Excellent read. May have to write a response to this.
The article also references Tom Brady’s agent Don Yee; you can find his work here, here, and here.
For those who believe that it’s not about race: a white man wrote this article, for one. Two, check out some quotes below:
“Today, the economic exploitation within college sports remains race-neutral on its face….And yet, while the NCAA’s intent is color-blind, the impact of amateurism is anything but.”
“According to the U.S. Census, blacks made up 12.3 percent of the nation’s total population in 2012. Meanwhile, a 2016 study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education found that black men made up only 2.5 percent of the overall student population at the schools in the five biggest Division I conferences. In other words, African-Americans aren’t just overrepresented in big-time college sports; they're wildly overrepresented.”
“‘Several black athletes have told me how even when they get a [cost-of-living] stipend, they have to send it back home to help family out,’ says Billy Hawkins, a University of Georgia professor who studies the sociology of sports and is the author of The New Plantation: Black Athletes and College Athletics. 'Whereas the majority of white athletes coming from middle class families don’t have those same responsibilities. So even if and when white athletes are experiencing economic exploitation, it can still be a disproportionate impact.’”
“'Graduation doesn’t equal education,’ says Hawkins, the University of Georgia professor. ‘That’s one of the things I’ve always been critical of. I’ve been on this campus 20 years. We can graduate athletes. But what’s the quality of that education, and does it lead to gainful employment in fields that are comparable to what they’ve studied?’”
