Pretty Is As Pretty Does

If I just can't get here the way I need to on top of what I am being "forced" to write at In-Your-Face Women these days, then at the very least, I should be tipping you to what I'm reading myself here and there.  For example, S.E. Smith posted the piece I'm re-posting here the other day at GlobalComment.com. I'm so disgusted that any journalist would snipe Gabby Douglas for having a hair out of place after winning a gold medal, it brought me out of retirement (as it were). I know I didn't write this, but I wish I did.

Racism in Olympic Coverage
by S.E. Smith 

Jayshawn Augusto In The House!

I presume everybody else on the internet has already seen this kid. Maybe a bunch of times. And frankly, I hate the fact that there are unquestionably thousands of super bright young African-American intellectual whiz kids out there who will never wind up in front of a video cam because THAT doesn't make the news. But really, this kid deserves some attention anyway. His name is Jayshawn Augusto. He's eleven years old. And he just might be the Mohammed Ali of basketball. Prepare to be amazed.

My Annual Post On Sports

It isn't very often that I read an article in Jet - or even the New York Times - and find myself reminded of my stats classes in grad school. There's a reason for that. Such articles are few and far between because most ordinary folks can't understand what statistical analysis really means, as a rule. This is one of the reasons people are so quick to say flatly, "You can prove anything using statistics." What they mean is that statistics can be used to "prove" anything - right or wrong. But the reality is that "statistics" can only "prove" "anything" to them. If you have a clue, statistics can only bear out the facts.

When I first read about the study conducted by Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania, and Joseph Price, a Cornell graduate student in economics, I knew there wouldn't be much flap over it, even though there ought to be. Then, when I saw the article in the Jet Magazine, I really winced. It was virtually unintelligible. That is, I read it twice, and I couldn't make heads nor tails of what it was supposed to be saying. I would have ignored it, if I hadn't already understood the first piece.

Wolfers and Price found that, during the course of the thirteen N.B.A. seasons from 1991 through 2004, White referees called fouls at a greater rate against Black players than they did against White players. In fact, they went so far as to say that the difference in the rates "is large enough that the probability of a team winning is noticeably affected by the racial composition of the refereeing crew assigned to the game." Whoa!

The crunchy part read something like: "Across all specifications, we find that Black players receive around 0.12-0.20 more fouls per 48 minutes played (an increase of 2-1/2 to 4-1/2 per cent) when the number of White referees officiating a game increases from zero to three." The bottom line: a difference of about two victories in an 82-game season.

The N.B.A. went ball-istic, of course (sorry I couldn't resist). The Commissioners rushed right out and had their own study done, which "found," needless to say, no such problem. Three independent experts hired by the Times to examine both studies, however, declared the Wolfers-Price work far more credible, though they may have been ham-strung somewhat by the fact that the N.B.A. refused to provide the underlying data they claimed to use to make their alternate conclusions.

The N.B.A. shouldn't take it all so hard. First of all, the fact that the whole society is rampantly racist is easy to document. Are the N.B.A. Commissioners trying to claim that it and it alone stands above the socially institutionalized norms? I would hope not. Secondly, it's not as if someone is accusing them of intentional oppression. When they said the league does not consider race in the hiring process for referees, nobody (and certainly not Wolfers or Price) claimed otherwise.

When the referees are taken out of the equation, however, it's hard not to catch the differences. "Player-performance appears to deteriorate at every margin when officiated by a larger fraction of opposite-race referees," write Wolfers and Price, except for shooting free throws (when the referees are irrelevant). And there you have it.

The researchers have tried to reassure the N.B.A. Commissioners that they're not calling anyone racist, per se, but bias based on skin tone can be subconscious, they say. "You see two players [collide] on the floor and you have to call a block or a charge. Does the skin color of the players somehow shape how you interpret the signals your brain gives you?"

The numbers say they do. "Basically, [our research] suggests," says Wolfers, "that if you spray-painted one of your starters White, you'd win a few more games." Damn! No wonder the playing fields are still not level. Folks that look like me gotta win part of the time.

Why Am I Not Surprised?

Remember last summer, when I wrote here and here about racist practices of some fans at European soccer matches?

Well, here's the latest. At the time I wrote my earlier pieces, some suggested that the problem doesn't really exist. Apparently, they were wrong.

Ya Can't Win For Losin'

When I was small and something didn't go the way my parents wanted it to, they would shake their heads sadly and say to each other: "Ya can't win for losin'." I basically understood them to mean that no matter how hard you try and no matter how things look as if they're going in a positive direction, they never, in the end, turn out well.

Now, obviously, this wasn't true for them and eventually, I knew it. I mean, we started out in the mountains of Kentucky in a house across a vacant lot from a coal mine. And by the time I was in high school, we were in northern Illinois, living in a three-story house with a working fireplace and wall-to-wall carpeting (not minor accoutrements in the early 1960's).

