“Killing Us Softly”- Political Gridlock in Washington Dooms a Generation of Young Workers
Dr Mark Naison Fordham University
At a time when economists are talking about recovery, American political leaders have been making decisions which may doom a generation of young workers to economic hardship for the next ten years.
At a time when official unemployment is 9.7 percent, and private sector job growth has ground to a halt, the Congress of the United States, with only limited opposition from the Obama administration, has placed deficit reduction over job creation as a national priority.
The results are going to be devastating for a generation of young people graduating from college and professional school, along with those leaving high school, the military, or prisons without advanced degrees. At a time when banks are still writing off toxic assets and being extremely wary of extending credit , and cash rich corporations are putting their surplus into dividends rather than job creation, virtually the only economic growth has come from government expenditures and tax incentives, but now deficit conscious politicians are determined to cut those channels of economic stimulation off
Yesterdays news from the housing front dramatized that dynamic. Last month, sales of new homes dropped 33%, to the lowest level since 1981, thanks to the ending of a program of government tax credits to home buyers.
This collapse of home sales will not only have devastating effects on the construction industry, it will lead to a further freezing of credit, as second mortgages are one of the major ways Americans fuel consumption. Yet a budget conscious Congress refuses to extend the very tax credits that prompted a modest revival of the housing market.
And that’s only one part of a larger catastrophe. Last month, Congress refused to extend unemployment benefits to the long term unemployed, a decision that will put further strain on state budgets that are approaching bankruptcy in many portions of the country, and will give yet another hit to consumer spending
Worse yet, Congress is refusing to consider even a modest extension of the stimulus package which, in many economists eyes, prevented the economy from falling into a Depression and saved many states from economic collapse
As a result of this inaction, many states will be implementing draconian cuts in key government services including health care, transportation, and especially education. During the next two years, hundreds of thousands of teachers across the country will lose their jobs, making a mockery of educational reform efforts and destroying the dreams of idealistic young people across the country who hoped to make teaching their career.
Let us make no mistake about it. If current priorities don’t change, we are going to see massive job shredding in the public sector, along with virtually no job growth in the private sector, for the next five or ten years Not only is it going to be difficult to find jobs in law, finance and real estate, it is going to be equally difficult to find full time work in education and human services.
Young people are going to be leaving college and graduate school with huge debt and few economic prospects; and as they find work in fields which require less education, they are going to push out people who have weaker credentials The result is going to be shattered dreams, crowded households, families under stress, and an economy doomed to stagnation because people have little income and less confidence in the future.
Government alone has the power to break this impasse, through deficit spending, but our politicians have decided that deficits present a greater danger to the economy than high unemployment.
To me, that not only seems to deny the lessons of history, it represents an act of gratuitous cruelty to America’s youth.
Mark Naison June 24, 2010
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Monday, May 31, 2010
Why Republican Rants About a “Secular Socialist Conspiracy” Just Won’t Work
Dr Mark Naison
Fordham University
Lately, Republican Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has been in the news for saying that Barack Obama is leading a “secular socialist conspiracy” that is as dangerous to the America as Hitler or Stalin.
Rather than being alarmed, most Americans yawned.
Attacks on President Obama for being a “socialist” don’t have a lot of traction not only because they are manifestly absurd- after all this is a president who bailed out the nation’s banks and is offering huge incentives to states to partially privatize their educational systems- but because the idea of “socialism” doesn’t scare Americans like it used to
And this isn’t just because the Soviet Union collapsed and because purchases of US Debt by the “Communist” Chinese help keep our government afloat, it’s because more and more Americans, to survive economically, have to adopt some kind of communal living arrangements, be it with friends, family or total strangers.
For more and more Americans, the nuclear family, consisting of parents living with children in two generation households until those children are ready form households of their own, is becoming more the exception in the rule.
You can see this dramatically displayed in the working class neighborhood of East Hampton where I own a vacation house. Virtually all of the residential units in our area- called “The Springs”-are detached one or two story houses surrounded by lawns. There are no apartment buildings; virtually all of the houses are zoned for single family occupancy.
Yet when you drive by these homes, early in the morning, or late at night, it is not unusual to see three or four or five cars or pick up trucks parked in their driveways.
There are multiple families, or multiple groups of unrelated people, living in those houses
And I am not just talking about the homes of the Latino immigrants, who are a large and growing portion of the Springs population. The same pattern is visible among the Springs white and black population On my block, which is predominantly white, at least two thirds of the homes have some form of shared residential space beyond the nuclear family.
If this is what is going on among working class people in a relatively affluent resort area, you can just imagine what is going on in sections of the country whose economies have been hit much harder. As unemployment proliferates, peoples home values plummet, their credit card limits are frozen, and their savings evaporate, more and more people, without fanfare or ideological pronouncements, are sharing living space, child care, transportation and food to stay above water, or avoid hunger and homelessness.
Even middle class people are feeling the pinch and are giving up individual living space. I know of several formerly prosperous individuals in their thirties, unemployed for over a year, who have recently moved back in with their parents and more than a few of my students, after futile searches for full time work, have taken the same step.
Given the dynamics of shared living space which have become the lived reality for more and more Americans, it is understandable why the image of a government caring for its people- rather than nurturing individual self-reliance- doesn’t scare people the way it used to.
In an economic crisis like the one we are living through, “self reliance” just doesn’t work very well , even for people who are hard working and ambitious. A lot of people recognize that to survive these times, they not only have to ask for help, they have to help one another. And they are doing so, all over the country, in proportions which most journalists, or social scientists have failed to recognize.
This doesn’t mean that Americans are mobilizing to sign up under the Socialist banner, But it does make them receptive to the idea that it is the government’s responsibility to help people when they are in trouble, whether they have lost their jobs, or whether their livelihoods are threatened by a flood or an oil spill.
And if the Obama administration is really doing that, all the red baiting in the world from Republicans won’t make a damn bit of difference
Mark Naison
May 31, 2010
Dr Mark Naison
Fordham University
Lately, Republican Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has been in the news for saying that Barack Obama is leading a “secular socialist conspiracy” that is as dangerous to the America as Hitler or Stalin.
Rather than being alarmed, most Americans yawned.
