Intercollegiate Sports in America, 1900-2020
 

Spring 2020

Race and Class

Since the earliest days of college sports, colleges and universities have sought out athletically talented students from class, ethnic, or social groups not normally admitted to their institutions. In some periods, such students came from immigrant groups of Irish or European origin, often economically disadvantaged, or from mining and agricultural communities in rural parts of the country. More recently, colleges recruit African-American students from America's inner cities or small towns and from high schools in southern states to participate in elite college sports. In many cases these practices offered individuals an opportunity for upward mobility, but in others it represented a form of exploitation. The controversies over standards for recruitment and athletic subsidies, academic eligibility and graduation rates, while often expressed in terms of competitive fairness, usually also have a subtext related to student-athlete race and class, and sometimes gender.

In America, intercollegiate sports often captures and highlights critical social and cultural concerns prevalent in the larger society. Sports is a relatively unambiguous enterprise, with specific people doing specific things in regulated environments, and the ambiguities surrounding issues of race, class, and gender in the larger society become sharpened and simplified in college sports. In this context, Americans tend to highlight issues related to race and gender while avoiding conversations related to class. Nonetheless, most of the sports-related issues connected to race also have a strong socio-economic component related to class.

By the late 1920s, colleges' efforts to recruit athletically talented students had become significant and the distinctions that separated athletically recruited students from regular students occasioned considerable comment and analysis. This development included the use of financial incentives to bring talented athletes to school, support for them while there, and often a lack of concern about their academic success while enrolled.

In today's college sports enterprise the average academic results of student-athletes, while matching the general student population, misrepresents the wide range of academic performance by participants in the different sports. Basketball for example has dramatically lower graduation rates today than non-revenue sports such as tennis. However, in large public universities, the range of general student performance is also wide, as is the range of student-athlete academic performance. Many circumstances influence the academic success of college students, and perhaps the most significant element is prior academic preparation. Further compounding this issue, many student-athletes who come from less financially secure backgrounds find that their preparation for college work is seriously deficient. Student-athletes from financially secure backgrounds, like other college students similarly situated, do better.

Race and College Sports

Just about everyone who has lived through or studied the the last generations of American history understands the transformation of college and professional sports that opened up athletics to a wide range of talent. From a primarily white or European ethnic enterprise, almost all sports have come to be multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and even international. Nonetheless, even today, some sports remain predominantly white while others have become significantly or majority African-American.

The process of this transformation requires us to look at the pressures that persuaded white-controlled and dominated sports enterprises to recruit and include black athletes. We also need to consider the circumstances that cause young black men and women to participate in college sports, not only at historically black colleges and universities, but also since the mid to late 1960s at predominantly white institutions.

For all of the problems attendant on the highly competitive nature of intercollegiate sports, the cult of winning places a high value on talent. As some colleges in the North and Midwest began to recruit highly talented black players in the middle of the twentieth century, their competitors in other parts of the country recognized that they could no longer ignore the talent pool of non-white athletes. Over time, this single-minded pursuit of talent opened a wide range of opportunities for black and other non-white athletes in most of America's colleges and universities.

The categories we use to describe these changes in the social, economic, and ethnic composition of athletic teams and programs often imply a precision that does not actually exist. The terms "black," that we use to describe African-Americans, "white," for those of Western European descent, "Hispanic," for those of Western Hemisphere origin, or "Native American," for those of American pre-Colombian origin, have relatively little scientific value. Instead, these terms describe classifications attached to various subgroups by virtue of history, exploitation, opportunity, politics, or economic advantage and codified into various statutes and regulations by government action, especially through census classification methodology.

While we all use terms such as black, African-American, Hispanic, or white, these reflect less some scientifically valid genetic classification and more a socio-historical category. Nonetheless powerful in providing or denying opportunities, the categories speak less to inherent physical characteristics than they do to the cumulative effect of class structure and opportunity throughout our history as reflected in today's society, geography, demography, and economy.

Although the expansion of opportunities for all ethnic groups to participate in intercollegiate sports and gain access to all levels of American higher education is an important advance, many observers worry about the relationship between sports success and life achievement. The tension between athletics and the student-athlete's future aspirations and achievement continues to concern everyone involved in intercollegiate athletics.

Some studies have found that while sports opened up many avenues for previously excluded people to participate in college life, the glorification of sports as the primary avenue for success may have distorted values and limited opportunities outside of sports. Moreover, the promise of a future in professional sports is clearly a false one since only a tiny fraction of participants in secondary school and college sports go on to successful careers with professional athletic teams. The concentration of interest on sports success leaves some significant number of student-athletes unprepared to compete successfully in the non-athletic world after their college sports careers end.

Symbols and Stereotypes

The issues of ethnic discrimination and changing attitudes towards racial stereotyping also affected the symbols related to college sports. Team mascots and emblems came under close scrutiny as observers found many athletic symbols offensive or symbolic of values no longer acceptable to many people in American society. Whether the battles occurred in the South over the use of symbols related to the period of slavery such as those based on the Confederate flag or the frequent usage throughout the country of Native American tribal names for sports teams, these issues highlighted the changes in American values that took place in the second half of the twentieth century and many instances continue into the twenty-first.

These controversies serve as somewhat disguised discussions of race and class, whether focused on the Confederate flag symbol, popular in many Southern states, or on the Native American mascots prevalent throughout the country. These symbols carried multiple meanings for many people. For some they represented only the enthusiasm for a particular team or region, but for others the subtext of the symbolic representation appeared discriminatory or reflective of a painful history.

The Confederate flag appeared to many as a coded symbol for white supremacy and the discriminatory practices and institution of slavery characteristic of communities in the South before and after the Civil War. Many Native Americans came to see the symbols of warriors or tribes as negative reflections on their historical cultures and an appropriation of their historical past for a trivializing purpose. These controversies produced significant changes in the symbols permitted in college sports and reflected the impact larger social issues have on the operation and meaning of intercollegiate athletics to the nation.

Because sports is such a significant element in the lives of so many, the symbols and styles of sport performances become major social and cultural symbols for the nation. Colleges and universities, unlike professional teams, reflect the nation's values in many other ways, and these institutions found themselves required to confront the non-sports significance of their adopted sports symbols. The result has been the elimination of confederate symbols and most Native-American references within college sports.

Class

In the discussion of race, the issue of class is fundamental, for while there are many poor people of all ethnic groups in America, the subgroup of economically challenged student-athletes has a high proportion of black student-athletes. The interesting comparison here is that in the early years of the twentieth-century, recruited student-athletes also frequently came from poor backgrounds and required subsidies to attend elite institutions or indeed any college. They paid their way through college with their participation in football or other sports. Today, the same process takes place, but with a focus on African-American as well as other economically disadvantaged but athletically talented individuals. As a result, college sports became a focus for the larger American conversation about race, class, poverty, and educational opportunity.

Again, as we've seen, the clarity of sports rules and performances, the requirement for fair competition, and the demand that athletes who represent colleges must be students, all focused attention on the differences between student-athletes and regular students as well as the differences between athletes of different races, and often by inference, of different socio-economic class. Given the highly charged nature of these issues, college sports frequently became involved in controversies about large social issues that sports neither created nor could resolve.

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