Nearly as insidous and nefarious as the Prison Industrial Complex is the National Collegiate Athletic Association, otherwise known to the world as the NCAA.
It is the institution that claims to the world that it is a pillar of moral and educational righteousness, when it is actually the naked purveyors of the finest strain of capitalism and exploitation known in America. Every March, these rapacious, money-grubbing parasites rake in tens of millions of dollars into their coffers, yet they graduate fewer African American males — who sweat and labor for free to make them their money — than ever.
Worse, according to the Institute of Diversity and Ethics in Sports, “the graduation gap between white and black playes has widened this year for the teams that are participating in March Madness.”
In the latest year available for analysis, the NCAA tournament teams are graduating more than 70 percent of their white players, up from 33 percent last year. Yet the alarming statistics remain tragically the same for African American players, where only “20 out of the 65 teams [are] graduating 70 percent of their black athletes.”
This means that many of the people holding up liquor stores, breaking into houses and committing senseless violent crimes are former star athletes who didn’t make it to the NBA. They are devoid of the education and life and job skills as well as humanity or any sense of perspective after living on top of the world and then being callously discarded into destitution.
Faceless, dastardly, criminally minded middle-aged white males are cracking the fiscal whip over the backs of black men who plow the fruitful fields like cattle to bring back the gargantuan harvest — and receive none of it. Corporate vultures and jackals in sophisticated suits and ties are camoflauged behind the NCAA banner, dragging dollar bills, false promises or both through the ghettos of America to lure wanting and talented black males to the NCAA stables (colleges and universities) to perform at predetermined times that attracts the multitudes to their extemely profitable enterprises. They are not student-athletes. They are commodities.
The NCAA is not a not-for-profit philanthropic organization bestowing benevolence among its so-called student-athletes. They are blatant labor-rights violators who auction off the amateur athletes’ — mostly black, mostly poor — images for billions, sell TV rights in the billions and allow coaches to skip from program to program, leaving schools in tatters in their wake as they rack up more wins, more naive players, more money and more championships at another school.
This behavior is exemplified by Kentucky coach John Calipari, a man who has left two other programs crippled from his NCAA infractions and who has endured absolutely no ramifications yet was able to move on unscathed and actually be rewarded for his slick-haired ways. Meanwhile, athletes have to sit out a year if they choose to do the same thing as the coaches.
Tragic. And even more tragic is that the NCAA is allowed to get away with it. –terry shropshire