Attacks on President Obama for being a “socialist” don’t have a lot of traction not only because they are manifestly absurd- after all this is a president who bailed out the nation’s banks and is offering huge incentives to states to partially privatize their educational systems- but because the idea of “socialism” doesn’t scare Americans like it used to
And this isn’t just because the Soviet Union collapsed and because purchases of US Debt by the “Communist” Chinese help keep our government afloat, it’s because more and more Americans, to survive economically, have to adopt some kind of communal living arrangements, be it with friends, family or total strangers.
For more and more Americans, the nuclear family, consisting of parents living with children in two generation households until those children are ready form households of their own, is becoming more the exception in the rule.
You can see this dramatically displayed in the working class neighborhood of East Hampton where I own a vacation house. Virtually all of the residential units in our area- called “The Springs”-are detached one or two story houses surrounded by lawns. There are no apartment buildings; virtually all of the houses are zoned for single family occupancy.
Yet when you drive by these homes, early in the morning, or late at night, it is not unusual to see three or four or five cars or pick up trucks parked in their driveways.
There are multiple families, or multiple groups of unrelated people, living in those houses
And I am not just talking about the homes of the Latino immigrants, who are a large and growing portion of the Springs population. The same pattern is visible among the Springs white and black population On my block, which is predominantly white, at least two thirds of the homes have some form of shared residential space beyond the nuclear family.
If this is what is going on among working class people in a relatively affluent resort area, you can just imagine what is going on in sections of the country whose economies have been hit much harder. As unemployment proliferates, peoples home values plummet, their credit card limits are frozen, and their savings evaporate, more and more people, without fanfare or ideological pronouncements, are sharing living space, child care, transportation and food to stay above water, or avoid hunger and homelessness.
Even middle class people are feeling the pinch and are giving up individual living space. I know of several formerly prosperous individuals in their thirties, unemployed for over a year, who have recently moved back in with their parents and more than a few of my students, after futile searches for full time work, have taken the same step.
Given the dynamics of shared living space which have become the lived reality for more and more Americans, it is understandable why the image of a government caring for its people- rather than nurturing individual self-reliance- doesn’t scare people the way it used to.
In an economic crisis like the one we are living through, “self reliance” just doesn’t work very well , even for people who are hard working and ambitious. A lot of people recognize that to survive these times, they not only have to ask for help, they have to help one another. And they are doing so, all over the country, in proportions which most journalists, or social scientists have failed to recognize.
This doesn’t mean that Americans are mobilizing to sign up under the Socialist banner, But it does make them receptive to the idea that it is the government’s responsibility to help people when they are in trouble, whether they have lost their jobs, or whether their livelihoods are threatened by a flood or an oil spill.
And if the Obama administration is really doing that, all the red baiting in the world from Republicans won’t make a damn bit of difference
Mark Naison
May 31, 2010
Friday, May 28, 2010
Rebel Diaz Arts Collective Provides Model For Activists and Young People Locked Out of a Stagnant Economy
Dr Mark Naison
Fordham Unviersity
Last night, I had the opportunity to visit the Rebel Diaz Arts Collective, an organization of activists, musicians and visual and performing artists which has transformed a former candy factory into a vibrant community space.
When I entered the building, I felt I had been transported into a hip hop community center in Berlin, or a loft in lower Manhattan that had been occupied by political activists in the late 60’s and early 70’s. There were murals and political slogans all over the walls, couches and chairs that had clearly been found on the street or donated by friends, a large room that had been transformed into a performance space, and smaller rooms that had been turned into a music studio, a computer room and the offices of an allied community organization. An outdoor sitting space was filled with graffiti art done by a combination of well known writers and neighborhood youth and a wall on the roof had a huge yellow sign, probably 70 feet long, and 10 feet high, that read “No Human is Illegal” that was easily visible from the Bruckner Expressway.
The people in the Arts Collective also had a familiar appearance. Most were people of color in their twenties and early thirties, with a scruffy, but hip look that would have made them seem at home in a meeting of Young Lords, the Black Panthers, or SDS 40 years before. My two guests and I, sixties veterans all, did a double take. It was as if we had been transported into an earlier time in the City’s history, a time when a collapsing social structure and a fierce political idealism spawned revolutionary dreams, and when the city’s faltering economy provided inexpensive spaces those dreams could be pursued in.
The three of us were so surprised by what we saw that we did a collective double take. Could this really be happening again? The political spaces we had spent our formative years in had, over time, been transformed into upscale boutiques and expensive apartments and the revolutionary dreams we once held had been rejected by three generations of young people in favor of the pursuit of wealth, security and a dynamic consumer lifestyle.
But what we saw in that abandoned factory in the South Bronx, we soon realized, was not a fluke, it was a sign of an emerging revolutionary consciousness among a generation of young people facing unprecedented economic stagnation, and a future that would soon render questionable the dreams of effortless wealth and consumption that many Americans had seen as their birthright for the last thirty years.
We all know the grim statistics about unemployment for people under the age of 30. Only a minority of college graduates are finding full time jobs following graduation a while job opportunities in law, business, education and social service are shrinking rapidly. No reputable economist that I have read thinks the economy will expand rapidly enough to absorb this huge, young surplus labor force any time soon, leaving many educated young people without the wherewithal to become economically independent, while young people with less education are being forced deeper into poverty and desperation.
There is already much pain and hardship being inflicted on young people, and their families, in both groups. But a few visionary young people, like the members of the Rebel Diaz Arts Collective, have seen an opportunity to create new forms of organization which allow people to free themselves from individualistic, acquisitive impulses which will only bring disappointment in this time of crisis
What gives this vision substance, and ultimately, more than a little practicality, is the sudden appearance of huge amounts of abandoned residential and commercial space in virtually every town and city in the country. Not only are there hundred of thousands of abandoned and foreclosed private homes in the country, they are tens of thousands of recently abandoned stores, warehouses, factories and shopping centers whose owners have gone bankrupt or closed down their operations.
Very few of these facilities are going to be rented at market rates any time soon. If they stay abandoned, nothing good is going to happen.. They are going to be stripped, vandalized, or set afire.
But if young people can seize these properties and convert them to community usage, or render them operational for less than market rent, both the original owners and the government may find this a better alternative than letting them remain vacant.
This is exactly what the Rebel Diaz Arts Collective has done. They have taken a huge abandoned space on a deteriorated block in the South Bronx and have made it into a community center by using volunteer labor, not only from the 15-20 members of the collective, but from people in the community and friends around the city and the country.
