In Black America; Dr. Harry Edwards, Part 1

NEXT CLICK MUSIC From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is in Black America. We tend to focus upon what white folks have done to us. And not enough upon what we have not done for ourselves.

And what we ought to be doing for ourselves. I'm not going to walk in here in November, late in the year. Of 1991, with David Duke running for Governor and getting the majority of the white vote, and George Duke sitting in the White House, and sit up here and talk to you, sit up here and talk to you, waste your time about what white folks ought to be doing for us. That's a waste of time. If we don't know that by now, then God save us because nobody else is going to. I want to focus today on how we evolved in this situation through our actions, through our virtual complicity, with racism and discrimination, break downs in leadership, misdirection, misorientation, and honest mistakes.

Dr. Harry Edwards, professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Edwards is the founder of the Disciplinal Sports Sociology, that focuses on the relationship between American sports and society and their effect on racial equality. In 1968, most college sports programs were really white. Today, the presence of African American athletes is commonplace. But a recent NCAA survey show the graduation rate of African American athletes is not so encouraging. Of the athletes who entered in the 1984-85 academic year, a mere 26.6 percent of African Americans graduated compared to 52.2 percent of whites. In that survey, African American comprised only 7 percent of all college students while African American athletes made up 56 percent of college basketball and 37 percent of college football teams. Some say the African American society is a co-conspirator in this. It peels its kids to the highest bidders.

I'm Johnny O'Hanston, Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America. This week, sports, academic, and the black male with Dr. Harry Edwards in Black America. Now, in order to understand the situation impacting black males, from the perspective of how we as a people have evolved into this situation, in order to understand these developments at the interface of athletics and academics, we must understand the course and development of black circumstances in a broader society. For sport and society are inextricably intertwined and interdependent, as I have argued for the last 25 years, against the flood of opinion that sport was somehow isolated and insulated from the realities of life and fun and games and unlike other dimensions of American society. As I have argued against the notion that somehow the rest of society could just be like sport,

all of our problems would be resolved. As I have argued that the rest of society is like sport, that's why we have problems in sport. You can no more have a racist society, a discriminatory and racially oppressive society, and a non-racist sports institution, then a chicken can lay a duck egg. Dr. Harry Edwards is considered an expert on racial, political, and economic issues of sport, society, and education. Dr. Edwards involvement in the politics of sports date back to 1967, when he was an assistant professor of sociology at San Jose State. There, he supported a black boycott of the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Today, he is a professor of sociology at the University of California in Berkeley, and a consultant on racial affairs to Major League Baseball, the San Francisco 49ers, and the Golden State Warriors of the NBA. In addition, Dr. Edwards has written and published more than 60 articles and reviews, and serves as a contributing editor to a number of newspapers and magazines.

Recently, I spoke with Dr. Harry Edwards at the Seven National Higher Education Conference on Black Student Retention in Las Vegas. I think that you can clearly look at the situation in the post-Jackie Robinson era and see that there has been substantial change in evolution from the pre-Jackie Robinson era. But when you look at the substantive character of the progress that has been made, it's clear that in virtually every sport we move from a Jim Crow pre-Jackie Robinson era to a post-Jackie Robinson era that I characterize as Mr. James Crow Esquire. We still have substantial segregation by sport, that is to say blacks are still virtually absent in about 95% of American sports activities on the college campus. You're basically looking at the revenue-producing sports of basketball and football as far as substantial black participation. We get less than 5% of the scholarships and all other sports with the exception of track where you have a great deal of carry-over from football, the track in many instances

among the sprunners, among the weight men and so forth. So I think that when you look at that situation, it becomes very, very clear that there has been some evolution. There most certainly has been some change, but there has not been substantial progress. We're still not in front office positions and anything close to representative numbers, even in the sports that we participate in in disproportionately high numbers as athletes. We don't have ownership in many instances. A great deal of this is due to racism and discrimination, a great deal more of it, I believe. And I think that it's empirically demonstrable is due to a lack of institutional development in black society, where the economic institution, the political institution, the various social institutions that provide for a broad scale political organization and cultural support of black enterprises, by black people are simply underdeveloped. And I think that it's contributed directly to our lack of involvement and ownership and decision-making capacities in all sports, even at the collegiate level. How can we get our young male athletes to buy into the notion that becoming an athlete

