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NewBlackMan (in Exile): ESPN Must be High: Drugs & Jim Crow in Sports’ Reporting

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ESPN Must be High: Drugs & Jim Crow in Sports’ Reporting

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

My concern and interest in sports often has little to do with sports. While I am clearly a fan, someone who enjoys watching and thinking about sports, I am often drawn into the world sports because of the larger implications and meanings. Sports are more than a game; it is a pedagogy, a technology, and an instrument of larger social, political, and racial processes. During a recent interview with Colorlines, I spoke about the danger in seeing sport as purely game, entertainment, or distraction:

One of the things that often strikes me is the disconnect between progressive and those engaged in anti-racist movement and struggles — and sports. Sports continues to be seen as antithetical or a distraction, or not part and parcel with the movements for justice. I think that when you have a society that is increasingly invested in and has been for the last 30 years, with incarceration, with a suspension culture, with racial profiling, it’s not a coincidence that you have a sports culture that’s equally invested in those practices. And invested in the language of the criminal justice system.

I consume and am consumed by sports not simply because of the “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” but because of its potential as a source of social change. Yet, sports continue to be a site for the perpetuation of injustice, violence, and despair. As a critical scholar, as an anti-racist practitioner, and as someone committed to justice, my gaze is never just as fan. In watching games, listening to commentaries, and reading various sports publications, I am unable and unwilling to suspend this gaze. So, it should be no surprise that when I recently opened ESPN: The Magazine, to find an article on drug use and college football, it had my attention.

“Of 400,000 athletes, about 0.6 percent will be tested for marijuana by the NCAA.” The lead-to ESPN’s sensationalized and misleading story on marijuana use and collegiate football, thus, frames the story as one about both rampant illegal drug use and the absence of accountability. While attempting to draw readers into their stereotyped-ridden, sensationalized tabloid journalism masking as investigative reporting/journalistic expose, it reflects the dangerous in this piece. “College football players smoking marijuana is nothing new. Coaches and administrators have been battling the problem and disciplining players who do so for decades,” writes Mark Schlabach. He highlights the purported epidemic plaguing college football by citing the following:

NCAA statistics show a bump in the number of stoned athletes. In the NCAA’s latest drug-use survey, conducted in 2009 and released in January, 22.6 percent of athletes admitted to using marijuana in the previous 12 months, a 1.4 percentage point increase over a similar 2005 study. Some 26.7 percent of football players surveyed fessed up, a higher percentage than in any other major sport. (The use of other drugs, such as steroids and amphetamines, has declined or held steady.) A smaller percentage of athletes actually get caught, but those numbers are also on the rise. In the latest available postseason drug-testing results, positive pot tests increased in all three divisions, from 28 in 2008-09 to 71 the following school year.

It is important to examine the evidence because of the narrative being offered here and the larger context given the racial implications of the war on drugs.

According to Schlabach, 22.6 percent of football players acknowledging using marijuana; in student-athletes playing football were the most likely to acknowledge marijuana amongst those participating in MAJOR sports. While unclear how he is defining major sports, I would gather that those major sports include football, track, basketball, and baseball, coincidentally sports dominated by African Americans in disproportionate numbers. Why limit the discussion here other than to perpetuate a stereotype? Does the revenue or popularity of a sport require greater scrutiny? I think not.

Examination of the actual NCAA study tells a different story. Indeed, baseball (21.5%); basketball (22.2%), and track (16.0%) trail football. Only men’s golf and tennis, with numbers of 22.5% 23.2% trails football amongst non-major sports. If one compares reported marijuana use between collegiate football players to their peers in swimming (27.2%) ice hockey (27.4%), wrestling (27.7%), soccer (29.4%), and lacrosse (48.5%), it becomes clear that football is not the problem. Add women’s field hockey (35.7) and women’s lacrosse into that mix, and yet again it is clear who is getting high. In fact, when High Times or Bill Maher looks for a role model within collegiate sports, they are more likely to call upon soccer or lacrosse players than a football player.

ESPN further mischaracterizes the study by failing to sufficiently acknowledge the differences drug use in Division 1 football and Division III. The NCAA study found that marijuana use is least common amongst Division I student-athletes (16.9%), where Division II student-athletes (21.4%) and those from Division III having the highest level of usage with a number of 28.3%. Since the 2005 study, drug usage actually declined at the Division I level, while increases were seen in other two divisions.

via NewBlackMan (in Exile): ESPN Must be High: Drugs & Jim Crow in Sports’ Reporting.

