So, let's turn out a race, and its role in America and American sports today. Some people now claim that America is actually now a post-racial society, and this is the idea that, yes, the U.S. had slavery and Jim Crow, and the rest, but then now, thanks to the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King and other changes, the color of your skin no longer matters in America. We've had a Black man, Barack Obama, as president, and everybody has the same opportunities. Now, I do think that we've made some important progress around race relations. But clearly we're not yet a post racial society either. There are more black or latino in this country, you're statistically more likely to grow up poor, to go to underfunded schools, to end up in lower paying jobs than white Americans. And in everyday life, too, racial fault lines also still shape our experience in all kinds of ways. Most Americans still make friends, and marry mostly within their particular racial or ethnic group. And the tendency, for complicated reasons I'd say, is still for people to go to music concerts, belong to clubs, to worship and generally, to hang out with people who look like themselves. So, race still does matter in the United States, and it still matters in American sports. And sometime it matters in very obvious ways. And one example might be the NFL, the great money machine, Leviathan, commercial entertainment complex of the American sporting scene. Well, as everybody knows, the majority of NFL players are African American now. But of the owners of NFL teams, there is not a single African American among them. They are all white. And so, what you have here is this kind of structure where the players who are literally putting their lives on the line to play this game that destroys bodies are predominantly African American, and the people who are controlling it and making these gigantic profits off of it are all white. And this is not to say I mean, black football players, football players in general make a lot of money and get some fame and glory. At least some of them do, so it's not as if, it's not exactly the old plantation system where you have white masters and powerless black slaves. But it still is a very racially structured hierarchical kind of arrangement where the owners and bosses are white. And the players, the ones doing the dirty work on the field are black. Another example of how race operates is in big time college sports, men's football and basketball which we're gonna talk about later in class. Now here, many of the players are African-American. They do get a full scholarship, but they're not paid anything. By contrast, most coaches are white. Not all, but the majority of them. And they earn in many cases millions of dollars a year. A definite kind of racial disparity. Now, one thing about race is that it also operates now in less public ways than it used to. People who are bigoted, and I do think this is a relatively small percentage of Americans, often won't express their views openly, now in the post-civil rights era. They're worried about getting into trouble, getting fired, creating enemies, people not liking them. But if you go into the dark underworld of the internet, people do use the cloak of anonymity to say whatever they want, and there the whole awful menu of racist language is still very much present. America's dark racial is still festering. I've actually written a whole book about Tiger Woods, the golf superstar. And one of the things that I found doing some research on the internet is just how much racial and racist junk you can find about Tiger posted anonymously on message boards and chat rooms over the years. So again, race does enter into American sports in all kinds of ways. So, just to conclude the lecture I want to leave you with one other of what I think is an important point. Namely that we need to understand America and sports as not just a story of black and white. I've been talking mainly about African American-white relationships as they've played themselves out in society and out on the athletic fields. But America is a multiracial country. Latinos are actually the biggest minority group in this country, not African Americans. And we need to take into consideration Native Americans, the first Native Americans. Asian Americans have become a gigantic presence in this country. I'm actually going to be talking about Asian Americans is sports, and Native Americans in sports a little bit farther along in the course. Maybe, I'll just say a few words now about Latinos in American sports history. Latinos have been present for many decades now, in this sporting tapestry of America. And so, you have these really gripping figures like Lee Trevino who rises from poverty and a dirt-floored house in Dallas to become the number one Golfer in the world, or a great female golfer, Nancy Lopez, out of Albuquerque, New Mexico. So, you had this Latino sporting history that sports scholars have written about, and you see in particular Latino presence in boxing and in baseball. And because of the relationship between the US and Latin America, and the fact of US influence, particularly in the Caribbean and in the northern part of South America, Venezuela in particular, American influence brings baseball there, and you get the development of baseball into a major sport in many of these Caribbean countries as we talked about earlier in the class. And yet, Latino baseball players, like African-Americans, are for a good part of the 20th century, denied the right to play at the highest level of baseball, to play in the American Major League. So, in the early 20th century, you have some Latino players, immigrants from Cuba in particular, making it into the major leagues, but only white Cubans. And, the pioneer boundary breaker in this case is a man named Orestes, his nickname is Minnie, Miñoso, a black cuban. And he in 1948, just a year after Jackie Robinson goes to play for the Cleveland Indians and becomes the first black Latino, to play for an American sports league. And for these black Latino players, they're facing a kind of double stigma. They're black people in a society where black people are often looked at as second class human beings, and they're also foreigners who don't speak English, who don't know the habits and the customs and who tend to be made fun of and looked down upon, certainly in the many of these kind of anti-foreign stereotypes where more, maybe they're still present but much more present in the mid-twentieth century. So, Miñoso breaks this barrier by becoming the first black Latino-American ball player and he's followed not so long after by Roberto Clemente, great figures in baseball history. A black Puerto Rican, who's a fantastic baseball player, wins most valuable player awards, and leads his team the Pittsburgh Pirates to the World Series, but is also a great humanitarian. And in fact in 1972, dies tragically, when he's personally bringing food and other supplies to starving victims of the survivors of a gigantic earthquake in Managua, Nicaragua. So, what we've seen across the course of this lecture is how race has mattered in American sports, how race is not just a matter of black and white. And I look forward to seeing you next time. [MUSIC]
