In Black America; Dr. Harry Edwards, Part 2

music From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is In Black America. From a demographic and technological perspective, this crisis 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. 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 focused on the relationship between American sports and society and their effects on racial equality. In 1968, most college sports programs were really white. Today, the presence of African American athletes is commonplace, but a recent NC2A survey showed 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% of African Americans graduated compared with 52.2% of whites. In that survey, African American comprised only 7% of all college students, while African American athletes made up 56% of college basketball and 37% of college football teams. Some say the African American society is a co-conspirator in this, it peddles its kids to the

highest bidder. I'm Johnny O'Hanston, Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America. This week, sports, academics, and the black male with Dr. Harry Edwards Part 2 in Black America. 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. Dr. Harry Edwards is considered an expert on racial, political, and economic issues of sports, 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, Dr. Edwards is the professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley and a consultant on racial affairs to Major League Baseball, the San Francisco 49ers, and

the Golden State Warriors of the National Basketball Association. 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. We conclude our conversation with Dr. Edwards at the 7th National Higher Education Conference on Black Student Retention in Las Vegas. Are we going to test every single day, are we going to test on demand, how are we going to test, and suppose, are we going to just test at the beginning of the season? Does a test in August and the National Football League guarantee that a person is going to be negative in November? Are we going to test during the playoffs and the Super Bowl? How are we just going to test the superstar? So testing is really not the answer. I think that education, I think that the practice, pushing the practice of safe sex, pushing the morality that is underlaid by the practical tradition of monogamous relationships, I think

that all of those things are going to have to be part of any resolution of this situation or the sports institution in this country. I don't think that we're going to test everybody is the answer. In fact, I think that that's nonsense. It's counterproductive. It'll give a false sense of security. We're at a conference addressing the male crisis in African America. How will our African American sisters play into addressing the crisis of the black male? I think that women are going to be a key to the future advancement of blacks in general, the black male and black families, black businesses, black institutions in general. I think that the circumstances of the black male practically dictate this. We have a situation where if recent studies are accurate by the year 2000, if contemporary conditions prevail, over 70% of black adult males will either be dead in jail or otherwise

institutionalized or hopelessly strung out on drugs and alcohol. When you combine that with the fact that those blacks who do have skills, who do have competencies, very quickly move into and onto the periphery of white institutions, the grassroots kinds of leadership that we're going to have to have to meet some of these challenges are going to of necessity fall to the ranks of women. Women are going to have to provide a great deal of that leadership and therefore we will advance exactly and precisely to the extent that black society really begins to deal with some of its sexism. We can no longer presume that the resolution of problems of racist discrimination are sufficient for us to advance as a society. We must now begin to make sure that we're at the forefront of the battle against sexism and under circumstances where black women are going to be thrust into major leadership

roles. We are going to have to deal with the fact that 69 cents on the dollar that a woman makes to a man doing a comparable job is not tolerable. It's no longer tolerable as an institutionalized sexist practice in American society because it er it erodes and er degrades not just women it becomes a particular hindrance to us who increasingly are going to be dependent upon black female leadership direction, involvement, entrepreneurship and so forth in our own collective advancement struggles. How can we as a community take back our neighborhoods, some crime, drugs, the proliferation of athletes being taken out of our community, dumped at these colleges and universities and coming back to following year and doing the same thing all over again? Well I think that a great deal of it has to do with black leadership.