But the saying stuck in my mind and I thought of it again today as I opened my new Jet magazine and saw the stunning young Togolese beauty queen who was named Miss World Cup in Germany the first of this month (see this.) Weird, huh? During World Cup matches, footballers of color are spit on, while "fans" make monkey noises and throw bananas onto the field. But Miss World Cup is a warm caramel color with a broad nose and large, dark brown eyes.

I'm sure that there are some who read my last post who would find this a wonderful thing. "See?" I can just hear them saying. "Things are getting better!" And that might be true for Togolese student Edwige Madze Badakou, who beat out 31 other contestants to win $2,500 and the use of a convertible for a year. But one can't help but wonder what this might or might not mean to a world class soccer player who's wiping some stranger's spit off the side of his face as he takes his position during a crucial moment in the game.

I know that this is going to make me look like somebody who can't see the positive even when it has a big red neon arrow pointed at it, blinking on and off. But the problem is, in my opinion, that White folks feel guilty about letting Black folks get brutalized, so they do things to make themselves feel better and give themselves an excuse to look the other way when the Hitler banners are unfurled. Like voting for a Black beauty queen.

Don't get me wrong. She's gorgeous. But that's not my point.

People of color (Africans, African-Americans, Asians, and a whole raft of other indigenous peoples, such as the Native Americans) have always earned their share of the awards, distinctions, and accolades, even when they didn't get them. The first thing you notice when you start studying real history (and herstory?) is that since White males had the power to decide what got published and disseminated, then White males got all the credit for everything, even if they didn't actually do it. Or it just didn't get reported at all. Tidy, huh? And, over time, in the United States, at least, people of color actually began to believe the hype themselves, waiting to "someday" be "allowed" to achieve something, when people just like them have been achieving all along.

Anyway, so here's this lovely young woman who had just as much right to win as anybody else, but there's no real way to know how many votes were cast "in solidarity" with people of color in the face of the vicious racism that blights the World Cup competition or because some White voter feels guilty about not doing anything else about it. The point isn't whether or not she should be or deserves to be Miss World Cup. She has as much right to be in that position, certainly, as any White queen who ever served because she met the Euro-centric standards of beauty that held such contests in their thrall for so long. The point is that her election can be used to placate White guilt that footballers of color still have to deal with violent attacks on themselves by White people during soccer matches. And that puts a whole new spin on "Ya can't win for losin'," huh?

I'll bet if the officials shut down the match the second a banana hit the field, that crap would cease. I'll bet if the officials had to pay 5000 Euros to every footballer that got spit on, the Hitler youth would stop being allowed into the games. But while on the one hand, Miss Badakou is enjoying (and rightfully so) her moment in the sun, official responses that would be strong enough to stop demonstrations of oppression against people of color at the event over which she ostensibly "reigns" are unlikely to occur. I wonder if it's hard to maintain her regal smile from time to time, watching her brothers continue to suffer because of their skin tone when it's the same as hers.

A World Cup...of Hate?

I first heard about this when France's Thierry Henry, arguably one of the best soccer players in the world, got international accolades for talking Nike into bank-rolling a Stand Up/Speak Up campaign against rampant racism at the matches. But I was totally unprepared for the recent rash of news media discussions about the extent and boldness of the activities--still common--that made the campaign necessary.

It's World Cup time, from what I can gather. God knows I'm not tuned into or turned on by sports of any kind really, but the competition began last Friday and will continue until July 9th, with matches in multiple European countries featuring the best "footballers" in the world (including some from the U.S.). The reason I know this information is that I have actually read a couple of lengthy pieces on it, but you know by now, of course, that if I'm writing about it, the subject is not sports--it's race.

Apparently, soccer (called "football" outside the U.S., hence the reference to "footballers" above) has a history of drawing hyper-emotional fans (remember the bloody free-for-alls they finally had to crack down on a couple of decades ago in England?). Well, the powers-that-be finally got the fisticuffs under control more or less, but over the past couple of years, they've begun to admit that there's another little problem they probably should deal with. Racist groups and individuals make the matches hellish for footballers of color. Simon Kuper, a British sports columnist, says "It was seen as all good fun and part of football culture and accepted for a long time." Hmmm. Let's take a look at the good fun he's talking about.

Thousands of fans screaming monkey noises and throwing bananas onto the field when a Black player is trying to make a kick. Entire groups unfurling pro-Hitler banners, complete with swastikas, and using intricate choreography to form human swastikas or even the face of Der Fuhrer in the stands. Teaming up to spit on Black players. Sounds like a barrel of laughs to me. And keep in mind: we're not talking about occasional instances here or certain countries or a few particular people. We're talking about routine attacks.

