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Racism in American sports
Racism in American sports
The impact of sport in society
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Sports may be a way out of poverty, but for very little. For the majority of minorities, sports is not an effective way out of poverty. Only about 1 in every 3,500 African American males make it into major league sports and mainly these sports consist of basketball, football, and baseball(very few). Minorities are largely missing from other sports and from positions such as team owners, managers, coaches, talent scouts, referees, and other major positions.
...ring in more minorities into the game. According to a study done by the University of Central Florida’s Racial and Gender Report Card, 9.1 percent of Major League Baseball players are African American (Gonzalez). That number has not been higher than 15 percent in the last 20 years.
Professional sports were segregated in America during the early 20th century. So African Americans playing sports were never offered the chance to play professionally. Others, mostly white people never felt that blacks had the right to do so. They never felt that blacks had much or any rights in the United States. But some African Americans changed that. Two people who had the biggest impact on sports and segregation were Jackie Robinson and Jesse Owens, both were outstanding athletes and had overcome the racial barrier.
This article proposes the idea of what would happen if Black people really embraced the sports world and made that their priority instead of education, “He provides the example of percentages of Black males competing in the NBA (77%), NFL (65%), MLB (15%), and MLS (16%) in comparison to the fact that fewer than 2% of doctors, lawyers, architects, college professors, or business executives are Black males,”. Dr. Robinson brings up the sta…..
Lomax, M. E. (2008). Sports and the racial divide African American and Latino experience in an era of change. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Historical and sociological research has shown, through much evidence collection and analysis of primary documents that the American sporting industry can give an accurate reflection, to a certain extent, of racial struggles and discrimination into the larger context of American society. To understand this stance, a deep look into aspects of sport beyond simply playing the game must be a primary focus. Since the integration of baseball, followed shortly after by American football, why are the numbers of African American owners, coaches and managers so very low? What accounts for the absence of African American candidates from seeking front office and managerial roles? Is a conscious decision made by established members of each organization or is this matter a deeper reflection on society? Why does a certain image and persona exist amongst many African American athletes? Sports historians often take a look at sports and make a comparison to society. Beginning in the early 1980’s, historians began looking at the integration of baseball and how it preceded the civil rights movement. The common conclusion was that integration in baseball and other sports was indeed a reflection on American society. As African Americans began to play in sports, a short time later, Jim Crow laws and segregation formally came to an end in the south. Does racism and discrimination end with the elimination of Jim Crow and the onset of the civil rights movement and other instances of race awareness and equality? According to many modern sports historians and sociologists, they do not. This paper will focus on the writings of selected historians and sociologists who examine th...
Major collegiate athletics programs are able to generate millions of dollars for their institutions, but are not able to show any evidence of successfully graduating their black male athletes that contribute to their success in generating those millions of dollars. These universities in turn, are failing these student athletes whom were promised that they would nurture them intellectually as well as athletically. A four year report published by the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education presents statistics that shows that the six major sports conferences in the NCAA (ACC, Big Ten, Big East, Big 12, SEC, Pac 12) have weak graduation rates for male African American Student athletes. Jessica Anderson of the associated press wrote an article titled, Black Athletes' Graduation Rates Weak where she used evidence from the University of Pennsylvania’s study as well as information from The Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education to present findings that showed that only about, “50.2 percent of African-American male student-athletes graduated within six years and that 96.1 percent of the schools graduated African-American male student-athletes at rates lower than student-athletes overall” (Anderson). Yet, the evidence that African American male student athletes are struggling to graduate as compared to their white counterparts does not simply stop there. In fact, Shaun Harper the executive director of the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education at the University of Pennsylvania reports that, “50.2 percent of black male athletes graduate within six years from colleges compared with 67 percent of athletes over all, 73 percent of undergraduates, and 56 percent of black undergraduate men” (Harper)....
“African Americans have just as amount of chance of becoming a professional athlete as he or she winning the lottery”. This so called goal of theirs is unrealistic and is highly impossible. There are so many sports athletes but majority of them are of a different c...
