COLLEGE PARK, Md. — While a sea of hundreds of thousands descended on
downtown Washington Tuesday night for the Concert for Valor, a crowd of several hundred showed up for a
different type of star-studded event on the campus of the University of
Maryland.
A panel was composed of professor and ESPN “Around the Horn” panelist Kevin
Blackistone; Washington Mystics player and ESPN commentator Kara Lawson;
Damion Thomas, curator of sports at the Smithsonian Museum of African American
History and
Culture; “SportsCenter” and ESPN Radio host Scott Van Pelt; and
ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption” co-host Mike Wilbon. The panel was convened
for the Ninth Annual Shirley Povich Symposium, hosted by George Solomon, the
director of the
Povich Center, and focused the topic of racism in sports.
Ten minutes before the event was scheduled to begin, the seats at the Orem
Hall of the Samuel Riggs Alumni Center were already filled, prompting
organizers to bring in more chairs for the standing-room-only crowd. The panel
took questions from the dean and the public for over two hours,
then remained for nearly an hour after the event to continue to talk and
meet with attendees.
The two biggest race-related sports issues of the year — the Donald Sterling
fiasco and the Ray Rice incident — took center stage. The
discussion started on Sterling, whose departure (it was universally agreed
upon) was good for NBA, but the nature of which left a sour taste in some
panelists’ mouths.
“The fact that the NBA got rid of him because of that and not because of
systemic racism is what bothers me,” said Blackistone, referring to the
lawsuit filed against the former Los Angeles Clippers’ owner for housing
discrimination in 2006.
As for the Rice case, the panel admitted that it has triggered a nationwide
discussion about the issue of domestic violence, but has also had at least one
major unintended consequence.
“Ray Rice has become the face of domestic violence in this country,”
Blackistone said, citing other brutal examples of domestic abuse that have
received less attention, like that of a Silicon Valley CEO who faced 45 felony counts after being
shown striking his girlfriend 117 times on home security footage.
“You could say it’s because of sports, or you could say it’s because he’s a
black man.”
Wilbon took that thread and ran with it, suggesting that sports often serves
as a catalyst for social change across the society at large.
“Sports moves faster than the culture in every way,” said Wilbon, comparing
Jackie Robinson’s 1947 integration into the Brooklyn Dodgers to Rosa Parks’
famous 1955 refusal to give up her seat in the front of a Montgomery, Alabama
bus. “We care more about it; it’s more visible.”
Later, though, Blackistone challenged the idea that sports are always the
leader when it comes to social change. “Sometimes we give sports too much
credit for moving the social needle,” he
said.
To that end, Van Pelt — a former analyst at the Golf Network and the host of
various golf events for ESPN — discussed the impact of Tiger Woods’ rise
on the game. Woods became the first golfer to earn over $2 million in
a single year on tour in 1997; 43 players did so in 2014.
But the number of black golfers to win an event on tour this year? Still just
one.
So while the game has benefited financially from Woods, he hasn’t
exactly blown the doors open for the next generation of young black golfers.
Pano
Every seat was filled by the time the symposium began. (WTOP/Noah Frank)
This led to a discussion of how African-Americans are viewed by society, and
how they view themselves in sports. Blackistone brought up
the psychological concept of stacking — the assigning of roles or
sports to athletes of different races.
“That’s how Jeremy Lin toasted and roasted Kemba Walker in college, but
because he’s Asian and he went to Harvard, he was overlooked,” he said of the
undrafted Lin, now a highly paid NBA star.
Further explorations into stacking and similar concepts
revealed an interesting perspective on the difference in how football and
basketball are viewed by the society at large. Despite the percentage of
African-Americans playing in the NFL (68 percent) and the NBA (78 percent)
being fairly similar, basketball is considered a black sport, while football
is not. Wilbon provided an insight as to why he believes this is true.
“Pro football is never seen as a black sport, because the stars — the
quarterbacks — are white,” he explained.
Blackistone went on to mention another recent event in sports and attempt to
put it through the same prism. As a NASCAR fantasy league player, he had
recently been watching a show in which they were discussing the Chase for the
NASCAR Sprint Cup, where a fight had broken out between drivers and crews
after a recent race. The incident was actually being used to promote the next
race, to show the emotion stirred up between the drivers competing.
“Do you think the NBA would have used the ‘Malice at the Palace’ to promote
NBA basketball?” he asked, referencing the
infamous fight involving Ron Artest and members of the Indiana Pacers, who
went up into the crowd, fists swinging, after being hit with debris from
spectators.
As the only active athlete on the panel, as well as the only female, Lawson
provided a different perspective. While she said she had not experienced much,
if any, feeling of racial discrimination due (she has a white
mother and a black father) as an athlete, she said she faced it fairly
constantly through social media during and after broadcasts.
“Race comes up more as a member of the media than as an athlete,” said Lawson,
who appears as an analyst on ESPN when she is not playing.
Lawson, Wilbon and Van Pelt all lamented the vitriol they encounter on social
media, particularly in regards to race. It is in the anonymous, punishment-
free zone of the keyboard commenter that they often see the worst in society,
a constant reminder that while progress is made in race relations every day on
the surface, there is still a long way to go.
Interestingly, while the best most can do on social media is block or simply
ignore such hateful speech, the NFL has recently attempted to regulate
athletes’ usage of the N-word on the field, which has prompted some
discussion over the validity of white men telling black men they cannot use
such a charged word, and the different contexts that word has in the locker
room, on the field, and in society at large. Wilbon, however, took a different
approach on the matter.
“I don’t want to hear about them regulating the word when they’ve got a team
called the Redskins,” said Wilbon. “It’s unthinkably bigoted and backward of
the NFL and its owner.”
That was the only real discussion of the most hotly contested local sports
race issue of the year. But the fact that two hours were easily filled, and
the discussion could have easily gone on for two or three times as long, shows
just how many ways sports and issues of race remain intertwined in our
society. There will, no doubt, be plenty of topics to pick up and discuss next
year.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story had the quote regarding white
quarterbacks as the stars of the league attributed to Professor Blackistone.
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