is a short-lived career and understanding the worth of an education? Well, I think that the basic thing that has to be done is that we have to restore mentorship. Mentorship was something that was very widespread in the black community in the pre-integration era. I had a mentor growing up in East St. Louis, Illinois, an attorney by the name of Frank Summers, who lived right there in the community, even though he was the first black assistant attorney general in the state of Illinois. He also lived in the black community. He never lived out of the black community, even though my father was a laborer and he was a professional, we lived within three blocks of each other, because there was no place else really for him to go to live. And even after integration, he stayed in that community and continued his mentorship involvement with the young men that came up in that community. Unfortunately, with integration, a great many black people, black professionals, black middle class people moved out of the community and essentially severed all contacts with the community. I think that that in combination with a media which tends to project basically what I call the ABCs of a black involvement in American media,

athletes, buffoons, criminals, and clowns, tends to create that situation of a lack of black role models in the community and a racist and discriminatory largely one-sided presentation of black society in the media tends to create a situation where disproportionate numbers of black males are channeled off into athletics until black mentorship is reestablished. And there is some association between the black middle class and the masses and the black community. We're going to find that this problem is going to continue until there is a broad scale cultural effort to make sure that our young people interpret the black images that are projected in the media properly and within a context of the political reality that we have to deal with as a people in this pluralistic society. We're going to continue to have this inordinate and disproportionately high number of competitive, aspirant, young African-American men and women sacrificing a wealth of personal potential,

of personal potential to contribute on the altar of athletic worship to the detriment of both themselves and of black society. Was African-American somewhat fooled and buying into integration because you mentioned our institution that deteriorated and to some extent do not exist any longer? Well, I don't think that there is any question that integration has some tremendous downsides for African-Americans. I don't think that it's an issue of integration per se. In a pluralistic society there must be a substantial degree of integration in order for all groups to participate in the national institutions. I want to see blacks in the military. I want to see blacks in the national economy. I want to see blacks in the United States Congress and Senate. I want to see blacks in the military. I want to see blacks in the media. I want to see blacks in all national institutions. We're part of this society.

We must be there. We must be in the major leagues and in the national football league and in NBA. But where the problem comes is when you take integration to pathological dimensions to the point that the integration of thrust becomes so radical that you erode and destroy your own institutions, your own community institutions, education, economics, politics, even to some extent the church in pursuit of an integrationist dream that very rapidly under those circumstances changes to a nightmare because no people have ever become full and respected participants in the national life of American society without the institutions intact. We must have that institutional foundation that turns out a constant flow of highly competent committed and credible generations of people to fulfill the kinds of mandates to meet the kinds of challenges that confront us as a people in a high tech post industrial American society. As long as we continue to pursue radical integrationism to presume that if anything is predominantly black or all black it is they factor a vestige of segregation and therefore a palpable evil to be gotten rid of, to be destroyed, to be ignored, to be eroded and undermined, we're going to be in very bad shape.

We're going to continue to miseducate if not diseducate a majority of our young black students who go to predominantly black or all black schools. We're going to continue to destroy and to erode and to degrade our economic institutions and our political institutions. We're going to continue to look for some messiah riding a white horse to come in and politically save us from ourselves and from white people and it's not going to happen. So integration has been in a manner of speaking a tremendous deception it has been it has bordered on almost in human mockery and when we begin to realize that and rain back our integrationist aspirations to more realistic and more productive levels I think at that point we'll begin to make progress across a broad front of challenges that confront us as a people and as a community in this pluralistic society.

Sport and society are inextricably intertwined and interdependent and as such the character of our sports involvement is inevitably set and contoured in conjunction with the historical evolution and contemporary character of our broader social and political circumstances and an escapable fact of life for us in the sports room. I refer you to an article about 80 pages coming out in Nakata journal, National Journal of the National Association of Academic Advisors which should be out by the first of December. For those of you who want to contact somebody and get a pre-release copy you should contact how it shines at the University of Illinois Champaign of Bernat who is the editor of the of the journal. From a demographic and technological perspective this crises confronting black males can be most directly traced to conditions encountered by working class men whose loss of function in post-World War II America led directly to their loss of function in the black family and to the exacerbation of the black males already negative legacy from the emasculating experience of slavery.

Through the first decade and a half of this century black men with few skills could find plenty of work in a still substantially agrarian American society where over 60% of blacks lived in the rural south. At the outbreak of World War I those blacks who left the south did so for the most part under the auspices of poor factors. As these southern black migrants made their ways north to take advantage of manufacturing opportunities created in the wake of the war, a small black urban middle class began to emerge. These blacks were at the bottom of society, a society which denied them the vertical occupational mobility opportunities necessary to move up but which nonetheless left them sufficient occupational latitude to establish a foothold in a burgeoning urban economy. Today's inner city black populations were not part of any such positive demographic or historical process.