Not only have the created a space that both neighborhood people and progressive artists feel comfortable in, but they have used the facility to spawn income generating activities, whether it by selling CD’s or art works by members of the Collective, renting the space out for music video shoots, charging admission for concerts and films, or getting government grants to run summer youth programs.
What makes this income generating activity work is the communal spirit that animates the group. People in the Rebel Diaz Arts Collective share whatever income that comes in and it is this communal spirit, as well as the physical appearance of the space, that so moved the three of us Sixties veterans that came by their Center. Here are people who understand that when the meaning in your life comes from friendship, love, creative activity and commitment to social justice, than you don’t need to accumulate material possessions to mark your place in the world. I am not sure where members of the collective lived, or what they owned, or how much money they maid from other jobs, but it was clear that they felt infused with a higher sense of purpose that give them joy and happiness and allowed for the development of powerful friendships.
As I have watched this economic crisis unfold over the last four years, I have often said that young people today needed to discover the revolutionary communalism of the Sixties.
Well, based on what I saw at the Rebel Diaz Arts Collective, they have already begun to do that. I suspect that what is happening on Austin Place, right off the Bruckner Expressway, is happening simultaneously in other parts of the city and the nation, and it gives me hope that maybe, just maybe, this so called “lost generation” is not going to passively accept the economic marginalization that economists and social scientists have declared to be their fate.
If they follow the lead of Rebel Diaz Arts Collective, they can become makers of history rather than a crisis they didn’t expect.
And that is a prospect that makes this Sixties veteran break out in a smile!
Mark Naison
May 28, 2010
.
Dr Mark Naison
Fordham Unviersity
Last night, I had the opportunity to visit the Rebel Diaz Arts Collective, an organization of activists, musicians and visual and performing artists which has transformed a former candy factory into a vibrant community space.
When I entered the building, I felt I had been transported into a hip hop community center in Berlin, or a loft in lower Manhattan that had been occupied by political activists in the late 60’s and early 70’s. There were murals and political slogans all over the walls, couches and chairs that had clearly been found on the street or donated by friends, a large room that had been transformed into a performance space, and smaller rooms that had been turned into a music studio, a computer room and the offices of an allied community organization. An outdoor sitting space was filled with graffiti art done by a combination of well known writers and neighborhood youth and a wall on the roof had a huge yellow sign, probably 70 feet long, and 10 feet high, that read “No Human is Illegal” that was easily visible from the Bruckner Expressway.
The people in the Arts Collective also had a familiar appearance. Most were people of color in their twenties and early thirties, with a scruffy, but hip look that would have made them seem at home in a meeting of Young Lords, the Black Panthers, or SDS 40 years before. My two guests and I, sixties veterans all, did a double take. It was as if we had been transported into an earlier time in the City’s history, a time when a collapsing social structure and a fierce political idealism spawned revolutionary dreams, and when the city’s faltering economy provided inexpensive spaces those dreams could be pursued in.
The three of us were so surprised by what we saw that we did a collective double take. Could this really be happening again? The political spaces we had spent our formative years in had, over time, been transformed into upscale boutiques and expensive apartments and the revolutionary dreams we once held had been rejected by three generations of young people in favor of the pursuit of wealth, security and a dynamic consumer lifestyle.
But what we saw in that abandoned factory in the South Bronx, we soon realized, was not a fluke, it was a sign of an emerging revolutionary consciousness among a generation of young people facing unprecedented economic stagnation, and a future that would soon render questionable the dreams of effortless wealth and consumption that many Americans had seen as their birthright for the last thirty years.
We all know the grim statistics about unemployment for people under the age of 30. Only a minority of college graduates are finding full time jobs following graduation a while job opportunities in law, business, education and social service are shrinking rapidly. No reputable economist that I have read thinks the economy will expand rapidly enough to absorb this huge, young surplus labor force any time soon, leaving many educated young people without the wherewithal to become economically independent, while young people with less education are being forced deeper into poverty and desperation.
There is already much pain and hardship being inflicted on young people, and their families, in both groups. But a few visionary young people, like the members of the Rebel Diaz Arts Collective, have seen an opportunity to create new forms of organization which allow people to free themselves from individualistic, acquisitive impulses which will only bring disappointment in this time of crisis
What gives this vision substance, and ultimately, more than a little practicality, is the sudden appearance of huge amounts of abandoned residential and commercial space in virtually every town and city in the country. Not only are there hundred of thousands of abandoned and foreclosed private homes in the country, they are tens of thousands of recently abandoned stores, warehouses, factories and shopping centers whose owners have gone bankrupt or closed down their operations.
Very few of these facilities are going to be rented at market rates any time soon. If they stay abandoned, nothing good is going to happen.. They are going to be stripped, vandalized, or set afire.
But if young people can seize these properties and convert them to community usage, or render them operational for less than market rent, both the original owners and the government may find this a better alternative than letting them remain vacant.
This is exactly what the Rebel Diaz Arts Collective has done. They have taken a huge abandoned space on a deteriorated block in the South Bronx and have made it into a community center by using volunteer labor, not only from the 15-20 members of the collective, but from people in the community and friends around the city and the country.
Not only have the created a space that both neighborhood people and progressive artists feel comfortable in, but they have used the facility to spawn income generating activities, whether it by selling CD’s or art works by members of the Collective, renting the space out for music video shoots, charging admission for concerts and films, or getting government grants to run summer youth programs.
What makes this income generating activity work is the communal spirit that animates the group. People in the Rebel Diaz Arts Collective share whatever income that comes in and it is this communal spirit, as well as the physical appearance of the space, that so moved the three of us Sixties veterans that came by their Center. Here are people who understand that when the meaning in your life comes from friendship, love, creative activity and commitment to social justice, than you don’t need to accumulate material possessions to mark your place in the world. I am not sure where members of the collective lived, or what they owned, or how much money they maid from other jobs, but it was clear that they felt infused with a higher sense of purpose that give them joy and happiness and allowed for the development of powerful friendships.
As I have watched this economic crisis unfold over the last four years, I have often said that young people today needed to discover the revolutionary communalism of the Sixties.
Well, based on what I saw at the Rebel Diaz Arts Collective, they have already begun to do that. I suspect that what is happening on Austin Place, right off the Bruckner Expressway, is happening simultaneously in other parts of the city and the nation, and it gives me hope that maybe, just maybe, this so called “lost generation” is not going to passively accept the economic marginalization that economists and social scientists have declared to be their fate.