NewBlackMan (in Exile): The Savior Syndrome: Patrick Willis and the Mystique of #WhiteLove

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Patrick Willis’ Two Dads | Ruth Fremson, NYTimes

The Savior Syndrome: Patrick Willis and the Mystique of #WhiteLove

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

There is an epidemic of white love in America. From The Blind Side and The Help to Kony 2012, George Clooney saving Africa and countless white celebrities liberating black children via adoption, white love has become the antidote to the race problem of the twentieth century. Whereas “the race problem” defined the last years, the next 100 years are purportedly to be one of white love. While racial profiling and the prison industrial complex, persistent discrimination and poverty, education and health disparities continue to plague the nation amid a climate of heightened anti-black racism, immigrant scapegoating, and a rising tide of white nationalists movements, white love offers a ray of sunshine. Better than Barack Obama’s “hope we can believe in,” in the face of so much injustice “white love” is hope (white) society can believe in each and every day.

While watching The Blindside Elon James White highlighted the power of white love within the much celebrated film and society at large:

I DID NOT KNOW WHITE WOMEN COULD CREATE FOOTBALL STARS WITH 16 WORDS. THEY ARE MAGIC. THEY SHOULD BE TAUGHT AT HOGWARTZ!

See–poor Black dude is actually full of talent and wisdom–he just needs a healthy dose of White love to open his eyes. #WHITELOVE

What #TheBlindside teaches us is if White people find poor homeless Black dudes they can create highly sought after football stars.

Awww snap. Kathy Bates and Sandra Bullock are doing a Awesome White Lady TAG TEAM. Hitting him with #WhiteLove left & right…

Dear White People: Please bottle #WhiteLove & sell it. Then we could throw it out of car windows in the ghetto like malatov cocktails…

#WhiteLove is so magical the child of awesomely White Sandra Bullock is smarter & more savy than the poor black dude 10 yrs his senior.

Every White person in this family is AMAZING. The Dad who wasn’t even paying attention to poor black dude is now INSPIRING him.

I don’t want to watch this movie anymore. I HAVE DEADLINES–but #WhiteLove is drawing me in… I WANT SANDRA BULLOCK SAVE ME.

The power of white love isn’t unique to Hollywood fantasy but is commonplace within sport culture. This particular fantasy was on full display during a recently re-aired episode of ESPN’s E:60. Documenting the trials and tribulations of the 49ers Patrick Willis, whose life took him from a Trailer Park in rural Tennessee to the fame and fortune of the NFL; from poverty and abuse to the American Dream.

The “rags-to-riches” and pulling oneself up by shoelaces is nothing new to sports culture given the centrality of the American Dream and sports as economic escalator within sports media. Yet, the presented story of Willis is one less about the Protestant work ethic and more of white love. The story isn’t so much of his talent, hard work, intelligence, but the transformative power of whiteness, whereupon Willis life changed when he became part of a white family.

The story given on ESPN and elsewhere is rather simple: Willis and his siblings grew up poor in Tennessee. As a result of their mother leaving them and their father’s drug and alcohol problems, a difficult childhood became one of great pain and suffering because of physical abuse. Ultimately standing up to his father by first responding to the abuse and then telling school officials, the children faced the prospects of being split apart. This would never come to fruition as Willis’s coach, Mr. Findley, after a request from the school superintendant, agreed to take all 4 children into their home.

No longer subjected to violence and poverty, yet together as a family, Willis began to thrive on and off the field. According to E:60, he no longer needed to focus on “basic needs” because of his father’s addiction or fending him beatings but instead could be a “normal child.” He was now able concentrate on himself on and off the field. Allowing Willis for the first time to experience love and a true childhood, Willis blossomed into an exceptional football player and even better story. The narrative frame that imagines blackness as pollutant and danger, as problem, juxtapose to whiteness as savior, as help, as goodness, and love is wrought with history and meaning. The only better than Hollywood’s vision of white love is the purported real thing.

continue reading @ NewBlackMan (in Exile): The Savior Syndrome: Patrick Willis and the Mystique of #WhiteLove.

NewBlackMan (in Exile): Jim Crow University?: The State of Racial Tolerance on America’s Campuses

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Jim Crow University?: The State of Racial Tolerance on America’s Campuses

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

Racial slurs; racist graffiti; taunts and jeers; nooses hanging from doors; and blackface. No, I am not talking about the South circa 1960, but the climate of America’s colleges and universities. If you look around the country, it would seem that some want to take our colleges back to the Jim Crow era when schools and curriculum were white only.