I think unfortunately we're in a set of circumstances in American society that I can only characterize as a bankruptcy of major black leadership and that as long as that is the case and black leaders are not speaking directly to the issues and concerns that we must be involved with as a community on an ongoing basis and organizing around those concerns that the situation is going to stay pretty much as it is. I think that we must begin to develop new leadership. I think that we must begin to excise that is to discard some established leadership that essentially has led us into box canyons, into irrelevances and nightmares projected as dreams. We must begin to develop the institutions of the black community, begin to whole black leadership accountable, begin to move in a direction organizationally that puts a greater responsibility and a greater accountability upon the community itself. Many black leaders are reluctant to tell black people this because they get greater applause, they get greater support, they get greater fanfare when they point to white people, to

the Bush administration, to the Reagan administration, to all of the things that are deficient and effective in our relationships with white America. What we must do is begin to develop our own capabilities, develop our own institutions. This is not to turn our back on integration. This is not to let white folks off the hook. It is to recognize that whether they are on the hook or not, we are still going hungry. We are still unemployed and disproportionately high numbers. We are still living in crime infested and drug infested and vice infested communities. We must begin to develop those capacities that we have within the context of our own resource and leadership capabilities until we do that. Not only are we going to continue to be victimized by whites, but we're going to be victimized by whites in ways that we need not be victimized.

One of the reasons that we continue to put so much pressure on the government for social programs is the burgeoning illegitimacy and crime rate in our communities. We can't get any businesses to come into our communities. We can't deal with the birth rate in terms of social services. We are now at a point where we have 32 and 34-year-old grandmothers in our communities. We must begin to deal with those aspects of our own situation that we and we alone are capable and competent to deal with, and a lot of that has to do with raising up new black leadership. And again, I am convinced that a substantial proportion of that leadership, the cutting edge of that leadership, is going to be provided by black women. So we must deal with the sexism in our community and begin to make way for that leadership that is going to provide the direction of thrust and advancement capabilities for black

people as we enter the 21st century. While many in black America presumed and hoped that integration at its outset would be two-way and mass-oriented, it has, in fact, been almost exclusively one-way an individual in focus, rather than African Americans and whites moving through reciprocity collectively along a two-way street between black and white societies and black and white institutions. It has been, instead, African American individuals abandoning black society to move into and onto the periphery of white society and white institutions. It has become commonplace for upwardly mobile blacks to move up and out of the black community. It is synonymous with success and making it to move out of the black community. We are the only people in this society who seeks to abandon its community as evidence of abandon its institutions of evidence of advancement.

Global mobility has come to replace in our man in a semblance of a viable concept of collective advancement. By key, typically higher-class, better educated, and capable people, there has emerged a marked relationship between the success and extent of radical integration and the institutional, physical, and spiritual deterioration of the black community. There's more and more members of the African American middle class escaped the black community, thereby depriving that community of their skills, their leadership, and most of all their mentorship and their success models in business, the professions and in their lifestyles, the black community, its culture, and its institutions first faltered, then physically deteriorated, and finally were overtaken by the moral bankruptcy and spiritual despair and institutional incapacity that paved the way for burgeoning problems in crime, drug addiction, and illegitimacy.

On almost an institution by institution basis, we can see the impact of forces at least in part abetted by the march of radical integrationism. In short, we suffered some tremendous losses on the way to the revolution. Black businesses were destroyed. It is all, if it's all black, or predominantly black, even many black people presumed to be the business to be inferior. Even in our social lives, when we get ready to go out, if we're just going to go out and hang out, we'll go by the black business, we'll go by the black restaurant, we'll go by the black nightclub, but when we really get ready to go out, when it's something really big, we find ourselves up in some white hotel. We find ourselves up in some white restaurant. We find ourselves up in some situation that is really, quote, big time. If it is black or predominantly black, it is de facto deemed to be inferior.

Even when something goes wrong, we are more likely to go back to the white business than we are the black business. I don't care how many white boys burn up our pants, shrink our sweaters, mess up our transmission and our cars. We'll turn right around and go to another white boy, but once a black person shrinks the sweater or messes up the car, all too often it comes to mind, see, I told you, don't take your car to that boot. Don't take your sweater to that blood. You don't know what he's doing. That is a plantation type of mentality that is still all too frequent amongst black film industry. We destroyed a black film industry in pursuit of integration. In order to see Pearl Bailey, I had to go and see her after integration as Darce Day's maid. In order to go to see Sydney Portia, I had to see him in some role that didn't make a lot of sense. You remember a guest who's coming to dinner? Here is a black man, PhD and MD, Nobel Prize laureate.