If they follow the lead of Rebel Diaz Arts Collective, they can become makers of history rather than a crisis they didn’t expect.
And that is a prospect that makes this Sixties veteran break out in a smile!
Mark Naison
May 28, 2010
.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
How Fixing a Flat Tire Turned into a Journey into Working Class Brooklyn
How Fixing a Flat Tire Turned into a Journey into Working Class Brooklyn
Mark Naison Fordham University
Last Tuesday morning , when I walked up to my car in anticipation of driving to work, I noticed that my front driver side tire was completely flat. I was able to use my wife’s car that day, but on Thursday, I decided to get it fixed so I left the house at 6 AM to see if I could do it myself
This was not as easy as it sounded. The street where my car was parked, 6th street between 8th Ave and Prospect Park West in Park Slope Brooklyn, is a through street for the local hospital and cabs and ambulances often come whizzing down the block at forty or fifty miles an hour. My flat tire was on the street side so the thought of getting on my knees to unscrew lug nuts or lying flat on my back to adjust the jack was not that appealing. Plus I am 63 years old, with a bad back and a bad hip, so even if I was in a deserted parking lot, changing a tire was not going to be that easy. Fortunately, I am a member of AAA so that was always an option of something went wrong.
Well, things went wrong pretty quickly. First of all, I had trouble getting the jack out of the trunk in the dark. That took ten minutes. Second, the lug nuts on the tire were incredibly tight. I am still pretty strong, but it took all the strength and weight to get four of them loose. The fifth resisted all my efforts so I gave in and called Triple AAA. They said someone would come in an hour and that I should stay by the car.
I decided to use the time to give the interior of my car a much needed cleaning, but after doing that for fifteen minutes, I got bored and decided to turn my attention to the stubborn lug nut, which to my surprise actually moved, so in the not unreasonable expectation that Triple AAA would be late, I decided to pull out the jack and change the tire myself
This proved to be much more difficult that I anticipated. Because I was unwilling to get on my back to place the jack where the notches near the wheel were located- both because of fear of being hit by an ambulance and fear that I might not be able to get up once I was lying down- I could not find a place on the body where the jack actually lifted the car enough to take the wheel off. The jack worked; the car rose, but the wheel remained on the ground.
After twenty minutes of futile jack raising, which had me pissed off and pouring sweat. A big triple A truck arrived and a heavyset white guy, about forty years old, with sandy hair and a couple of teeth missing, got out and walked up to me
“Are you fucking crazy!” he said, “Why are you changing a tire when you have Triple A. You are told old for this shit!”
After telling him that I was an old Brooklyn ballplayer who couldn’t accept the fact that I was getting old, I settled in to help him change the tire, which wasn’t that easy.
“Ralph” the name I will give him, had his own jack and lug wrench, but the car still wouldn’t rise high enough for the tire to leave the ground, so he had to use my jack to raise the axel while his raised the body. All of this took about 20 minutes and all of it was while he was flat on his back on a Styrofoam pad he brought with him
“Shit that was hard” I told him when he had finished, putting a twenty dollar bill into his palm for going the extra mile to help me. “ I wouldn’t have been able to do that myself, not with the bad back and hip I have.”
“Shit, it ain’t easy for me either,” Ralph said, “I have a hernia the size of a grapefruit that I have to hold in with my hands when I cough, but I hate doctors and hospitals so I just live with it.”
The subject of doctors and hospitals unleashed a torrent of commentary from me about my own mistrust of our medical system and before you knew it Ralph and I were trading stories about how hard it was to get out of bed and get dressed before starting our day
“In addition to my hernia,”Ralph said,” I have carpal tunnel in both hands, a bad back, bad knees, and bad shoulders, all it from getting on the ground and changing tires all day. I have been doing this for nineteen years and it gets harder every year. It takes me a half an hour to get out of bed in the morning and another fifteen minutes in a hot shower to get me loose enough to get dressed. I live on Advil”
“I take my hat off to you.” I said. “I work in a fucking office and it sometimes hard to cope with my ailments. But you’ve got to use every injured part of your body eight ten times a day. How long can you keep this up?.”
“I’ll do it until I can’t anymore,” Ralph said. “This is all I know how to do. It sucks, but I got a house, a family and bills to pay. So I do this till I drop, or until I can’t get out of bed at all.”
“Well friend, good luck to you,” I said as Ralph got in his truck and drove off,
I had just gotten a window into something most people in my position don’t see- the incredible skill and courage many working people display every day on their jobs, and the toll those jobs take place on their body. Auto repair people, sanitation workers, people who repair roads and bridges, construction workers, people who fix elevators, rooves and train tracks, all probably have stories just like Ralph’s. Without them, there is no Wall Street, no Universities, no advertising agencies and flagship stores, no theaters, no restaurants and hotels- there is no glamour , no luxury, no art and no life of the mind.
We who work in finance, in education, in social service, easily forget that, until something happens that reminds us we need people to fix things and keep our homes and schools and cars and buildings and roads in good repair.
Although we like to think it’s disappeared, a large part of the working class in this country still consists of people who work with their hands and do hard physical labor, They help keep the country going and make our own lives possible. And if Ralph is a fair example, they desperately need better health care than they are getting now.
Mark Naison April 2, 2010
Mark Naison Fordham University
Last Tuesday morning , when I walked up to my car in anticipation of driving to work, I noticed that my front driver side tire was completely flat. I was able to use my wife’s car that day, but on Thursday, I decided to get it fixed so I left the house at 6 AM to see if I could do it myself
This was not as easy as it sounded. The street where my car was parked, 6th street between 8th Ave and Prospect Park West in Park Slope Brooklyn, is a through street for the local hospital and cabs and ambulances often come whizzing down the block at forty or fifty miles an hour. My flat tire was on the street side so the thought of getting on my knees to unscrew lug nuts or lying flat on my back to adjust the jack was not that appealing. Plus I am 63 years old, with a bad back and a bad hip, so even if I was in a deserted parking lot, changing a tire was not going to be that easy. Fortunately, I am a member of AAA so that was always an option of something went wrong.
