PROVIDENCE, R.I. — When you work in the field of sport and play, it’s easy — convenient even — to insulate yourself from disruptions outside the arena, especially during March Madness.
But in the last month, the disruptions have become too pronounced to ignore — particularly when it comes to efforts to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Sports — and the NCAA tournament in particular — may be the greatest pushback to the negativity surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion. Indeed, the sports industry runs on DEI. We’d be nowhere without it.
Inside the arena, thousands of fans set aside political and cultural differences to cheer for their team. Especially at the upper levels of competition, many players on these teams are athletes of color; a good many are African American men and women. That doesn’t stop the cheering in places like Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas — where the preponderance of Black players has become as common as sweet tea.
Outside of the arena, DEI has been demonized as part of an agenda that pedals the fiction that any African American with status has not earned his or her position. This is a particularly tough sell in the business of sport and play where merit reigns.
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Inside the arena, fans generally accept the proposition that these players have earned their way through attributes that money cannot buy: hard work, dedication, talent, skill and character. In many instances they have overcome injuries, setbacks and tough upbringings. Women athletes have overcome the notion that they cannot and should not compete. With the help of federal legislation, they compete on playing fields that become more level by the year.
I’m not naïve. I realize that there are a large number of fans who cheer for the school colors, not the human being inside the jersey. But even with that, there is a general acceptance that the majority of players earned their way and were not given anything except opportunity.
I’m also not oblivious to the battles that continue to take place within sports, where we have endeavored to make sure that the dominance of athletes of color on the court and on the field extends to coaching and the front office. It’s a battle, but a battle many executives inside of sport (except, perhaps in baseball) have been willing to fight.
Sports is an American institution and the greatest commercial for the efficacy of inclusion.
But sports has not always been welcoming. For decades, major college programs and sports leagues closed their doors to athletes of color, regardless of their talent and character. Over time, these pro and college programs came to understand that they could not successfully compete and grow without athletes of color.
The stories of this evolution formed the underpinning of an institution where talent, not color, ruled the day.
South Carolina players pose with the SEC Championship Trophy after their game against Kentucky at Colonial Life Arena on March 2 in Columbia, South Carolina.
Jacob Kupferman/Getty Images
After his team upset St. John’s on Saturday, Arkansas head coach John Calipari talked about the merit-based ethos of basketball that applies to every aspect of the industry. Calipari should know. At age 66, he has been part of the industry since 1982, beginning as an assistant then becoming a head coach at UMass, Memphis, Kentucky and now Arkansas. He has coached hundreds of African American athletes and helped many of them get to the pros. They, of course, have helped him.
“This sport is merit based,” Calipari told me on Saturday as he walked to the team bus. “I’m the same way with my coaches: you either add value to players or you’re not working for me —you’re Black, white, green. Doesn’t matter. I’ve had Dominican coaches, Black coaches, white coaches. They add to the players or I’m not bringing you here.
“This profession, this sport is merit based and whoever deserves to be where they are, you’re there.”
Many college programs, especially those in the South, learned that hard way that they could not compete nationally without talented African American athletes. The Southeastern Conference, of which Arkansas is a member, is Exhibit A for the power of DEI.
For decades, the conference based in the deep South adopted the segregated norms of the times and refused to recruit Black students and athletes. This may come as a surprise to young people who are not exposed to history, perhaps because the history has been scrubbed.
There were benchmarks along the way that led to change. In March 1963, the Mississippi State men’s basketball team took a bold step by going against segregation norms. Mississippi State was barred by custom from participating in tournaments which featured integrated teams. Nearly all white southern schools were locked in this segregated prison.
The university president and head basketball coach made the bold decision to defy custom and snuck the Mississippi State squad out of Starkville and up north to Lansing, Michigan, to compete against Loyola of Chicago. Mississippi State lost, and Loyola went on to win the national championship.
