Why paying college athletes is a racial justice issue

Newly reported data adds weight to an idea that has always seemed to be the case: That opposition to paying college athletes is rooted in racism or racial bias. Researchers at California State University at Long Beach and University of Massachusetts at Amherst conducted and analyzed a survey that indicates that’s the number one predicting factor of whether a person supports paying players or not. The Washington Post reports:

According to NCAA data from 2014, blacks constitute the majority of players in college football and basketball, the two sports that most people think of when they think of college athletics. Given this reality, it would be strange if questions about paying college athletes did not conjure up images of young black men in the minds of survey respondents.

To find out whether racial prejudice influences white opinion on paying college athletes, we conducted a survey of opinions on “pay for play” policies using the 2014 [Cooperative Congressional Election Study].

In a statistical analysis that controlled for a host of other influences, we found this: Negative racial views about blacks were the single most important predictor of white opposition to paying college athletes.

The more negatively a white respondent felt about blacks, the more they opposed paying college athletes.

For clarification, according to the NCAA data for 2014-15, black athletes are the plurality across all college basketball players and the plurality of all Division I college football players. The disparity is even sharper for the basketball and football cash cows. Black athletes make up absolute majorities among football and basketball in the vaunted football powerhouse Southeastern Conference and in the basketball powerhouse Atlantic Coast Conference, as well as the Big 12 Conference. Of the five highest-earning sports conferences in the NCAA, only two, the Big Ten and the Pac-12, do not have absolute majorities of black players in football and basketball, but still maintain proportions much higher than the general population. These five conferences made over $300 million last year, most (or all) of which came from football and basketball.

So where the rubber meets the road, the idea of paying college players and the associated (and utterly bullshit) concept of amateurism are racial issues, especially when the general atmosphere of higher education and the opportunities involved are considered. And it makes sense that caught up in all of this is the idea of control, and the sense of ownership that fans feel over players.