In the last two months of the mockery of post-race America has been quite evident. The “N word” was scrawled on a dorm room and a bathroom at Fordham University. That same month, students at University of Wisconsin-Madison hurled bottles and racial slurs at two African American students who had the audacity to walk past THEIR fraternity house on THEIR campus. At Cornell University, black students walking through campus faced a barrage of racial epithets, flying bottles and catcalls of “Trayvon.” At the Ohio State University, since April, racist and anti-religious epithets have been found on a dorm room door and within the community, including the defacement of a mural of President Barack Obama. These incidents followed the appearance of “Long Live Zimmerman” on a campus building.

For white students the college experience is defined by parties, football games, and new experiences; for students of color it is one often defined by hostility, racist violence, and the same old experiences. Last year, “All N-word’s must die” was found at Williams College. At University of Alabama, a white student screamed a racial slur at a white student, with slurs popping up on campus sidewalks. At Murray State, a faculty member chastised a black student for arriving 15 minutes late to a film screening, noting, “slaves never show up on time.” And the list of incidences goes on and on. This is the sort of racism and violence that has become all too common at America’s liberal institutions of higher education, those places often praised as the breeding ground for the post-racial millennial generation.

Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans also face an increasingly racially hostile environment evidence in cowboy and Indian parties, anti-immigrant chants at basketball games, and countless other examples. While certainly more visible as a result of the power of social media, racism is obviously nothing new to America’s colleges and universities. Whether looking at the history of integration or the practice of “ghetto parties,” institutions of higher education have a long history of racial injustice.

Students of color and faculty of color experience this history each and every day. According to Howard J. Ehrlich, director of The Prejudice Institute, between 850,000 and one million students (roughly 25 percent of students of color and five percent of white students) experience racially and ethnically-based violence (name calling, verbal aggression, harassing phone calls and “other forms of psychological intimidation”) each year. And this only reflects what is reported and what is seen. As Leslie Picca and Joe Feagin have discovered with Two-Faced Racism: Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage, white students use the n-word and tell racist jokes with frequency, a reality that impacts the culture and environment of America’s colleges and universities.

The Jim Crow signs remain visible even as conservatives whine about liberal universities and the discrimination of conservative students. I haven’t seen any Bigots and Liberal parties, or groups of conservative student subjected to catcalls and slurs. There hasn’t been an assault on white history and literature, which remain central to the college experience.

It is also increasingly difficult for ethnic studies, evidence in the attacks on Mexican American Studies in Arizona or the recent blog post in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Excoriated as a “cause not a course of student,” and denounced as “promoting resentment toward a race or class of people” the white only signs are being constructed in classrooms and in college communities throughout the country. These unwelcome signs demonstrate a lack of commitment to and value in diversity, but also how the presence of students of color and the practices of African American and other ethnic programs challenges the very privileges of whiteness.

“What I’ve learned most explicitly about the often racist depictions of Back Studies at primarily White institutions, is that it is a by-product of the on-going project of the discipline to make explicit connections to the work that we do and the communities of folks that exist beyond the four walls of the classroom,” notes Mark Anthony Neal. “Even as some Black Studies faculty are no invested in such a project–and such a project looks very different now than it did during the 1960s, Black Studies continues to reject that idea that it exists in a vacuum.” The continued attacks on the fields of ethnic studies and students of color makes this all too clear.

via NewBlackMan (in Exile): Jim Crow University?: The State of Racial Tolerance on America’s Campuses.

DEAR WHITE FOLKS: You Need Black Studies Classes (and Here’s Why) – News & Views – EBONY

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DEAR WHITE FOLKS:
You Need Black Studies Classes (and Here’s Why)

by David J. Leonard

Recent months have seen a wave of campus racism at America’s colleges and universities, including Fordham University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cornell University, Northwestern University, and the Ohio State University. While racism is as commonplace at America’s “liberal” training grounds as binge drinking, I found myself wondering about occupying America’s universities. I found myself wondering how Black studies and ethnic studies have the potential to change America’s racial path. How Black studies and understanding the ongoing history of racism is essential to a quest for a “more perfect union.”

Imagine if every student took at least one Black studies course per year during college alongside of Chicano Studies, Asian American Studies and Native American Studies. What if students, what if white students, starting in kindergarten and through graduate school, American’s future leaders, teachers, and voters learned a 4th R – racism – alongside ‘reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic? Surely institutional racism would remain an obstacle, but Whites who inhabit those institutions, from the classroom to the Capital, would likely be changed.

Learning about minstrelsy and the history of racist imagery would surely impact the decision from White students to don blackface for the sake of fun, parties and Halloween. Learning about the history of slavery and lynchings would hopefully encourage thought from entire communities the next time a noose appeared on campus, the next time someone scrawled lynch on a chalkboard or dorm room door. There would be no more excuses and claims of ignorance about these histories.