Well, things went wrong pretty quickly. First of all, I had trouble getting the jack out of the trunk in the dark. That took ten minutes. Second, the lug nuts on the tire were incredibly tight. I am still pretty strong, but it took all the strength and weight to get four of them loose. The fifth resisted all my efforts so I gave in and called Triple AAA. They said someone would come in an hour and that I should stay by the car.
I decided to use the time to give the interior of my car a much needed cleaning, but after doing that for fifteen minutes, I got bored and decided to turn my attention to the stubborn lug nut, which to my surprise actually moved, so in the not unreasonable expectation that Triple AAA would be late, I decided to pull out the jack and change the tire myself
This proved to be much more difficult that I anticipated. Because I was unwilling to get on my back to place the jack where the notches near the wheel were located- both because of fear of being hit by an ambulance and fear that I might not be able to get up once I was lying down- I could not find a place on the body where the jack actually lifted the car enough to take the wheel off. The jack worked; the car rose, but the wheel remained on the ground.
After twenty minutes of futile jack raising, which had me pissed off and pouring sweat. A big triple A truck arrived and a heavyset white guy, about forty years old, with sandy hair and a couple of teeth missing, got out and walked up to me
“Are you fucking crazy!” he said, “Why are you changing a tire when you have Triple A. You are told old for this shit!”
After telling him that I was an old Brooklyn ballplayer who couldn’t accept the fact that I was getting old, I settled in to help him change the tire, which wasn’t that easy.
“Ralph” the name I will give him, had his own jack and lug wrench, but the car still wouldn’t rise high enough for the tire to leave the ground, so he had to use my jack to raise the axel while his raised the body. All of this took about 20 minutes and all of it was while he was flat on his back on a Styrofoam pad he brought with him
“Shit that was hard” I told him when he had finished, putting a twenty dollar bill into his palm for going the extra mile to help me. “ I wouldn’t have been able to do that myself, not with the bad back and hip I have.”
“Shit, it ain’t easy for me either,” Ralph said, “I have a hernia the size of a grapefruit that I have to hold in with my hands when I cough, but I hate doctors and hospitals so I just live with it.”
The subject of doctors and hospitals unleashed a torrent of commentary from me about my own mistrust of our medical system and before you knew it Ralph and I were trading stories about how hard it was to get out of bed and get dressed before starting our day
“In addition to my hernia,”Ralph said,” I have carpal tunnel in both hands, a bad back, bad knees, and bad shoulders, all it from getting on the ground and changing tires all day. I have been doing this for nineteen years and it gets harder every year. It takes me a half an hour to get out of bed in the morning and another fifteen minutes in a hot shower to get me loose enough to get dressed. I live on Advil”
“I take my hat off to you.” I said. “I work in a fucking office and it sometimes hard to cope with my ailments. But you’ve got to use every injured part of your body eight ten times a day. How long can you keep this up?.”
“I’ll do it until I can’t anymore,” Ralph said. “This is all I know how to do. It sucks, but I got a house, a family and bills to pay. So I do this till I drop, or until I can’t get out of bed at all.”
“Well friend, good luck to you,” I said as Ralph got in his truck and drove off,
I had just gotten a window into something most people in my position don’t see- the incredible skill and courage many working people display every day on their jobs, and the toll those jobs take place on their body. Auto repair people, sanitation workers, people who repair roads and bridges, construction workers, people who fix elevators, rooves and train tracks, all probably have stories just like Ralph’s. Without them, there is no Wall Street, no Universities, no advertising agencies and flagship stores, no theaters, no restaurants and hotels- there is no glamour , no luxury, no art and no life of the mind.
We who work in finance, in education, in social service, easily forget that, until something happens that reminds us we need people to fix things and keep our homes and schools and cars and buildings and roads in good repair.
Although we like to think it’s disappeared, a large part of the working class in this country still consists of people who work with their hands and do hard physical labor, They help keep the country going and make our own lives possible. And if Ralph is a fair example, they desperately need better health care than they are getting now.
Mark Naison April 2, 2010
Friday, March 5, 2010
Why Sports History is American History
Why Sports History Is American History
Mark Naison
Professor of African American Studies and History
Fordham University
During a forty year career of teaching African-American and American History, I have often used examples from sports to explain key events in American history, or to explore how people in American society have grappled with and racial, ethnic and regional differences in our very diverse nation Whether it is assigning a book on Jack Johnson so explain the nationalization of white supremacy during the Jim Crow Era, to using the movie “Cinderella Man” ( on heavyweight champion James Braddock who was living on relief a year before he won the title) to show how much American families were under stress during the great Depression, to examining the experience of Muhammed Ali to show how American society was divided during the Vietnam War, I have found sports history to be a tremendously valuable tool to bring American history to life
This is not just because, like some of my students, I am a sports fan and (former) competitive athlete. It is because professional and college sports, from the late 19th Century to the present have served as one of the nation’s most powerful community building institutions, helping define American identity, on the grass roots, level as powerfully as our political system, our broadcast media, or Hollywood film. In huge and diverse nation experiencing waves of immigration, struggling with bitter racial divisions, and undergoing a pace of economic change unmatched by any society in the world, sports have provided many Americans with a visceral connection to America’s lived traditions and cultural values while providing them with a much needed escape from the hardships of their daily lives.
Take an event like the Super Bowl. If you had a friend visiting from another country, what better way to give a four hour primer on American culture than watching that game and the spectacle surrounding it. Here are classic themes in American civilization on display in dramatic form- the creative tension between individual striving and team destiny, the fascination with violence and courage in the face of adversity; the glorification of the citizen as consumer, the love of gimmicks and new technologies which highlight the nation’s wealth, and less felicitously, the use of scantily clad women ( in this case cheerleaders) to market products, and the racial divisions symbolized by the spectacle of an almost all white stadium audience watching almost black teams play a dangerous and violent game. This is American society on display, with all its grandeur, power and imperfections, broadcast in a way that commands the attention of almost every person in the nation. Is this any less worthy of historical investigation than Congressional debates over health care reform or of policies of Wall Street financial firms that helped destabilize the economy. The Super Bowl, like many sports events throughout our history, provides important insights into how we think and how we live, how we entertain ourselves, and how we gather together to celebrate and affirm who we are.
