Minority Athletes

In Thursday's class, one of the group presentations was about stereotypes of minority athletes. A point of emphasis was that, unlike virtually every other profession in America, professional sports employs minorities as a majority of its workforce. To some degree, it seems that this is enough to declare that pro sports promotes equality in hiring, and indeed, yearly surveys by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission seem to agree with that fact by giving the four major leagues "A" ratings for workforce equality. But there's more to the story than that.

Sports leagues "hire" lots of minorities, enough to push them to the majority of their workforce, but most of that is because they are players. Unfortunately, this ostensible hiring equality doesn't often extend to upper management positions. In fact, front office positions for professional sports teams are still overwhelmingly dominated by whites. The men who show up to the clubhouse in suits rarely reflect the breakdown of the men who show up in uniform, and when people of color do ascend to management positions with sports teams, they are often former players. The message that this sends, however subliminally, is that minority groups can only thrive on the field of play and lack the intelligence to hold other positions in the business. There's a certain amount of institutional racism that comes with watching any professional sporting event, as outlined, among other places, in the book Forty Million Dollar Slaves by William C. Rhoden.

When a predominantly white audience pays outlandish prices to watch predominantly black athletes play a sport, the only difference between the sporting event and the minstrel shows of the Jim Crow days is that the blacks at the sporting event are making big money. I don't mean to condemn the existence of professional sports – I'm an enormous fan of them myself – but the connotations that it brings with it make every barb that much more racially charged. Black players who skip practice are called "lazy" by white fans who are using incredibly coded language whether they realize it or not. Black players who try to get bigger contracts are invariably called greedy by white people who, deep down, don't like the idea of blacks making that much more money than they ever will. Not every reaction to happenings in professional sports is racially motivated, (LeBron James faced a backlash when he claimed that media coverage of his decision to play for the Miami Heat next year was racially charged) but enough is that it's worth bringing up. A quick way to alleviate some of these racial tensions would be to show that blacks and other minority groups are valuable to sports organizations in capacities other than playing and coaching.