[MUSIC] This time, I wanna open up the issue of race and the role of race in sports and the sports world. And I wanna start just by talking a little bit about the concept of race in itself, which is a really problematic concept to begin with. So, the reality is that we are one single species. Human beings are all of us children of Africa. The human species develops, begins to develop 7 or 8 million years ago in Africa. And eventually human beings leave Africa and migrate to other parts of the world. So, we comes from common ancestors. We share 99.9 % of the same DNA. Certainly there are minor differences. Cosmetic differences in our skin color. In how curly our hair is and minor issues of bone structure, but the fact is that we are one single species. But what race does is divides up, or imagines that one can divide the world up, into these biologically discrete entities called called races, black, white, Asian, Latin American, whatever system of racial classification you're using. The truth is that we are not biologically distinct groups at all. A lot of new genetic testing in the United States is showing that a lot of African Americans, a lot of black people, have genes, have ancestors from different parts of Europe, from different parts of the United States, that they're certainly not all of African blood. And the same is true for whites, that whites turn out to have blood and ancestry from all kinds of different countries, Italy, sometimes African American, African blood, Native American ancestry. We are much, much more mixed up than the idea of race and all of those neat, separate check boxes would suggest. Yet race, paradoxically, has this very powerful role in human history, and some race scholars speak of the so-called paradox of race. The paradox of race is the fact that race is an arbitrary, fictional concept at heart. And yet, it's based on the most superficial of characteristics. And it's based usually more than anything just on skin color. What could be more superficial than how much melatonin or whatever the pigment of your skin is? Yet these superficial differences between human beings become the basis for building these racial hierarchies and taxonomies and divisions that then, in turn, become the basis for slavery and war and hatred, and bigotry, and misunderstanding. This is the paradox of race. We are all one species, we have these very, literally cosmetic differences. And yet these cosmetic differences become metamorphized into these giant, socially organizing principles and forces. So, race is at once a fiction, an absurd fiction, but at the same time, a powerful reality that continues to structure society and our lives. So, let's now turn to race and its place in sports. And race, as it has in so many things around the world, has had a big part in shaping the contours and the trajectory of sports, past and present. And I wanna focus in particular in this lecture on race in the United States. And what we can do when we begin to think about this issue is follow the role and status of race relations and their influence in sports over historical trajectory going back 150 years or so. And we can begin with a period of so called reconstruction. This is the period roughly from 1870 to 1890, the Civil War has ended in America, and there's this odd window of change and of opportunity where blacks, newly freed slaves are given the right to vote. There are black congressmen and senators. And African-Americans are also now allowed into the sporting world. So, in the early professional leagues, you have black players, you have black jockeys in the Kentucky Derby. Well, this is a time of opening, of the promise of equality for Americans after the Civil War. This changes in roughly 1890 and the 1890's with the period of Jim Crow beginning. And Jim Crow in America last from roughly the 1890's to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's. Jim Crow is American apartheid. It's the systematic denial of legal rights, the right to vote, sometimes the right to go to certain schools, the right to drink from the same drinking fountain. It's the systematic denial of rights to African Americans that follows upon this moment of opportunity in Reconstruction. And as America enters this age of Jim Crow, sports changes too. And in particular, what happens is that black athletes are no longer allowed in the world of professional sports and in the higher levels of college sports. So, in that whole period, from 1890's to the late 1940's, you have no blacks allowed in Major League Baseball or in professional football, the NFL, or the other important American sporting endeavors. So, this is an American apartheid that carries over into this racially based exclusion in sports. Now, what happens in this period? One of things that happens is that blacks, because they are denied the opportunity to participate in the mainstream professional leagues, form leagues of their own. And the most famous example of this is the so-called Negro Baseball League, with great stars like Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson. And so these are leagues where black baseball players, cuz they can't get into the Major Leagues, aren't allowed there, play. And they don't have the money, they don't pay the salaries, the stadiums aren't as good as the Major Leagues, but they're vibrant centers of sporting activity. You also have a black golf league, this is lesser known, the United Golf Association, because blacks are not allowed on the PGA Tour, the main American golf tour either. So blacks, but also Jews, faced certain kinds of exclusions, the antisemitism during this mid-20th century, early 20th century period. And so they too are sometimes shut out of certain sports arenas and decide to do it for themselves. And an example is with golf country clubs. A lot of the major, most prestigious American golf country clubs do not allow Jews to become members. There's this bastions of Anglo wasp supremacy. So in some cases, Jews begin to form country clubs where they can play golf of their own. For example, the famous Hillcrest Country Club in Los Angeles where Groucho Marx and other celebrities become members. So, you have in the era of Jim Crow these alternatives being developed by groups that are excluded. You also have, in this age of Jim Crow, what I like to call the racial bargain. And the racial bargain is not something that's written down or signed on paper, it's an unspoken agreement. And it's a kind of agreement between mainstream white America and a select number of black start athletes. The most famous examples are Jesse Owens, the great Olympic athlete and Joel Lewis the fantastic heavy weight champion, the brown bomber. Such a powerful presence in American culture in the 1940's. And Owens and Lewis both make this kind of racial bargain. And the racial bargain goes like this. America agrees, white America, to embrace, and idolize, and adore these great African American athletes, Owens and Lewis being the best example. And in turn, as their part of the bargain, that Owens and Lewis are expected not to point the finger at white America and say hey, great that you love me but my people are not allowed to vote. My people are not allowed to eat at the same restaurants or drink from the same drinking fountains as white Americans. In the racial bargain, the black athlete is expected to stay quiet. Not to speak out about these hot button issues. Not to recriminate. Not to point the finger at white America. So, you do have this racial bargain happening during this period. So, the Jim Crow period begins to crack apart in the late 1940's, 1950's, into the 1960's. And you get this third age in sports and race relations in America. And this is the Civil Rights era, the Civil Rights moment. And Jackie Robinson, of course, the baseball player, is the great civil rights pioneer. He breaks the color barrier in 1947, by beginning to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team and other great black baseball players enter into the major leagues. And gradually, in that period, just as the Civil Rights movement is happening with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, you see the old color lines begin to fall in sports as well. Golf is actually one of the last sports to integrate. In 1963 they get rid of their Caucasians only clause. But by the late 1960's, African Americans are all allowed into the major American sports. And you see as well, in the 1960's and 1970's, the development of these activist, often African American athletes, who are speaking up about Issues of poverty and racism. So, what we've seen so far in the first part of this lecture is the way that race and race relations in America are paralleled and intertwined with what's going on on the playing field. What we'll look at in the second part of this lecture is the status of race and race relations in America and American sports, now. [MUSIC]
