Black Mizzou football players go on strike

Once Dick goes black, he never goes back.

 

Mizzou had a black president not all that long ago. His wife told a jailed basketball player he needed to stop dating the "pink toe" white girls who were getting him in trouble. Her friend, the wife of an associate AD, was also recorded by the jail telling the player "them crackers shakin'" over the dirt he had on white administrators and coaches.

 

I wonder what the administrative reaction by NCAA will be to this.

Setting aside the worthiness of the actions of the players for a minute, the fact that the players threatened a boycott of football, apparently with the backing of the coaches, and that threat lead to action is a pretty big precedent. I imagine that there are pretty serious discussions going on at NCAA headquarters about how they can prevent a group of players from using their recently discovered clout for some cause in the future, be it a social issue or a work-related issue (for lack of a better term) within college football itself.

I would think that the NCAA, perhaps with collusion with the NFL, would like to figure out how to discourage college athletes from leveraging their skills to push for changes.

 

You see the NCAA as being much more organized than I do.

 

"Them crackers be shakin' " is the full quote.

 

This is another reason to pay players. If they don't play, they don't get paid.

The NCAA should stay away from this unless they are dragged in, but if Mizzou does not play, that means the team they play might not get paid to travel to the game or the seating revenue from hosting it.

 

I wonder if the University of Louisville president, who was photographed wearing a sombrero and a colorful poncho with staff members dressed as "Mexicans" is more worried now.

The Mizzou president was forced out because, well know knows? But obviously there were racial tensions on campus.

The U of L president actually caused Hispanic students to protest.

 

That kind of thing is getting into the "appropriation" bit (which was implicated in the Yale kerfuffle). All "appropriation" roads lead to cluster-fucks, unless you're employed in/angling for a job in a college/university diversity guidance office, in which case ...

 

The ship be sinkin'

 

Just wondering what the difference is between that and they don't play, they don't keep their scholarships. I don't think there's much difference.

 

Both of them?

 

I can add something here. The idea that it's full of rural, redneck racists is bunk.

What it is full of is a lot of people from the suburbs of St. Louis, which by most measures is the most segregated place in America (Detroit, Milwaukee and Boston jostle with St. Louis in the annual rankings). In the latest class, 27 percent of students are from St. Louis and only 11 percent are from Kansas City, which would probably track pretty closely to my experience there 25 years ago.

What Mizzou also has is an enormously influential Greek Life presence -- as of now it's 22 percent of enrollment, which doesn't seem all that high compared with big public universities now, but I think that is down quite a bit from years past. (I'm pretty sre it was 30-plus during my time there) But there are 53 fraternities or sororities and they set the social agenda for the whole university, particularly frosh/soph. I never went Greek and never considered it, but I did spend a year going to a lot of fraternity parties and even went to a sorority formal. Everyone did that. You simply couldn't avoid it. And the members and leadership of those houses draws very very heavily from that suburban St. Louis set. If you're familiar at all with those St. Louis suburbs, you will recognize when I mention the general elitism and inflated sense of self-worth of that particular group of young men and women. That region is very much an old-world society kind of place with lots of airs -- it is famous for the question "where did you go to high school?" which is a handy little way of finding out your entire demographic profile -- and that permeates to Mizzou. So that's the general tone that people see and feel when they arrive on campus, and then that is (or at least was back then) the pool of candidates for the student senate, the groups that got the best bulk seats at football and basketball games, and all the other big drivers of student life.

The atmosphere w/r/t race does not sound all that different from when I was there. I recall several incidents that made headlines, including one in which a black high school student lost his eye during a fight at a fraternity house, but not much action. It was also the place where I was introduced to the idea of the angry white male -- the guy who is a thoroughly average student yet spends four (five? six?) years lamenting how the minorities and women are getting all the good stuff he should get. I think the black population was about 3 percent at the time. I heard this sentiment verbalized quite often all around campus. (Most hilarious: the guy who was complaining that he couldn't get an LA Times internship because it was going to a minority, even though his dad plays golf with the publisher.)

It was a lot different in the J-School because we were the one place on campus that truly had a national and even international draw. But even there, anyone who had friends who weren't white and discussed these kinds of things would quickly find out that they were in many ways living on a different campus than their friends were.

It should have been surprising to me that the campus still felt like this 25 years later. But it wasn't.