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Upon its return to Starkville, the team was not arrested but celebrated. The team had accomplished something heroic, and I can only imagine that the Mississippi State players were emboldened by knowing that they had played against the best.
Three years later, Texas Western — with an all-African American starting five — defeated Adolph Rupp’s all-white Kentucky team to win the national championship. Kentucky would be the last all-white team to compete for the national championship.
Four years later, Sept. 12, 1970, an integrated USC football team went into Legion Field in Birmingham, Alabama, to play Bear Bryant’s all-white team (Bryant’s first recruited Black player was in the stands). Alabama was soundly beaten, and the door was open to the conference becoming integrated.
Once these southern schools got religion, there was no turning back.
Today, the SEC — in good part on the strength of Black athletes — has become the nation’s premier sports conference. The SEC put a record 14 teams into the men’s NCAA basketball tournament. Ask former Alabama football coach Nick Saban how he feels about DEI. Saban, 73, won a national championship at LSU and six championships at Alabama.
Just about every SEC coach will say “Amen” to the power of DEI. Inclusion is not a luxury item, but a necessity.
Jackie Robinson, in military uniform, became the first African American to sign with a white professional baseball team in 1945. He signs a contract with the minor league club in Montreal, a farm team for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Bettmann
Sports often takes a back seat to the contentious swirl of world events. But there have been notable exceptions when sports have given shape and spine to our national identity.
Jack Johnson became the first Black heavyweight champion in 1908. His victory ignited race riots across the United States, because certain elements were overcome by fear of what an editorial in the New York Sun described as, “the Black man’s rise against White Supremacy.”
But when African American boxer Joe Louis defeated Germany’s Max Schmeling in 1938, he was proclaimed as a great American hero. Track star Jesse Owens’s performance at the 1936 Berlin Olympics did not stop Adolf Hitler, but his record-setting feats marked the first moral victory for the United States in the war against fascism.
Jackie Robinson desegregating Major League Baseball in 1947 became a major pillar of United States character — not the act itself but the slings and arrows he endured to achieve that historic moment. Muhammad Ali opposed the Vietnam War and refused to be inducted into the military. He gave up his boxing title in the process. By the end of his life, Ali had become a revered figure in the United States and internationally — so beloved, in fact, that the administration of President Donald Trump plans to have a statue of Ali in the White House.
Tommy Smith’s and John Carlos’s human rights protest at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics remains the iconic symbol of athletic protest. In 2020, members of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream helped elect Rev. Raphael Warnock to the U.S. Senate and topple Republican candidate and WNBA team owner Kelly Loeffler. Colin Kaepernick’s protest in the NFL sparked a worldwide movement and reminded athletes that they had a role to play in protest and resistance.
Will sports play a role in restoring some semblance of equilibrium in the coming months and years? Or will an industry where so many athletes of color defy anti-DEI narratives become targets?
At the Super Bowl, the NFL vowed to stand strong with diversity initiatives, but the league also agreed to remove “End Racism” from the endzone of its Super Bowl game. Last week, the Department of Defense deleted a story on its website highlighting Robinson’s military service as part of the administration’s initiative to purge references to DEI. Recognizing that this was a bridge too far, the story was quickly restored, albeit in the colorblind context that Robinson was an American hero.
Fine.
Scrubbing Robinson from American history is like scrubbing Nelson Mandela from South African history. Clearly, Mandela and Robinson operate on different planes of history, but the point is that when you take too big a chunk out of the national identity, you perform a cultural lobotomy that leaves a nation without memory.
Calipari mentioned on Saturday that the strength of his surprising Arkansas team was that it had overcome so much. He emphasized that knowing what it had overcame made the team stronger.
It’s important for a nation, an individual or a country to remember what has been overcome. Living without memory is a terrible existence.
William C. Rhoden is a columnist for Andscape and the author of Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete. He directs the Rhoden Fellows, a training program for aspiring journalists from HBCUs.