Most of those who populate our inner cities most of those who populate our black communities today are descendants of the victims of the flight of urban jobs to the suburbs and to the sun belt. Others were part of the last wave of southern migrants arriving in the 1950s and 1960s largely displaced by increasing automation and mechanization of farming that made the black workers labor superfluous on the farm and drove them to the cities where the decline of manufacturing work for the less skilled and poorly educated made their labor no less superfluous. The emergence in the 1960s of a highly automated computerized high tech post-industrial occupational structure still further exacerbated the difficulties that post-World War II migrants passed on to their children. This combined with stifling racist oppression and a failure of black people and black leadership in particular to thoroughly appreciate the true dimensions and imperative priorities of the struggles for black freedom and advancement in post-industrial America contributed to making institutional underdevelopment in black society and disproportionately permanent intergenerational joblessness among black males. The most salient features and the key sustaining forces in the perpetuation of the crisis of the black male in American society.

By the mid 1960s even as the black civil rights struggle raged the lives of black residents in many of our inner city communities in particular were transformed. Female-headed households increasingly replaced stable families and legitimate jobs were replaced by underground and underworld economies. One phenomena has further compounded the difficulties facing black populations. With the onset of integration in the mid and late 1960s many blacks who had established some semblance of a middle class foothold in the occupational structures of black communities left these communities and moved on to and on to the periphery and into the center of white institutions and white society. And this brings us to the dynamics and evolution of the second major force impacting the crisis of the black male in sport and society. The political struggle that established radical integrationism as its chief strategy and goal.

Here we must recall the roots of our problems in the thrust and substance of the historical debate between accommodationist and assimilationist that occurred at the turn of the century. The accommodationists were led by Booker T. Washington and the assimilationist later kind who came to be known as integrationist where their position was articulated by the intellectual young radical of the day Dr. W. B. Du Bois. It was during the first decade and a half of this century that this debate raged most furiously and that ultimately the foundations of still dominant black advancement strategies and goals were established. Booker T. Washington and W. B. Du Bois essentially argued over the proper goals and direction of the liberation efforts of the so-called Negro. Booker T. Washington held that the Negro should strive for institutional development while accommodating the then current restrictions on social and political equality placed upon him by the segregationist in American society. As he was to reiterate in the 1895 Georgia cotton exposition blacks and whites could be as separate as the fingers but function like one as the hand relative to the complementarity of their various roles and positions in all areas save those of political and social equality.

Dr. Du Bois saw Washington's accommodation to separate and distinct Negro development as a disgusting and unacceptable capitulation to racism. His idea and those of other assimilationist was that those Negroes capable of and competent to compete in the mainstream a proportion he reckoned to be approximately 10% should struggle for such mainstream access and full social equality. This so-called talented 10th would then serve as the leaders and ladders guiding and providing for the ascendancy of the less capable Negro masses. Du Bois feared that Washington's strategy would lead inevitably to a two-tiered society with whites on top and dominant in every sphere saved those spheres of endeavor they deemed less worthy and therefore which they chose to relegate to the sphere of legitimate Negro enterprise. Washington feared that Du Bois strategy would lead inevitably to a class split among Negroes so severe and devastating as to generate greater antagonisms within black society than between blacks and whites.

Eventually Du Bois, like Booker T. Washington, came to understand that what he had perceived and what the NAACP, the organization that he started, had later institutionalized as the consummate evil, nameless segregation was not of one undifferentiated and seamless cloth. The phenomena of a distinct and discernible black social, cultural and historical reality and existence was both complex and multifaceted. Indeed Du Bois began to question the prevailing understanding of what was seen as monolithic segregation as well as the strategies targeting its elimination, root, branch and seed. He began to suspect and ultimately to empirically establish that radical integrationism did not in fact distinguish between the social structural residue and products of racist segregation and legitimate black pluralistic institutional and cultural development. With the triumph of integrationist ideology and strategies and the extension of integrationism to pathological dimensions, we embarked upon a course of development that could only spell widespread disaster for African Americans individually and as an ethnic and cultural group.

Integrationist ideology and strategy gone mad along with racism and discrimination has played a direct role in generating the crisis of the African American male. Radical integrationism has also done something even more devastating. It has precipitated and contributed to sustaining and perpetuating a plantation mentality among too many African American people and in acceptance of if not indeed a virtual insistence upon a plantation structure of relationships with white America. With the recent revelation of romantic Johnson, a meeting that he's tested positive for HIV virus, it strikes me out or maybe a symptom of society that an athlete had to be affected for African Americans and particularly the country in general to take this particular disease and its devastation to a more serious level. Does it say something about us as a society and as a people?