In the short essay that follows, I would like to offer some reflections on what I think are three key dimensions of sports in American history- its role in socializing and Americanizing immigrants and their children; its role in marginalizing African Americans in the Jim Crow Era, and then giving Blacks a platform from which to challenge their subordination, and its shattering of gender norms on the field without challenging the eroticization of women in the sports marketplace. To make the discussion more accessible, I will combining historical analysis with reflections on some of my own experiences as and athlete, coach, parent and sports fan
The role of sports in Americanizing immigrants has been written about extensively by historians and journalists. Professional boxing and baseball, both of which achieved heightened popularity at the dawn of the 20th Century, became important vehicles by which successful waves of immigrants marked their progress in American society. The hero making machinery of these two sports, enhanced first by mass circulating newspapers, then by radio, allowed for individuals from immigrant backgrounds to achieve the status of popular culture icons even while the majority of their ethnic cohorts struggled with poverty and marginality. For European immigrants, even those from Eastern and Southern Europe, sports, pervaded with an ethos of “fair play” and open competition, proved far more accessible to talented immigrant youth than the nation’s banks, corporations and universities where discrimination was often masked behind “gentleman’s agreements,” and where progress in breaking barriers was often painfully slow. Figures like boxers John O Sullivan, Jim Corbett, Benny Leonard and Rocky Marciano and baseball players like Joe DiMaggio and Hank Greenberg became symbolic representatives of the potential of Irish, Italian and Jewish Americans to win success and acceptance in a nation that had often looked upon their presence with suspicion.. And this filtered down to the neighborhood level where the American born children of immigrants seized upon sports as a surefire way of affirming their American identities and opening up opportunities for economic and educational success
The belief in sports as a true bastion of “democracy” was alive and well in the Brooklyn neighborhood I grew up in during the 1950’s- Crown Heights. In a community where 95% of the people were Jewish and Italian ( I didn’t meet a white Protestant until I was 8 years old!) and where the older generation spoke little or no English, sports assumed almost religious significance among English speaking boys and men. The men of my father’s generation not only discussed sports constantly, on street corners, in bars and at the dinner table, they bet on sports events, ranging from horse racing to boxing, to basketball, through the bookie who was a fixture outside the corner candy store. As for the boys I grew up, sports totally dominated our horizons.We fanatically followed the three New York baseball teams, the Dodgers, Yankees and Giants and tried to model ourselves on the three centerfielders on those teams, Willie Mays, Duke Snider and Mickey Mantle.When we reached our teens, we practiced basketball even more, aware that many older guys in our neighborhood were playing on high school teams and some had gotten scholarships to play in college. We watched Sunday pro football and the Friday night fights, practicing the moves we saw there in the sometimes brutal fights we had in alleys and occasionally in school, and in equally brutal sandlot football games. But the thing I most remember about all of the games watched and played was the sense that America was ours for the conquering; that if we got good enough at our sport, there was no height to which we couldn’t ascend because people named Gordon and Koufax and Furillo and Rizzuto and Berra were at the pinnacle of professional sports and people just like them were stars at every Brooklyn high school. Did we think this way about Presidents and Senators, Mayors and members of Congress? I doubt it. None of us knew anyone who had succeeded in politics or even had run for office. But if anyone has asked us did we believe in American Democracy, all of us would have said “yes” without the slightest hesitation and we would have pointed to sports as proof that America was the land of opportunity for people just like us.
If anyone had asked us, we would probably have said, looking at the teams and athletes we rooted for, that American Democracy applied to Blacks as much as it did to Jews and Italians. Living seven blocks from Ebbets Field, and coming of age a full ten years after the Dodgers broke major league baseball’s color line, we marveled at the exploits of Dodger stars Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe, and despite hating the Giants, all tried to make basket catches in the style of Willie Mays. Of equal significance to the basketball fanatics among us,, many of the great high school players in Brooklyn in that era were Black, as were some of the participants in our schoolyard games, and we looked on NBA players like Elgin Baylor, Oscar Robertson and Bill Russell as models for our developing games, which we hoped would take us to college stardom.
But as I would learn much later,, meritocracy and fair play were concepts which were more exceptions than the rule for African Americans for most of American history. During the first half of the Twentieth Century, African Americans, no matter their talent level, were barred from participating in most professional sports leagues, and were unable to play on most college and recreational teams. Whereas children of European immigrants, when they Americanized, were welcomed in virtually all spheres of American sports, African Americans were viewed as a stigmatized lower caste whose very presence would lower the prestige of any team they were on.. Nowhere was this caste system more visible than in major league baseball, which drew the color line from the first “World Series” in 1903 till Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. This was not because African Americans didn’t play baseball at the highest level, or because white players and coaches weren’t aware of their talent. At the turn of the century, baseball was the single most popular sport in Black communities throughout the nation, and the pool of Black talent was deep and strong. The best white major leaguers knew this because they competed against the best Black players in winter leagues in Cuba, where the Black players more than held their own, and in sandlot games against black teams played in the off season. You cannot find a clearer example than major baseball of how racial segregation violated every principle of equal opportunity and fair play which Americans claim to cherish. Unlike European immigrants who were encouraged to think that they could go as far in America as their talents and effort would take them, Blacks were told that their racial identity would always trump their talents, and that no matter how hard they worked they would always be treated as inferiors. To the shame of all who love the purity of athletic competition, Sports in America were used to convey that awful message.
Fortunately, tensions between idealistic visions of American Democracy and the ugly reality of Color Caste could not be contained forever and over time, sports would become an importan arena in which this caste segregation was subverted. In the 1930’s, boxing and track and field, two sports in which segregation was never as complete as it was in baseball, produced two Black athletes who became genuine American sports heroes, Jesse Owens and Joe Louis. In each instance, the moment of their coronation was a competition in which they beat athletes from an ascendant Nazi Germany, whose racial theories marked stigmatized much of America’s immigrant population as racial inferiors. Because of this, Jesse Owens victories at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and Joe Louis 1938 victory over Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium, marked the first time in American history that large numbers of white Americans perceived a Black athlete as fighting for them, and joyously celebrated their victory. And it was these moments which helped set the stage for the gradual steps taken by coaches at schools like NYU and UCLA and City College of New York to recruit black players for their football and basketball teams, and for the much bigger step taken by Branch Rickey to integrate major league baseball.
