Dr. Paul Harris
To be clear, racial integration in sports – college and professional -- was never driven by a moral imperative, but rather by economics. For example, in William Rhoden's Forty Million Dollar Slaves (2006), he details the economic underpinning of the integration of Major League baseball, and how Negro Baseball league teams were picked apart with no teams or coaches coming to Major League Baseball intact. Even the notion of amateurism in collegiate sports is rooted in money and power. It has been touted for decades with its fiercest defenders claiming that student-athletes are like any other college student who happens to participate in a sport. However, the only reason the term student-athlete ever came to be was because the NCAA did not want to grant the widow of Ray Dennison, an army vet/father of three/college football player who died in 1955 in competition, worker’s compensation. Since then, collegiate basketball and football teams, whose rosters are disproportionately filled with Black males, have generated billions of dollars in revenue through March Madness and more. And the message to athletes has been for them to be grateful for the scholarship to attend the university, even though upwards of 40 hours weekly are given to their sport which makes it nearly impossible to work a job to cover expenses that scholarships do not cover.
While this has changed some due to recent name, image, and likeness (NIL) policies opening the door to appropriately compensating student-athletes for their labor, it’s important to note that such developments are the result of tense legal battles, court cases, and more, not a moral imperative. Such integration without empowerment is only reinforced by Black athletes at the highest level being told, implicitly and explicitly, to “shut up and dribble,” and being locked out of positions of power at the collegiate and professional levels. The message is clear: a moral imperative will not be enough to fully know and value Black athletes’ humanity. As such, it is my position that Black athletes should collectively resist such ongoing oppression by refusing to play. Whether it was the 1970 Syracuse football team protest or the 2015 Missouri football team protest, or other student-athlete protests in history, these young people possess immense power to impact the bottom line – money – which is what historically moves the needle on anything related to justice. Rarely, if ever, is it a moral imperative.
Historically Black Colleges and Universities were literally formed because of the mindset behind such decisions being made by many universities today. My preference would be for all 5,500 Black males playing Division I Football and Basketball at FBS schools to take their talent to HBCUs and give those institutions a deserved economic boost. However, I am aware of the present threat to the existence of HBCUs given the reckless and racist agenda of our country right now. Refusing to play, though, will force institutions to reckon with the financial repercussions of their abuse of Black athletes, and evoke the courage that several institutions have failed to show in the face of the current anti-DEI policy shifts. Perhaps most importantly, Black athletes could realize the collective power that they have to cultivate systemic change in support of equity and justice.
I do not make this recommendation without consideration for the risk that it poses to the futures of these athletes. One need look no further than the timeline of Colin Kaepernick’s activism and the NFL’s response to see what speaking out against injustice can lead to. I do not make this recommendation without consideration of the great Black college coaches at FBS schools and their families as well. I do care about how such a movement would impact them all. Coaches, too, could be blackballed in a profession that is already so difficult to break into for joining and/or supporting Black athletes in such an effort. I am not apathetic to that at all. I hate that such risk even needs to be acknowledged. My recommendation, though, is meant to center the thousands of individuals who have been an afterthought for far too long and challenge the status quo of racism that persists. And to lift up those whose experiences at predominately white institutions will be made that much more complex, oppressive, and disempowering with the recent anti-DEI decisions. Enough is enough.
Dr. Paul Harris is an associate professor in the Department of Counseling and Special Education at Virginia Commonwealth University.
