Racism in the Sports World

The problem of racism is not specifically an American problem, though Americans have made it into an important political and social issue as they have tried to find a way to eliminate racism from their society. Racism occurs whenever there is a dominant racial group that uses its position to discriminate against a minority racial group on the basis of racial characteristics. Traditionally, discrimination has been seen as a creature of prejudice, and until the late 1960s the dominant perspective among social science analysts of discrimination was that prejudice and intolerance were the causes of discriminatory actions. Other observers have focused on individual racists and have seen the problem as the individual motivated by hatred of a given "outgroup." Still others consider the issue in terms of patterns of segregation and community practices (Feagin and Feagin, 1986, 1). Certain areas of American life are seen as transcending racism, and sports has been one of these. While it is true that the admission of blacks to the ranks of college and professional sports was slow in coming, it is also clear from an examination of college and professional teams today that blacks and whites coexist and work together on teams in nearly every sport. Yet, a closer examination shows that racism has not been eliminated from the sports world any more than it has from American life in general, and racist attitudes and discriminatory behavior emerges in various ways among pl

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rities in off-the-field positions. Jackson's Rainbow Commission for Fairness in Athletics had also targeted other sports leagues for the same failure (Dodd, 1993, 3). Civil rights leaders have become more concerned about the disparity between the number of blacks playing sports and the far smaller number employed in coaching and front-office jobs. These civil rights leaders can point to the number of qualified blacks, former players and otherwise, who are routinely passed over in favor of whites for positions as head coach or manager. Baseball is the sport that has made the greatest progress in hiring blacks for such positions, and 31 percent of baseball players are members of minorities, while 21 percent of managers are members of minorities. The NFL is a different story, for there 64 percent of the players are black while only 7 percent of the head coaches are. The disparity is even greater in the NBA where 75 percent of the players are minorities and only 11 percent of the coaches. The situation is similar in college sports. In Division I basketball, 60 percent of the players are black and only 19 percent of the head coaches. In Division I-A football, 40 percent of the players and black, while there were no black hea

Category: Psychology - R