Black Athletes Not Taught To Put Education First
It’s a funny thing about chickens; they eventually come home to roost. Liberals in the educational system have bludgeoned schools into race-based affirmative action and the unjust application of same under the guise of “diversity.” Diversity, these liberals would have us believe, makes the college campus more representative of our culture, and it allows for a divergence of ideas. And as we have witnessed the last decades, they are willing to violate and discriminate to whatever lengths necessary to ensure they have black faces on campuses. The empirical evidence, however, paints another picture. The black students do not interact with whites on campus as other students do. They instead form a new level of apartheid by self-segregating. Wherever you look, blacks on campus are cloistered together with few white faces to be seen.
The problem is that not only is race-based (and gender-based), affirmative action under the guise of diversity a vile heterodoxy of racial/gender discrimination, but it also guarantees that black students who are not prepared educationally to compete and interact at the elite levels of academia will deprive qualified students who aren’t black admittance based solely on color of skin. This is particularly indicative of the majority of black athletes.
Blacks who would go apoplectic and cry racism from every corner if scholarships weren’t passed out like candy to every black wannabe athlete barely able to speak English at an intelligible level and even less able to read, write, and do complex mathematical calculations (albeit one would think they would have a leg up with Xs and Os because of seeing them diagrammed in playbooks). The ugly truth is that the majority of these blacks do not go to college to get an education. They go to play sports. And if it weren’t for sports they would be hard pressed to get on campuses as grounds keepers because of their criminal backgrounds.
[adsanity id=8405 align=alignleft /]The majority of white athletes are there to receive an education and play sports. University of California Berkley has been in the news recently because of the abysmal rates of black athletes not graduating. But the following statistics prove my point.Ann Killion and Nanette Asimov writing for the San Francisco Chronicle found that: “Just 4 in 10 black male athletes on average earn a degree from Cal within six years of starting school, compared with 7 in 10 white male athletes, according to the NCAA, which released graduation rates of students who entered college between 1998 and 2006.” They opined, that “black male athletes at Cal have far more trouble finishing school than their white counterparts.” (Cal Graduation Rates Divided Along Racial Lines; 11/26/13)
Harry Edwards, the militant professor liberal whites love to suck up to, called the findings “Scandalous.” And for once I agree with him, but not for the reasons he would appreciate. Blacks cannot have it both ways. The majority of these black athletes should never have been given a scholarship. And I can tell you that there is a division one school that devised a creative program to provide scholarships to essentially ensure that every one of the black athletes they wanted would be enrolled. And they were told not to worry about SAT scores. I know this first hand because they reached out to our son. Suffice it to say we refused the offer. Other scholarship and recruiting offers to our son were based on his superior academics earned from above average, private Christian schools (not some promote the children to get rid of them public school) and his being an accomplished classical clarinetist.
The injustice isn’t that the black students aren’t graduating from Cal Berkley and other big name schools; it’s that many of them aren’t qualified academically to be there to start with. Their entire lives have been spent learning to punt, pass, shoot, jump, tackle, and block. Science, chemistry, Shakespeare, Mozart, foreign languages, and like educational pursuits were not part of their lives. They have been told how great they are and fawned over for their supposed athletic prowess, not for their ability to discuss Pythagorean theorem. They can make triple doubles in basketball and rush for 200 yards in football, but the chances of them having read Harper Lee is remote, and the only Browning they’ve heard of comes with a thirteen-shot clip.
But as I said, Edwards et al. aren’t interested in resolving the problem. They’re interested in finding someone to blame. Which will translate into more money in their pockets. Many of the black players literally step off a police blotter to attend college because they are a better athlete than the next guy. But it takes more than that.
I would bet one of my best, vintage cigars that they won’t strengthen the academic standards that would ensure students attending these schools graduate. Like the Cincinnati, Ohio fire and police departments, they will find a way to lower test results so as to continue on the same course but with manipulated outcomes. The end result will be black athletes graduating elite educational institutions with degrees in Pan-Africanism. Which will ensure they are unemployable with a degree.
There is also the problem with crime of every description. A classic example is Jameis Winston the Heisman candidate from Florida State University who, for the time being, has dodged a sexual assault complaint against him. Guns, drugs, fights, sexual complaints, and theft are not the academic standards that schools should allow in their scholarship candidates. But schools want to win games which means looking the other way or ignoring behavioral problems and poor academic ability in order to do so. Both the athlete and the schools are at fault. What the athletes do not realize at present is that they are about to be violated and used in a whole other way.
The bottom line is that the black athletes referenced are not at Cal to graduate; they are there to win championships with the chance of making it to the professional leagues dangling over their heads like a carrot. Which invariably means that those who do make it to the pros will be broke within two-three years after retiring or leaving the game due to injury. But those are factual numbers to discuss another day.
As I’ve indicated, the chickens of the racialists have come home to roost. But in the face of overwhelming evidence that race-based, affirmative action adversely, affects more blacks specifically than it helps the evidence is dismissed. While liberals and their “you owe me” black sycophants are loathe to admit the laws of unintended consequences are unforgiving.
The only way to resolve this situation is to adhere to stricter academic guidelines and disciplines, not to lower the academic guidelines and excuse aberrant anti-social behavior with the subtle racism of lowered expectations. Which ostensibly dictates it’s okay for blacks to be improper and common because, after all, they’re black. We need look no further than the White House for proof of that fact.
As I’ve written before quoting George Kelly from his book on Personal Construct Theory, “Psychological disorder is any personal construction which is used repeatedly in spite of consistent invalidation” i.e., repeating the same thing failure after failure is a psychological disorder. But don’t tell liberals and racialists like Edwards that because they’ll call you a racist.[adsanity id=8403 align=alignleft /]
About the Author
Mychal Massie
Mychal S. Massie is an ordained minister who spent 13 years in full-time Christian Ministry. Today he serves as founder and Chairman of the Racial Policy Center (RPC), a think tank he officially founded in September 2015. RPC advocates for a colorblind society. He was founder and president of the non-profit “In His Name Ministries.” He is the former National Chairman of a conservative Capitol Hill think tank; and a former member of the think tank National Center for Public Policy Research. Read entire bio here