Can we imagine a world where White students didn’t commonly use the “N-word” behind closed doors because they understood the history of racial violence? Would the hurling of racist jokes and epithets lessened as all students began to think about the consequences and daily harm? Would the exposure to alternative perspectives, to unseen history, and to conversations with students of color, change those students? I would hope so.

Through knowledge, critical thinking and dialogue, colleges can transform themselves–and their students. According to Howard J. Ehrlich, director of The Prejudice Institute, between 850,000 and one million students (roughly 25 percent of students of color and five percent of White students) experience racially and ethnically-based violence (name calling, verbal aggression, harassing phone calls and “other forms of psychological intimidation”) each year. What if each of the students who hurled the slurs at Cornell or graffitied “Long live Zimmerman” at the Ohio State University taken a Black studies course surely there worldview would have been different. Surely, those White students who sat idly by, who watched and said nothing, would have challenge their peers had they any real knowledge of race and racism.

Knowledge about Black culture, history, and identity would come not from Basketball Wives or The Help but in James Baldwin and Tayari Jones, Daughters of the Dust and Killer of Sheep.

Yet, the need for a world of Black Studies as multi-year required isn’t simply to teach White students about prejudice, but the erased experiences and voices of Black people. Knowledge about Black culture, history, and identity would come not from Basketball Wives or The Help but in James Baldwin and Tayari Jones, Daughters of the Dust and Killer of Sheep. We would no longer hear about Martin Luther King’s dream of colorblindness, but instead his dream of justice, reparations, and equality of outcome. The civil rights movement would be a history told not through King and one great speech, but people like Bayard Rustin and Ella Baker, heroes and sheroes who refused to accept American Apartheid. This is my dream, a dream where White students learn alongside of students of color about the history of racism, about privilege, and inequality; about the contributions and humanity of communities of color; about histories of resistance from “Aint I a woman?” to “Let freedom ring.”

While a freshman at the University of Oregon, I took my first African American history class. This class and so many others changed my life. Beyond learning about African American history, beyond reading the likes of DuBois, Frederick Douglas and Carter G. Woodson, beyond hearing for the first time names like Turner, Garvey, Delany, and Hamer, I learned to think for myself, asking why wasn’t I learning this history and what does it mean that the history, literature, and culture I learned during my formative years was a story of whites.

continue reading @ DEAR WHITE FOLKS: You Need Black Studies Classes (and Here’s Why) – News & Views – EBONY.

NFL Bounties and the Criminal Justice System: Not So Different? – Entertainment & Culture – EBONY

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NFL Bounties and the Criminal Justice System:

Not So Different?

by David J. Leonard

Roger Goodell has spoken, which is never good for an NFL player. Because of their participation in “bountygate,” the NFL commissioner suspended Jonathan Vilma (entire season), Anthony Hargrove (8 games), Will Smith (4 games) Scott Fujita (3 games). And what was their infraction? They participated in a program, along with their coaches, that provided big dollars for vicious hits on the playing field, especially those leading “‘knockout’ or ‘cart-off’ hits.”

While others questioned the NFL’s commitment to safety, calling the punishments excessive, Roger Goodell justified suspensions as part of league’s commitment to root out unnecessary violence and protect its players: “It is the obligation of everyone, including the players on the field, to ensure that rules designed to promote player safety, fair play, and the integrity of the game are adhered to and effectively and consistently enforced. Respect for the men that play the game starts with the way players conduct themselves with each other on the field.” Linking the punishment to its effort to promote “safety, fair play and integrity,” Goodell seems to have concluded that encouraging on-the-field violence with financial incentives is counter to not just the NFL but the morals and values of society.

While drawing a wide range of opinions as to whether the “punishment fit the crime,” there seems to be agreement about the evils of a bounty system. According to Bill Plaschke, “The integrity of this country’s most popular sports league has been battered, and its commitment to safety bloodied, with the NFL’s report…that the New Orleans Saints spent three years operating a management-approved bounty pool that paid big money for inflicting injury.”

Similarly Jeff Schultz positioned “bountygate” in the context of morals and values “We’ve addressed this before: Anybody who trivializes the bounty program with comments like, ‘Everybody does it’ (not true) or the NFL loves violence (true, but they don’t love concussions and torn ligaments) is missing the point. There’s a difference between rewarding an athlete for an unscripted play and a premeditated assault. Payments for ‘cart-offs’ aren’t acceptable. We’re taking about people’s livelihoods. And lives.”

For them, Roger Goodell needed to send a message, one made clear that the league would not tolerate any efforts to reward and encourage on-the-field violence.