But the one thing to keep in mind, when charting the gradual integration of college and professional sports was that it was changes in the political climate in the nation and the world that cracked open segregated sports, not some miraculous growth in the talent level of black players. All throughout the 1930’s and into the 1940’s, before integration took place, the best white major league baseball players and the best white professional basketball players were competing against Black players, usually on all Black teams, and often losing! In the early 1930’s, the legendary New York Celtics basketball team, which was all white, played many games against the Harlem Renaissance Five, who were all black, and lost as many games as they won. Later in the decade, the Harlem Globetrotters, whose skill level was as impressive as their comedy, won the majority of their games against professional teams. The same thing was true in contests between barnstorming groups of major league players and Black teams like the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Homestead Grays. Satchel Paige was a legendary figure among white major leaguers well before he was signed to play for the Cleveland Indians in 1948 and there wasn’t a white player who competed against him who didn’t think that if the color line broke, he would be an instant star.
As historians, there is no better way to teach our students about the creation and destruction of the color line in 20th Century America than to draw examples from the history of race in sports, a history which is now richly documented in biographies, historical works, novels and documentary film,
The history of how gender barriers were broken in sports follows a somewhat different trajectory than the breaking of racial barriers. For women, the story is not about how female sports talent was kept out of competition, it is of a powerful, overarching gender system that kept female sports talent from developing on the grounds that such talent would masculinize women. For most of the twentieth century, women were socialized, in families, schools, and the media to think that competitive sports were a male domain, and were given few opportunities to develop athletic talent. It was not until the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, and the passage of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that women as an organized political force, began to define sports participation as a women’s rights issue and insist that girls have the same opportunity to participate in sports as boys. And it is through protests, and legal challenges, and struggles fought by women and men in families and communities that girls and women’s sports have expanded to become an integral part of organized athletics from the school to the university level as well as in neighborhood and recreational leagues.
How dramatic, and how recent this change is can be demonstrated by what took place within my own family. All my life, I was a competitive athlete, and I ended up as captain of my high school and college tennis teams. By contrast, my wife Liz, who is every bit as good an athlete as I am, never had a chance to play organized sports in school. She became an expert skier and swimmer, but when it came to school, the only team available was field hockey, so she put her energies into cheerleading, where her cartwheels and spins got her made captain of the squad. When Liz and I got married, we both, as committed feminists, agreed that if we had a daughter, I should teach her everything I knew about sports, so when my daughter Sara was born in 1977, I did exactly that. I started teaching her to throw hit and catch from the time she was 2 years old and when she was five, I took her down to the church
across the street and signed her up for baseball. When it became clear to everyone who watched her, that she could throw hit and catch as well as any boy, a whole world opened up, not only for Sara, but for other girls in the neighborhood. Sara ended up playing baseball, basketball and soccer on mostly boys teams, first in our neighborhood, then on teams that travelled around Brooklyn, sometimes being cheered, sometimes provoking protests. When she was ten, the boys CYO team she played on won the Brooklyn CYO championship with her as the starting off guard, and the coaches secretly got together, the next season, to ban girls from boys basketball. By going to the papers, we overturned the ban. But irrespective of Sara’s situation, girls sports in Brooklyn was a juggernaut that couldn’t be stopped. By the time Sara was 14, girls softball, basketball and soccer leagues had sprung up all over Brooklyn, and girls now had the choice of either playing with boys, or playing on all girls team. And school and college sports kept pace. By the time
Sara was applying to college, most American colleges, thanks to Title IX challenges and lawsuits, had as many girls teams as boys teams and Sara had a choice of playing college basketball, softball or tennis. When she chose tennis and ended up, like her dad, as the captain of her college tennis team, I realized history had come full circle and something of a revolution had taken place in sports and gender. Now a young girl growing up has almost as many sports opportunities as a young boy, and sees models of women athletes all around her, in her school and her neighborhood and on television.
But as with race and sports, it would be too soon to declare the revolution is over and we can declare victory. While sports and fitness have become women’s domains to a degree unimaginable to past generations, the most popular and highly publicized professional sports, football, baseball and basketball, remain overwhelmingly male domains where women are often presented as prizes of competition, the bare midriffs and cleavage of the cheerleaders reminders of the reward that awaits the male athlete when his athletic labors are over. Today, in American sports, the woman as eroticized object coexists with the image of woman as ferocious competitor, creating a tension which some might find exciting, but others confusing and demoralizing. Nowhere is this polarity dramatized more than in the “Swimsuit Issue” of Sports Illustrated, the single most popular issue of any magazine published in the United States, where women are marketed as sex objects for a predominantly male readership. That there is nothing comparable for women goes without saying. What is a young girl to think? For whom is she developing her physical talents? And to what end? That her athletic talents are now respected is gratifying, but when it comes to men and sports, is it still all about sex? Where is real equality? Or is that an illusion too?
These questions, as disturbing as they might be, remind us of the excitement that awaits us, as teachers, as we use sports to reveal important themes in American history and culture. There is no point of entry into American culture and civilization that will tell us more about how our fellow citizens think and live and imagine themselves than sports, and we now have great books and films as sources to reveal those mysteries. Hopefully, the articles to follow will serve as resources for you in your teaching, and incentives for future research. Let the games begin!
Mark Naison
February 16, 2010
Mark Naison
Professor of African American Studies and History
Fordham University
During a forty year career of teaching African-American and American History, I have often used examples from sports to explain key events in American history, or to explore how people in American society have grappled with and racial, ethnic and regional differences in our very diverse nation Whether it is assigning a book on Jack Johnson so explain the nationalization of white supremacy during the Jim Crow Era, to using the movie “Cinderella Man” ( on heavyweight champion James Braddock who was living on relief a year before he won the title) to show how much American families were under stress during the great Depression, to examining the experience of Muhammed Ali to show how American society was divided during the Vietnam War, I have found sports history to be a tremendously valuable tool to bring American history to life
This is not just because, like some of my students, I am a sports fan and (former) competitive athlete. It is because professional and college sports, from the late 19th Century to the present have served as one of the nation’s most powerful community building institutions, helping define American identity, on the grass roots, level as powerfully as our political system, our broadcast media, or Hollywood film. In huge and diverse nation experiencing waves of immigration, struggling with bitter racial divisions, and undergoing a pace of economic change unmatched by any society in the world, sports have provided many Americans with a visceral connection to America’s lived traditions and cultural values while providing them with a much needed escape from the hardships of their daily lives.
