Here is the flier that set emotions aflame at Mary Washington University, according to anonymous comments on my previous post on this topic, “More Racism on Campus. What Am I Missing Here?”
The photograph captures a moment after the 2000 Michigan State University basketball team, showing a jubilant coach Tom Izzo embracing an emotional Mateen Cleaves after winning the NCAA championship. Cleaves was named Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four for his brilliant play. (I know nothing of such matters. If anyone has better information, please correct me.)
The photograph appears to be undoctored. (You can see a copy of it here on the viewimages.com website. And you can view a video here, the final scene of which shows Izzo and a crying Cleaves from a different angle.) Therefore, there shouldn’t be anything offensive or intolerant about the photograph itself. The outcry at Mary Washington, then, must have stemmed from the words used in conjunction with the photograph. What, then, do the words mean?
I interpret the words as drawing an analogy between college/professional sports and the institution of slavery. In the context of the photograph, “Slavery Reinstated” clearly suggests that the institution of slavery has been put back into effect in big money sports. The meaning of “Catch yourself a strong one” is more opaque. By a “strong one,” the author might be referring to a strong athlete/slave. By “catch,” the author might be referring to the act of enslavement.
While equating highly honored and compensated black athletes with slaves seems a stretch to me, politically “progressive” writers have made that very argument. In his book “Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete,” New York Times sports columnist William Rhoden “offers a charged assessment of the state of black athletes in America, using the pervasive metaphor of the plantation to describe a modern sports industry defined by white ownership and black labor,” according to Publishers Weekly.
Likewise, in “The Slave Side of Sunday,” former NFL player Anthony Prior examines the legacy of racism in professional sports. “We are not looked at as leaders, rather, just a labor force where the money is generated,” he writes. “Plantation capitalism is still alive today.”
So, once again, I raise the question, “Where’s the racism? Where’s the intolerance?” The white student who posted the flier appeared to be making a political statement — expressing a “progressive” political sensitivity that has been converted into books by major publishers, has been reviewed in the Mainstream Media and reflects the views of a number of African-Americans.
Am I missing something here?