In this paradigm, sports become not merely a game, but a symbol of the American Dream ethos. Writing in the introduction of Connie Mack’s autobiography, My 66 Years in the Big Leagues (1950), historian Francis Tevelyan Miller articulates the symbolic significance of baseball, which he believes to be, “democracy in action; in it all men are ‘free and equal,’ regardless of race, nationality, or creed. Every man is given the rightful opportunity to rise to the top on his own merits … It is the fullest expression of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly in our national life.” (qtd. in Orodenker 18) The democracy of sports was unwelcoming to women and people of color, and that is reflected in a sports literature that has been written almost exclusively by white
Sports have served as a platform on which the subject of race has been highlighted. Sports have unfailingly been considered the microcosm of society. This is because the playing fields have revealed the dominant culture’s attitudes and beliefs that people held about race relations throughout history in the United States. Many racial barriers were broken in the world of sports long before they were crossed in the realm of mainstream society as a whole. From Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball during the year of 1947 to Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists clad in black gloves during the 1968 Mexico City Summer Olympics, sports have started conversations about race in the United States that have undeniably changed the course of race relations in the United States.
“We are more visible, but not more valuable”. This famous quote was said by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, one of the most famous black basketball players, symbolized what many black athletes were pursuing when they first got into sports. In today’s world not only are black athletes a part of our sports venue, they are dominating the landscape of some sports such as the NBA which consists of a whopping 80% black athletes. Black athletes continue to revitalize sports in America as some athletes became the face of their sports such as Muhammad Ali in boxing, Jackie Robinson in baseball and Michael Jordan in basketball. Sports came as a form of entertainment for many Americans, but for black athletes it came as a pathway to express who they were and what they believed in. The more they became involved in sports, the more media they were able to attract which enabled them to talk about topics other than sports such as racism, their religions and equality through the civil rights movement. These views and statements made in their interviews and press conferences were the ones that became publicized and more popular amongst the typical white men in America and it played a huge role in changing the way blacks were viewed in American society.
Race, gender, and socioeconomic status are enduring social characteristics that influence life outcomes and children and adolescents cannot control (Murphy, Gaughan, Hume, & Moore, 2010). With the unequal distribution of society’s resources based on race and gender and the negative view of African American males, African American males’ ability to access and complete college is hampered. Although athletics is often viewed as a way to improve one’s life chances, African-American male athletes perform worse academically than any of their peers (Murphy, Gaughan, Hume, & Moore, 2010), which threatens their college completion goals.
Dealing with the issue of sport and ethnology, three major factors come to mind; prejudice, racism, and discrimination. These factors span across gender, ethnic, racial, religious, and cultural groups. In the following paragraphs, I will discuss how these factors have played a part in the evolution of sport in our society. The first issue tackled in this paper will be racism in sports, followed by prejudice and discrimination.
"Money makes the world go 'round." Sports could not exist without the presence of money. You have high paid athletes asking for multi-million dollar contacts, while at the same time you have doctors not even making close to that amount. There are corporations buying out sports teams, buying stadiums, and buying everything that has to do with sports. Someone may ask why they do this. Sports are one of the most profitable industries in the world. Everyone wants to get their hand on a piece of the action. Those individuals and industries that spend hundreds of millions of dollars on these sports teams are hoping to make a profit, but it may be an indirect profit. It could be a profit for the sports club, or it could be a promotion for another organization (i.e. Rupert Murdoch, FOX). The economics involved with sports has drastically changed over the last ten years. In the United States, we spend about 13% of all money on sports and entertainment. Sports has obviously done its job; entertained and drained money out of our pockets.
In a society filled with people that strongly believe that sports is an industry that is removed and immune from the ills of the world—racism. Many fans and spectators of sports, such as baseball, basketball, football, and many other sports that include players of different races and ethnicities considers that racism is a thing of the past because of the inclusion and acceptance of all races in different sports. However, the misconception of living in a post-racial (colorblind) world is prevalent. Even though racial discrimination in sports and society in general, are not overt as in the past, racism continues to plague the industry. Regardless of fans and spectators wanting to ignore the racial biases and discrimination in the sports industry,
Throughout history, it is easy to recognize how African Americans have triumphed in sports. It is also enlightening and empowering to see and recognize the challenges that women faced in the past with achieving recognition in sports as compared to that of men.