It was a study that came back with these numbers: four out of 305.
Last week, Norman Chad, syndicated columnist for The Washington Post, wrote a column headlined "I'm in the White Business."
Four out of 305. Enough to make a white journalist turn white.
Or write about.
It's a story that the fewer than 300 black sportswriters have been talking about for years, but it took a white writer to bring it to the masses.
And now that it's out, it must be accompanied by substance. Not that Mr. Chad didn't do the story justice, but this study is about just us, the 1.3 percent and those who live with this number every day, the ones who won't get the opportunity to become editors of the pages of sports.
It's a story we've been screaming forever, but no one wanted to hear. One that we've all thought was one of the biggest in sports, but no one wanted to read.
Four out of 305.
Chad said the number was "like Gilbert Gottfried's hit rate at a singles bar." To us African-American sportswriters and editors, it was more like our reality finally coming to life.
When you live in a place where a "skewed" misrepresentation of the balance is your daily existence, you cope. That's what you learn to do, that's where you have no choice.
The sports experience for black people is different. It is one that hasn't and will never be shared by any other race or nationality in the country.
Much of the civil rights and forces of equality we living black in America have achieved have come from accomplishment in sports. Think about that. Serious.
Jack Johnson, Jesse Owens, the Negro Leagues, Jackie Robinson, Curt Flood, Muhammad Ali, Arthur Ashe, Jim Brown, Althea Gibson, Wilma Rudolph, the Harlem Globetrotters, Wendell Scott, Willy T. Ribbs, Shani Davis, the Williams sisters, Tiger Woods.
Much of what these people stand for and what they represent has nothing to do with sports. But the role they -- and many unnamed others -- have played in shaping African-American history has been told to us by those who do not share what these "sports figures" mean to us 12 percent of the American population (or higher, if you consider the walls broken down for other minorities to participate in sports).
That is why this report is significant. More significant than if the report had come out about any other business in America. Even though the 1.3 percent top management rate reflects almost any other Fortune 5000 business in America, sports, you see, is different. Along with music and entertainment, it has been one of the only places we've been able to find equality.
To us, sports is not a game ... it represents freedom. Always has, always will. But most of America doesn't understand that. Never has, never will.
But because of the makeup of sports, because of the "skewed" number of us who play, because of its history in connection to our emancipation, the fact that only four of us have been given the opportunity to run the pages in which a major part of our history is being told gives an insight into what we black sportswriters have been saying since Pulitzer became a prize.
