Racial Paternalism and College Sports
Monday, June 29, 2009
Here's some nice easy reading for you as the July 4th weekend approaches. Racial paternalism and college sports. (I've tried to ease it up a little with the snuggie picture.)
Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal published an investigation that found just 26 major league baseball players and managers have college degrees. Twenty-six! That's out of a pool of a potential 1,042 players and managers. You want that in percentage terms, that's 2.5 percent. A staggeringly low percentage, even if you pull out all Latin American players (who don't have the same collegiate opportunities) from the equation. Yet, I defy you to find an article that utilizes this fact to make an argument that baseball players need better educations.
The same would hold true for tennis, hockey and golf. As a society, we don't care about the education of our athletes in those sports. In fact, what are the only two sports that you hear about when it comes to the education of athletes? Football and basketball. Which just so happen to also have the largest percentage of minority athletes. That's got me wondering, isn't our society guilty of racial paternalism when it comes to sports?
I think so. Put plainly, we don't trust a comparatively small pool of young black kids to make decisions about their professional sports futures, but we don't even blink when thousands of white kids head pro in sports without the slightest bit of education.
If I stacked every article ever written about the necessity of obtaining a college education, how many of them would focus on baseball? Any at all? Just think about it based on your own experience as a sports fan, how many articles have you read about the value of a college education when it comes to basketball and football? It's shocking, right? No one ever -- and I mean ever -- questions the right of kids to sign baseball contracts directly out of high school. No talking heads ever pound their hands into a desk and wax eloquent about the need for a college eduction, millions be damned.
The comments, as always, are already entertaining. My favorite so far, the column has just been up for forty-five minutes, comes from gsan201:
"Pretty much everything this jackbag writes about is race this and
race that.YES CLAY is a RACIST,HE justt happenes to be Protected
by(Political Correctness)because he HATES on White Anything...IF he
can blame a White Person for something,anything HE WILL DO IT.Racistt
biggtto is what he is and always will be.He is just nother KEVIN
BLACKSTONE. He can't write or come up with a good article so he
always wants to stir the pot and Scream RACE WAR,RACE WAR...lol If it
wasn't so sad and serious this EVIL GAME that he and his buddies like
him PLAY,YOU would think you were watching a SOUTH PARK episode and
just think it is low brow humor."
Awesome analysis.
Sincerely, jackbag racist who "HATES on White Anything."
P.S.
Why are the w and a capitalized?Labels: racial paternalism college sports clay travis
Posted by Clay Travis at 9:38 PM
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