume I am all “physical’..never bothering to consider that this guy is highly educated…speaks more languages than most and can paint and play drums like a rocker. Believe it or not, I actually found Germany to be far more enlightened than America. Hidden racism and stereotyping are what continue to make America look idiotic through the lens of many European countries. While those things do exist there…more often than not Europeans look over at America and see a majority of ignorant, out of touch anti-intellectuals. So many of my European friends repeatedly tell me this.
Living in many parts of America can cause a black male to loathe ever being an athlete. I often loathe having all of my Championship rings and memorabilia because for some reason people assume that is all I am. If I wear a ring out to a bar or restaurant, I have to deal with guys being male groupies more than chicks trying to stare at my finger. The real question is this: Why are white men so enamored and obsessed with athletes and sports? Is it the idea of walking around a college campus or city and having people notice you or girls wanting to be around you that is enticing? As you have singled out Tony Allen as being foolish, the real issue to me is people wishing they could have his “status” while not also living life in his shoes. People seem to want to have the accolades of the black athlete but do not want to truly be black in every other area of society. I am not saying you are this way. I respect the fact that you even thought enough of the topic to write about it. You have brought up some valid points and I agree with many of the things you have written here. Thanks.