These suspensions have made clear that “bounties” have no place within football. But as the NFL’s crackdown on paid smackdowns takes hold, what about the bounty system that exists throughout our culture? If encouraging violence with financial incentives, if promises of cash and fame are unacceptable within football, can we say the same about the criminal justice system? If risking people’s lives and potentially destroying their careers violates the values of sport, can we not agree that it is also antithetical to justice and democracy?

If encouraging violence with financial incentives, if promises of cash and fame are unacceptable within football, can we say the same about the criminal justice system?

What is bad for football is surely bad for a system committed to justice and equal protection under the law. And yet ours is a criminal justice system that rewards officers for arrests and tickets, that provides financial incentives for the “war on drugs”, that encourages racial profiling and “stop and frisk” programs.

Continue reading @ NFL Bounties and the Criminal Justice System: Not So Different? – Entertainment & Culture – EBONY.

NewBlackMan: Education in Era of the McTeacher

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Education in Era of the McTeacher

by Theresa Runstedtler and David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

“It’s a Biblical principle. If you double a teacher’s pay scale, you’ll attract people who aren’t called to teach.” – Alabama state Senator Shadrack McGill (R)

Speaking at a prayer breakfast last month, state Senator Shadrack McGill (R) argued that increasing school teachers’ salaries would not only destroy the quality of public education in Alabama but it would be tantamount to blasphemy. (Of course, this position did not prevent him from advocating for a 67-percent pay increase for Alabama legislators.)

To go in and raise someone’s child for eight hours a day, or many people’s children for eight hours a day, requires a calling. It better be a calling in your life. I know I wouldn’t want to do it, OK? And these teachers that are called to teach, regardless of the pay scale, they would teach. It’s just in them to do. It’s the ability that God give ‘em. And there are also some teachers, it wouldn’t matter how much you would pay them, they would still perform to the same capacity. If you don’t keep that in balance, you’re going to attract people who are not called, who don’t need to be teaching our children. So, everything has a balance.

Even though McGill’s theological grounding of the issue of teacher pay is laughable at best, his assertion exposes an underlying tension in current debates over education reform. Ironically, those who demonize teachers frequently deploy this tired mantra of selfless public service to rationalize low teacher salaries, even as they expect the same teachers to operate in an increasingly corporatized, “results-based” environment – without corporate-sized wages.

In other words, they want to have their cake and eat it too, and all on the backs of those who spend their days working in the classroom, often with paltry resources, little support, and the constant threat of punitive measures and public derision. And this pressure to push the rubric of privatization into public education is not just coming from the Right. The “progressive” movement for education reform has also jumped on the corporate bandwagon.

Indeed, the logic of consumerism now dominates the “enterprise” of American education from kindergarten to college. We have entered a phase defined by a client relationship, with teachers becoming akin to academic concierges or service representatives, rather than intellectual leaders and mentors. Schoolteachers and professors must provide information, guidance, and whatever else their student-customers’ desire. More and more we are told that we are in the business of content delivery and job training, rather than social analysis and critique. In “Putting the Customer First in College,” Louis Soares, the Director of the Postsecondary Education program at the Center for American Progress, even argues for the establishment of an “Office of Consumer Protection in Higher Education”:

Students make customer choices based on available information, interests, abilities and life circumstances that will mostly determine whether they succeed in obtaining an education with a meaningful credential. The problem is our higher education marketplace today does not account for this customer focus that is so important to success. In large measure, this is because education policies that guide this marketplace are largely crafted by the dominant voices in higher education—colleges and universities with the resources to sway elected officials. Students as customers have no voice in this policy conversation. (emphasis added)

Writing about the phenomenon of helicopter parents, Afshan Jafar links the rise of hovering moms and dads to the heightened consumerism in U.S. education. “This trend is clearly the manifestation of a consumerist mentality: I’m paying for this, so even though I am a sophomore, I should be able to take the course that is open to juniors and seniors,” writes the assistant professor of Sociology at Connecticut College. “Or: I’m paying for this, so this better be good (and “good” really means a good grade here). This consumerist mentality explains the sense of entitlement that we perceive in some of our students and their parents.” While often attributed to the increasing costs of higher education and the recent string of consumer-fraud class actions brought by students, this “retail” ethic runs much deeper. It reflects a substantive paradigm shift in the language, practice, and structure of American education.

With this emphasis on benchmarks, quantifiable results, and customer reviews, it is no surprise that attacks on teachers, whether at the university or public school level, have escalated in the past few years. Whether measured by standardized tests or student evaluations, teachers are now expected to produce immediately recognizable “results,” even as the funds dedicated to the classroom (as opposed to testing companies and college administrations) continue to shrink.

continue reading @ NewBlackMan: Education in Era of the McTeacher.