Author Casts Black Sports Stars as Powerless Serfs

Crisis, The, Jul/Aug 2006 by Wellington, Darryl Lorenzo

Author Casts Black Sports Stars as Powerless Serfs Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete By William C. Rhoden (Crown, $23.95)

Two propositions.

(1.) Athletes are athletes. They are yood at what they do, but they aren't and don't have the backgrounds to be civic leaders, social commentators, or politicians. They run, jump, catch balls and cross finish lines. However, they aren't qualified to offer the world their opinions on affirmative action, racial justice or the Iraq war.

(2.) Athletes are public figures and, whether they like it or not, they acquire responsibility with the influence that celebrity breeds. Black athletes in particular carry the weight of the race on their shoulders. Black athletes can and should leverage their fame for the good of the Black community.

William C. Rhoden doesn't hedge about which side of the fence he stands on. Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete is a critical, sometimes blistering look at the ethics of today's Black athletes. While fans wear blinders, Rhoden, a sports columnist for The New York Times, sits in the front row and doesn't like what he sees. Is he right when he depicts America's best loved Black sports heroes as confused adolescents, caught in a vicious circle of success at the price of dignity, lost in a culture of bling bling?

At the very beginning of the book, the paradoxical title "Forty Million Dollar Slaves" is questioned by Robert L. Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television and now owner of the Charlotte Bobcats basketball team.

"I'm not quite sure making $12 million a year playing 82 basketball games is called a plantation. If it is, I know a whole lot of folks who want to be on that plantation," says Johnson, whom Rhoden calls a friend.

Rhoden's justification is that the high profile of Black athletes masks an appalling lack of color elsewhere - the scarcity of Black coaches, Black management and the rarity of a Black owner in professional football, basketball and baseball. Black players are now the majority in the NBA and the NFL. Though Black arms and legs provide the muscle, the author contends, look twice and you'll see how few Blacks have real power in the corporate world of sports.

Forty Million Dollar Slaves isn't arguing that the exploitation of Black athletes is a new phenomenon; what's new is the (false) impression that things have changed. For most of the 20th century, Black athletes realized they were sensitive, racial symbols. Today, the young athletes literally don't see that they're being exploited.

Rhoden devotes some chapters to the sports world today and others to a history of Black athletes in America. In the latter, he expresses admiration for the Black jockeys of the late 19th century, former slaves who dominated the field of horse racing, early 20th century boxing champion Jack Johnson and the late tennis star Arthur Ashe.

His unsung hero is Arthur "Rube" Foster, the founder of the Negro National League. Foster was a brilliant entrepreneur who fought segregation by creating, in 1920, a baseball league in which Black players were nurtured and respected. What's often misunderstood, Rhoden notes, is that Foster never fulfilled his dream.

"Rube Foster came out of a political ideology of building strong black-controlled economic, political and social institutions ...His ultimate goal...was to integrate an entire black-owned team into Major League Baseball." Instead, beginning with Jackie Robinson in 1947, the Major Leagues signed selected star Negro League players. Talent was appropriated - but neither control, nor executive authority, was shared.

That paradigm is duplicated today, Rhoden argues, by a system that blinds Black youth with the dazzle of sports celebrity, grabs a few of them right out of high school, separates them from parents and friends, coddles them. It makes them so dependent on the system that, like the great Michael Jordan - "god, deity, his Airness" - they never feel empowered to speak on social issues, even within the sports world. When they're told it's time to go, they quietly go away.

Rhoden's blunt, no holds-barred style may be painful for some readers - some may squirm as he portrays their favorite sports stars as powerless serfs. But when he argues that the road to real power is in forming an association of professional African American athletes, you may scratch your head and wonder, why not?

Darryl Lorenzo Wellington is a freelance writer in Charleston, S.C.