Well it says a great deal, the magic Johnson situation says a great deal about athletics, it says a great deal about American society and it says something particularly I think about black people in terms of this particular issue. Magic Johnson is not the first athlete or even the first black athlete to die of AIDS, there have been baseball players, there have been boxes who died of AIDS but we were into a mindset which focused upon high risk groups and that allowed us to always evade the fact that AIDS is our individual problem. It's not a group problem, it's my individual problem if I am out there and behaving in certain kinds of behavior. The focus upon high risk groups, upon homosexuals, upon intravenous drug users, upon hemophilia acts, enabled us to say I'm not a homosexual, therefore AIDS is not my problem, I'm not an intravenous drug user, therefore AIDS is not my problem, I'm not a hemophilia act and I don't move on that turf, therefore AIDS is not my problem but the reality is that it's not high risk groups that are the problem here. It is high risk behavior that is the problem and while you may not belong to a high risk group, you most certainly can become involved in high risk behavior because members of every group eventually moves into your life space and if you are dealing with the same people they are dealing with then you are engaging in high risk behavior if you don't take the necessary precautions to deal with that.

The fact that Magic Johnson was an athlete wasn't what woke us up. The fact that Magic Johnson is a superstar athlete and someone that we have all at one time or another had in our homes via the TV set and came to identify with as a cultural icon and hero means that we put him in a different perspective than we put Alan Wigan. Then we put Jackie Smith, then we put a number of athletes who have died of this horrible disease. So I think that it says something about us as a people, it says something about us as a society that a Magic Johnson contracting this disease did a great deal more in terms of waking us up than the almost 50,000 people combined. Athletes, non-athletes, blacks, whites, male, females, babies, old folks who have died of the disease up to this point. It speaks something about the place of athletics and athletics superstars in the lives and the life of this society and in the lives of black people in particular.

Do you believe that collegiate athletics and also professional athletics would address itself to the possibility of testing of athletes in close contact sports? Well, I think that they'll have to address it because there's a problem that it has to be dealt with now. The problem is out in the public and it's one that we are going to have to address as an institution and here I'm speaking of professional and collegiate athletics. How intelligently they will address it is another issue because there are a number of factors that you're dealing with here. You're dealing with first the image of the sports, you're dealing with secondly the politics of the situation. How does one characterize the problem as a problem of premiscuity, as a problem of homosexuality, how does one characterize politically the problem and then you're dealing with a health problem that could impact upon individuals' lives and then finally you're dealing with a business problem. How does an industry that is so diverse with so many different kinds of factors to consider go about dealing with what is essentially not a sports problem.

How does Notre Dame, a Catholic institution, deal with the fact that they set us for disease control and every other knowledgeable expert in this area says that condoms are probably the best way to deal with this infection safely if you are not going to commit to abstinence. How does Notre Dame deal with that? How do professional franchises such as the San Francisco 49ers and the Golden State Warriors who are owned by practicing Catholics deal with this situation? How do young black men deal with it who have grown up with the idea that somehow using condoms is emasculating that somehow detracts from and interferes with their expression of their masculinity? As one young athlete told me it's like taking a shower with your clothes on, it's like walking along the beach and galoshes. That's all well and good, but how do we deal with these cultural, political, social, individual kinds of problems?

So the issue becomes not whether the sports institution in America will now deal with this problem. They're compelled to deal with it at some level, but whether they will deal with it optimally, productively, and intelligently. Just for the record, I will say that I don't think that mandatory testing is a viable answer. A person could be tested and be negative this morning and depends upon what he does in the next couple of hours could be positive by lunchtime. Dr. Harrier with Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. If you have a question or comment regarding this program, write us. Remember views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or the University of Texas at Austin. I would like to thank Dr. Cleenington A Ford and Florida A&M University for their assistance in the production of this program. Until we have the opportunity again for In Black America's technical producer, David Alvarez, I'm John L. Hansen, Jr., please join us again next week.

Cassette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing In Black America cassettes, Longhorn Radio Network, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin Texas 78712. That's In Black America cassettes, Longhorn Radio Network, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin Texas 78712. From the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, this is the Longhorn Radio Network. I'm John L. Hansen, Jr., join me this week on in Black America. Indeed, the boys began to question the prevailing understanding of what was seen as monolithic segregation, as well as the strategist targeting its elimination,

root, branch, and seed.