"In a stadium of 60,000, it's easy to be anonymous," says Jerome Champagne of the Federation Internationale de Football Association. But I've seen photos of young men being allowed to hang a big swastika banner by the fans seated behind them--and their faces in full view. What's up with that? Champagne knows. "The main issue," he goes on, "is not racism within soccer, but racism around soccer." No lie.

So the footballers organize in groups with names like "Kick It Out" (in Britain) and the "Never Again Association" (in Poland), both part of a network called Football Against Racism in Europe (FARE). And there are fans--such as those who formed "Arsenal Against Racism"--who have joined them. Thierry's Stand Up/Speak Up campaign sold four and one-half million black and white wrist bands, raising five million Euros (more than six million dollars!) for anti-racist projects in eleven countries.

Nevertheless, Kuper tells us: "You can still hear people say, 'Oh, it's all good fun." Being spit on is good fun? Hitler is good fun? Gee, and all this time, I liked reading. Just look what I've been missing!

My point is that the Hitler youth and the spitters may represent a relatively small group, comparatively speaking. But they're not the ones calling it fun. They're not doing it for fun. They're doing it to spread an agenda of racist hatred. I understand them. They're sick and, if they're allowed to, they will bring us to mayhem, at least, and destruction, if they can. But the ones that scare me are the "ordinary" people who call it "fun." Would they laugh at being spit on or called an animal? Would they find these situations "fun" if they were happening to their children? Of course not. So what is their agenda?

We still have Nazi's in the U.S. They leaflet campuses on a regular basis in this country. But overall, many European-Americans purport to believe that all that bold and ugly racist stuff is behind us. They might watch the craziness at the soccer matches and pat themselves on the back as being from a nation where that isn't currently happening. But most of them still wink at racist jokes, look away from racist activities in the work place, and would not consider seeing themselves as allies of people of color. So they are probably not much different, in the end, from the Europeans (who look like them) and ignore the "fun" while people of color continue to have their spirits lynched in the name of a sport.

Movie Night (or How African-American Basketball Players Got Their Size Thirteens In The Door)

I know zip about sports. And, what's harder for some people to understand: I really couldn't care less. I mean, overall, I don't know who's playing. And, for the most part, I don't know which teams play which sports. I don't even know exactly when Super Bowl Sunday is, in spite of the fact that I know it's right around the corner...sometime.

But there are crystal moments in sports history you just gotta love. Like when the two African-American track stars bowed their heads and raised their fists after they won the Olympics that time--while the national anthem played, for goodness' sake. And the time last year when the woman soccer player lost her head after an amazing triumph of some kind and whipped off her shirt in athletic jubilation, to the delighted shock of the fans and a whole bunch of other viewers who got to see it later (over and over and over).

A movie released last week-end tells the story of another one of those moments--the night back in 1966 when a European-American basketball coach from Texas Western (a school nobody had ever heard of) started five Black players in the NCAA national championship play-offs against University of Kentucky, a team touted as four-time champions under the legendary Adolph Rupp. This was just not done. And when Texas Western left the floor victorious, basketball in the United States had been changed for all time.

Now, you know I had to see this movie. Fast pace, great music, underdogs winning against all odds, and let's not ignore that I hurried out immediately to watch "Hustle and Flow" and saw "Crash" twice the week it came out. So, of course, I knew from the preview that I'd be there the opening week-end. And, yeah--I loved it. Walked out smiling. Glad I'd spent the money. Glad to know the story. (I sure didn't know it before I saw the movie.)

But it intrigued me enough to make me check it out a little more after the fact. One thing I learned was that Texas Western (which became University of Texas at El Paso the year after the historic win) was the first college in a southern state to racially integrate its athletic teams and that was before the arrival of Coach Don Haskins. So there were already three African-American players on the team when he got there, though he rapidly added more. And today, the student population at UTEP is 70% Chicano, which is probably a function of their location, but it still makes a point, I think.

Another thing I found interesting was that Haskins cut his basketball teeth playing one-on-one with an African-American friend, Herman Carr. Apparently, Haskins was disappointed when some scenes depicting their relationship wound up on the cutting room floor because Carr was at the movie's premiere.

The bottom line for me, I guess, is that this story portrays a truth I like to consider: European-Americans who learn to respect people of color can be instrumental in pushing the envelope when it comes to social change related to the socially-constructed political notion of "race." Additionally, social institutions (like schools) that are even a little less committed to White privilege than the average quickly become fertile ground for that social change to occur. And people of color are always, repeat, always, repeat, always ready at a moment's notice to rise to that occasion when given half a chance--no matter what kind of nightmare they have to walk through to do it.

Despite the fact that Haskins only had four losing seasons in his 38 years coaching at UTEP and wound up ultimately in the basketball hall of fame, he was never able to repeat what happened back there in 1966. But that's because the first time can only happen once.