And they're worried about him coming to dinner. And I happen to see it in a theater movie, in an integrated theater, and a whole bunch of white folks sitting on the edge of that seat, wondering if Spencer Tracing and Katherine help burn were going to really allow their daughter to get engaged to this Negro, and I was sitting on the edge of my seat too because I was waiting on them to tell me, what is this black PhD Nobel Prize laureate MD doing out in the house with this white dress? I couldn't figure out why they would sell that to us. But we bought it, that sold, that went over. That went over. What was he doing off in there? But that was part of the sacrifice. That was part of the sacrifice. If it's black, I don't care how low the whites are, then it has to be on the same level. Because the issue becomes, what does she race overtakes all?

We destroyed a black fair ministry. We destroyed a black sports industry. We looked at it and applauded it. That's how sick we had become. We applauded it. Branch Ricky is perceived as a hero in the black community. Branch Ricky held black baseball organizations in total contempt. He said there are nothing but vestiges of a numbers racket. They're run by numbers runners, by racketeers. And so he felt nothing about going into the Negro Leaks, taking out the best players. And of course, between 1946 and 1956, the Negro Leaks disappeared. Because as he went in and took out the best players, the people want to see the best players. So even black people quit going to see the Negro League teams.

And when he went in, Justice Hollywood did, they didn't take the black riders or the black directors or the black producers. They just took the black actors. In baseball, they just took out Hank Aaron. They just took out Jackie Robinson. They just took out Roy Campanella. And then Larry Dobie. That's right. Got some witnesses out here. He probably saw some of them games. And then the Negro Leaks collapsed, and we applauded it. They didn't do that when the National Football League integrated with the American Football League. They didn't go into our Davis's operation in Oakland and take out Daryl Emonica and take out Hugh Adixson and take out Archelle. They didn't do that, Archelle. They brought in the whole Raiders organization. And so now you have the American Football Conference, which is nothing but the old American League and their trading players and trading coaches back and forth, and general managers and so forth. They went in and took the best black athletes, the Negro Leaks collapsed. And so here we are, almost 50 years later, still trying to get a black manager, still

trying to get a black on, still trying to get a black GM, the first black GM in Major League Baseball. And we applauded the destruction of our own sports institution. And as they brought in the black athletes and the Negro Leaks collapsed. And football and basketball followed suit along the same trail. They didn't bring in the black sports riders. So in order to get an interpretation of what's going on, we want them to read the White Press. We don't get stuff that's interpreted in sports from our cultural perspective. So for generations of athletes, we thought that, hey, sports was what's going on. If the black man can make it, the black man is going to make it through sports because that was the white interpretation. They didn't tell us that they were exploiting our kids. They didn't tell us that they were ripping off our kids. It wasn't until 1968, and the revolt of the black athlete, that white folks, and then they questioned, what's wrong with those Negroes, they're out there in sports, what more do they want?

They're out there playing. That was a result of shutting out the black press. And to this day, the most segregated corner of the sports realm is not the front office. It's the press box. And while they point to O.J. Simpson and Bill Russell and our mind were shodd, and so far looking what they're doing to you, these are literally color commentators. And on top of it, most of them, on top of it, most of them have a substantial athletic background, whereas Brent Musberg has high smontrophy, whereas Dick Inberg's all pro-ranking. How come we can't get in the same way they got in? By misinterpreting what teams are playing on the field, and who's at bat? We destroyed an institution, and pursued at a promise of integration, in a pluralistic

society, where no group stepped forward and said, black folks, you can come in and join us. You can be ahead of our lodges. You can head our political organizations, or hurt to you will be a hurt to me. And when I get ready to bat his team, you can be my G.M.A.L., you can be my partner, because I'm going to help financials and bring you in. Not one group stepped forward and said that, and we're out there pursuing some invisible carrot at the end of a stick, and we wonder why we wind up going over the edge of the cliff. We destroyed our institutions, black schools, the same thing. We destroyed our elementary and secondary schools. They were abandoned or eroded relative to their institutional integrity, because we bought a definition that if it wasn't integrated, it wasn't school. It was somehow inferior.

