Racism & Sports

¡Hola! Everybody...
As it is, we spend more right now on health care than is necessary for universal coverage. The issue on the table is no longer whether we should do it (we must), nor whether we can (we already spend more for much less). The national healthcare “dialog” has degenerated into how we can continue to place profits before people and still make it look as if “reform” has been effected.

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-=[ The Sportin’ Life & Million Dollar Slaves ]=-

Shaq is rich, the white man who signs his check is wealthy...Wealth is passed down from generation to generation; you can’t get rid of wealth. Rich is some shit you can loose with a crazy summer and a drug habit.

-- Chris Rock on wealth

One of the consequences of racism is that whiteness is rendered invisible. Whites can afford to be nonchalant about race because they cannot see how this society produces advantages for them because these benefits appear so natural they are taken for granted (Kinder & Sanders, 1996). They literally do not see how race permeates America’s institutions and how it affects the distribution of opportunity and wealth.

What’s more, if people of color cry foul, if they call attention to the way they are treated or to racial inequality, if they try to change the way advantage is distributed, if they try to adjust the rules of the game, white Americans see them as trouble makers as asking for special privileges.

If there’s any realm in which the color line should have disappeared by now, it should be professional sports, where measures of achievement are clear-cut, empirical, numerical, and uncontested. Still, race matters in sports and not in the way perceived by many. Sports is an arena that’s seen as one of the most meritocratic, colorblind institutions in American life. Yet, though 79 percent of National Basketball Association (NBA) players in the 1996-97 season were black, 76 percent of the head coaches were white. By 2001, the proportion of white coaches dropped to 66 percent, as ten NBA coaches were black.

Although 66 percent of the National Football League (NFL) players in the 1996-97 season were black, 90 percent of the head coaches were white (Lapchick & Matthews, 1998). by the 2000-2001 season, the numbers had not changed; there were still only three African American head coaches, accounting for 10 percent of NFL coaches (Lapchick & Matthews, 2001).

The situation is not much different in college sports. Sixty-one percent of Division I-A male basketball players were black in the 1996-97 season, but 85.5 percent of the head coaches were white. The numbers had barely changed at the end of 2001 season, as the proportion of white head coaches decreased to 78 percent. In addition, although 52 percent of the Division I-A football players were black during the 1999-2000 season, 92.8 percent of the coaches were white. By 2001, nearly 97 percent of the head coaching positions had gone to whites.

These discrepancies are unlikely to even out anytime soon. After the 1996-97 college football season, there were 25 openings for head coach of Division I-A teams. Only one of those schools, New Mexico State University, even interviewed a black candidate. During the 1997 and 19998 seasons, thirteen head coaches were named in the NFL, a turnover of almost 50 percent in the thirty-team league. Not one of the replacements was black. During the next three years, the situation did not change much. Although the NFL turnover rate was 75 percent between 1998 and 2001, only one African American was hired as a head coach.

Can these inequalities be described using the conservative framework? Can these discrepancies be explained by the concept of merit? c’mon, I know quite a few reading this like to subscribe to the “it’s up the individual” philosophy. Some may say that these head coaches got their jobs because they had the best records, for example. The evidence, however, does not support this explanation. Up until 2001, there had been only four black head coaches in the history of the NFL. Each of them has either played or coached on a Super Bowl championship team, or was a college conference coach of the year. By contrast, as of 2001, only thirteen of the twenty-seven white NFL head coaches held this distinction. Even a cursory analysis shows that merit has little to do with the criterion of for being a head coach. the potential pool of blacks has included (to name just a few) Johnny Roland, All-American running back and Pro-Bowler who has been an assistant coach for twenty-two years; Art Shell, former Pro-Bowler with a 56-41 record as head coach of the Raiders and currently an NFL assistant coach; and Sherman Lewis, ten-year offensive coordinator for the Green Bay packers and an NFL assistant coach for twenty-nine years.

Who was chosen? One thirty-four-year-old with eleven years of coaching experience, two of which were as offensive coordinator, and a forty-two-year-old with four years experience as an NFL assistant coach and one year as a college head coach. Each of these men had been an assistant coach under Sherman Lewis, who was passed over. Also chosen as head coaches were a former head coach whose previous four years produced records of 8-8, 7-9, 7-9, and 2-6, and ten men over the age of fifty-five with an average record of 6-10. Only one member of this “old boys club” had made the playoffs the season before. All were white. It appears, contrary to the bleating of conservatives and some whites, that race matters more than merit in hiring NFL head coaches.

According to a report released in 2002, African Americans in the NFL are the last hired and the first fired (Madden, 2004). Few of them were involved in the interview process. Since 1920, the league has hired more than four hundred head coaches and, as of the end of the 2002 season, eight of them (2 percent) have been African American. As one observer offered, “When you see a Denny Green fired after the record he has built and then not get a new job, or Marvin Lewis coach the best defense ever, win a Super Bowl and two years later not have a head job, you know something is wrong” (George, 2002).

Similar patterns are found in other sports. a study of lifetime pitching and batting averages, fir example, shows that black ballplayers have to out-hit and out-pitch their white counterparts by substantial margins to win and keep their jobs. One little-known fact is that mere journeymen can have long and profitable careers as long as they are white, but among African Americans, only the very best superstars and above-average players will succeed. Perhaps this is why there are so few black baseball managers in major league baseball. Baseball typically hires managers, coaches, and front office personnel from the echelon of “good but not great” players. Because most of these players happen to be white, black ballplayers experience difficulty becoming coaches.

The interesting point to all this is that professional sports mirror the cultural patterns of the larger society. In a national project looking into the hiring practices of large law firms, for example, it was found that black applicant s with average grades are less likely to be hired than whites with the same records. Black partners are much more likely than whites to be Harvard and Yale graduates. The “black superstar” requirement is most evident at the most prestigious law firms. As one partner at an elite Chicago law firm told researchers, his firm sets “higher standards for the minority hires than for whites. If you are not from Harvard, Yale, or the University of Chicago... you are not taken seriously” (Staples, 1998).

As these and future examples will show, race counts heavily in the ways Americans are treated. Being white has its advantages, and being non-white has its disadvantages. The problem of race in America is that people are treated differently according to the color of their skin. The most important aspect of being white, it follows, is not pigment, melanin, or skin color. Rather, it is the connection between being white and having better economic opportunities and life chances.

I will be going on vacation after this Friday, but I’ve queued some entries for next week. Because I see so much energy on the denial of racism, I will document its existence in major areas. next up: healthcare.

Eddie

References

George, T. (2002, October 6). NFL pressured on black coaches. New York Times, p. 9.

Kinder, D. R., & Sanders, L. M. (1996). Divided by color: Racial politics and democratic ideals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lapchick, R., & Matthews, K. (1998). Racial report card: A comprehensive analysis of the hiring practices of women and people of color in the National Basketball Association, the National Football League, Major League Baseball, the NCCA and its member institutions. Boston: Northeastern University, Center for the Study of Sport in Society.

Lapchick, R., & Matthews, K. (2001). Racial and gender report card. Boston: Northeastern University, Center for the Study of Sports in Society.

Madden, J. F. (2004). Differences in the success of NFL coaches by race, 1990-2002: Evidence of last hire, first fire. Journal of Sports Economics, 5(1), 6-19.

Staples, B. (1998, November 27). When a law firm is like a baseball team. New York Times, p. A42.