It wasn't right. And so everybody who could integrate did integrate. If we couldn't move, we bust them out to the suburbs. Whatever they learned out there, they forgot on the bus on the way back. And we wonder why we are in worse shape educationally today than we were before Brown versus Board of Education Topeka. We were undereducated, perhaps prior to Brown. Although I think even that has yet to be proven. We were miseducated, acknowledged, miseducated in integrated schools, because the teachers didn't understand the communities, didn't understand the minds that didn't understand the culture, and didn't like the kids. Today, even in many of our predominantly in all black schools, our kids are diseducated. They've been turned off from education.

And how did that happen? Because the basic presumption was that if it wasn't integrated, it couldn't be an education going on. And when we have teachers in schools, black schools are predominantly black schools with black teachers, black principals, oftentimes black school boards. And our kids were not learning, we said the problem was segregation, not enough money, so forth, and so on. And after period of time, our kids began to pick up that they weren't expected to learn in this environment. Some of your other duties and responsibilities find questions with the San Francisco 49ers. Our professional athletes, and not particularly the 49ers, understand that the career they're in presently is a short career in their life after the National Football League. It's a very difficult thing for young people to realize and visualize the extent of their own mortality, whether it be occupational or physical or whatever.

And the professional athlete in particular, who is trained to think of himself as ubiquitous, invulnerable, invincible, believes that at a very basic kind of level that he is always going to be on top in making this money. He goes out and plays football and somebody pays him a million dollars. He goes out and plays basketball and somebody pays him two and a half million dollars. And he's always in a situation where his athletic ability and that whole aura of invincibility and invulnerability permeates all of his other relationships and his visions of reality. All of his friends, in one way or another, he met through or is somehow involved with through athletics. All of his self-identity, his self-esteem is somehow involved with athletics. And so it's easy to believe as person after person bows from the ankle and begs for his

autograph and so forth, that this is going to go on forever. I mean, as good as this is, as young as I am, as strong as I am, as virile as I am, as potent as I am, how could this ever end? So it's a very, very difficult thing to look a young man in the face, who is 22, 23 years old, making $750,000 a year, single, living in a $350,000 condo, driving an $80,000 automobile with a six-year contract, and he's in the second year of this, it's very difficult for him to believe that it's ever going to end. A six-year, six years is a third, almost, is a quarter, almost a third of the time that he's been alive. So six years is a long time. That's forever. It's never going to end. And all of a sudden, he gets an injury. Or he even goes through the six years and at the end of that six years, nobody wants to pay him that money anymore.

And now he's 28 years old, he's 29 years old, probably with another 40 years in front of him, and no degree, no competencies, no skills, and nobody else on the face of this earth who's going to pay him not a million dollars or $750,000, a single dam to run a football or to catch a football or to dribble a basketball. And he's out on the street wondering what happened. It's that old salt. And there are three kinds of people in the world, and I tell the athletes at the 49ers on the Golden State Warriors this all the time, three kinds of people in the world, those who make things happen in their lives, prepare themselves, move on, advance, those who watch things happen, and then those who wonder what happened. And this, unfortunately, is the plight of the majority of professional black athletes. Over 90 percent have absolutely no post-career occupational preparation of plans. Final comments, Dr. Edwards. I've probably said too much already, but in any event, I hope that your listeners find it a valuable conversation.

Dr. Harry Edwards, 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. Kanito 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 Cliff Hargrove, I'm John L. Hansen Jr. Please join us again next week. Cousette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing In Black America Cousettes. Longhorn Radio Network. 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, DuBois 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. This academics and the Black male with Dr. Harrier with Part 2 this week on in Black America.