Take an event like the Super Bowl. If you had a friend visiting from another country, what better way to give a four hour primer on American culture than watching that game and the spectacle surrounding it. Here are classic themes in American civilization on display in dramatic form- the creative tension between individual striving and team destiny, the fascination with violence and courage in the face of adversity; the glorification of the citizen as consumer, the love of gimmicks and new technologies which highlight the nation’s wealth, and less felicitously, the use of scantily clad women ( in this case cheerleaders) to market products, and the racial divisions symbolized by the spectacle of an almost all white stadium audience watching almost black teams play a dangerous and violent game. This is American society on display, with all its grandeur, power and imperfections, broadcast in a way that commands the attention of almost every person in the nation. Is this any less worthy of historical investigation than Congressional debates over health care reform or of policies of Wall Street financial firms that helped destabilize the economy. The Super Bowl, like many sports events throughout our history, provides important insights into how we think and how we live, how we entertain ourselves, and how we gather together to celebrate and affirm who we are.
In the short essay that follows, I would like to offer some reflections on what I think are three key dimensions of sports in American history- its role in socializing and Americanizing immigrants and their children; its role in marginalizing African Americans in the Jim Crow Era, and then giving Blacks a platform from which to challenge their subordination, and its shattering of gender norms on the field without challenging the eroticization of women in the sports marketplace. To make the discussion more accessible, I will combining historical analysis with reflections on some of my own experiences as and athlete, coach, parent and sports fan
The role of sports in Americanizing immigrants has been written about extensively by historians and journalists. Professional boxing and baseball, both of which achieved heightened popularity at the dawn of the 20th Century, became important vehicles by which successful waves of immigrants marked their progress in American society. The hero making machinery of these two sports, enhanced first by mass circulating newspapers, then by radio, allowed for individuals from immigrant backgrounds to achieve the status of popular culture icons even while the majority of their ethnic cohorts struggled with poverty and marginality. For European immigrants, even those from Eastern and Southern Europe, sports, pervaded with an ethos of “fair play” and open competition, proved far more accessible to talented immigrant youth than the nation’s banks, corporations and universities where discrimination was often masked behind “gentleman’s agreements,” and where progress in breaking barriers was often painfully slow. Figures like boxers John O Sullivan, Jim Corbett, Benny Leonard and Rocky Marciano and baseball players like Joe DiMaggio and Hank Greenberg became symbolic representatives of the potential of Irish, Italian and Jewish Americans to win success and acceptance in a nation that had often looked upon their presence with suspicion.. And this filtered down to the neighborhood level where the American born children of immigrants seized upon sports as a surefire way of affirming their American identities and opening up opportunities for economic and educational success
The belief in sports as a true bastion of “democracy” was alive and well in the Brooklyn neighborhood I grew up in during the 1950’s- Crown Heights. In a community where 95% of the people were Jewish and Italian ( I didn’t meet a white Protestant until I was 8 years old!) and where the older generation spoke little or no English, sports assumed almost religious significance among English speaking boys and men. The men of my father’s generation not only discussed sports constantly, on street corners, in bars and at the dinner table, they bet on sports events, ranging from horse racing to boxing, to basketball, through the bookie who was a fixture outside the corner candy store. As for the boys I grew up, sports totally dominated our horizons.We fanatically followed the three New York baseball teams, the Dodgers, Yankees and Giants and tried to model ourselves on the three centerfielders on those teams, Willie Mays, Duke Snider and Mickey Mantle.When we reached our teens, we practiced basketball even more, aware that many older guys in our neighborhood were playing on high school teams and some had gotten scholarships to play in college. We watched Sunday pro football and the Friday night fights, practicing the moves we saw there in the sometimes brutal fights we had in alleys and occasionally in school, and in equally brutal sandlot football games. But the thing I most remember about all of the games watched and played was the sense that America was ours for the conquering; that if we got good enough at our sport, there was no height to which we couldn’t ascend because people named Gordon and Koufax and Furillo and Rizzuto and Berra were at the pinnacle of professional sports and people just like them were stars at every Brooklyn high school. Did we think this way about Presidents and Senators, Mayors and members of Congress? I doubt it. None of us knew anyone who had succeeded in politics or even had run for office. But if anyone has asked us did we believe in American Democracy, all of us would have said “yes” without the slightest hesitation and we would have pointed to sports as proof that America was the land of opportunity for people just like us.
If anyone had asked us, we would probably have said, looking at the teams and athletes we rooted for, that American Democracy applied to Blacks as much as it did to Jews and Italians. Living seven blocks from Ebbets Field, and coming of age a full ten years after the Dodgers broke major league baseball’s color line, we marveled at the exploits of Dodger stars Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe, and despite hating the Giants, all tried to make basket catches in the style of Willie Mays. Of equal significance to the basketball fanatics among us,, many of the great high school players in Brooklyn in that era were Black, as were some of the participants in our schoolyard games, and we looked on NBA players like Elgin Baylor, Oscar Robertson and Bill Russell as models for our developing games, which we hoped would take us to college stardom.
But as I would learn much later,, meritocracy and fair play were concepts which were more exceptions than the rule for African Americans for most of American history. During the first half of the Twentieth Century, African Americans, no matter their talent level, were barred from participating in most professional sports leagues, and were unable to play on most college and recreational teams. Whereas children of European immigrants, when they Americanized, were welcomed in virtually all spheres of American sports, African Americans were viewed as a stigmatized lower caste whose very presence would lower the prestige of any team they were on.. Nowhere was this caste system more visible than in major league baseball, which drew the color line from the first “World Series” in 1903 till Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. This was not because African Americans didn’t play baseball at the highest level, or because white players and coaches weren’t aware of their talent. At the turn of the century, baseball was the single most popular sport in Black communities throughout the nation, and the pool of Black talent was deep and strong. The best white major leaguers knew this because they competed against the best Black players in winter leagues in Cuba, where the Black players more than held their own, and in sandlot games against black teams played in the off season. You cannot find a clearer example than major baseball of how racial segregation violated every principle of equal opportunity and fair play which Americans claim to cherish. Unlike European immigrants who were encouraged to think that they could go as far in America as their talents and effort would take them, Blacks were told that their racial identity would always trump their talents, and that no matter how hard they worked they would always be treated as inferiors. To the shame of all who love the purity of athletic competition, Sports in America were used to convey that awful message.
Fortunately, tensions between idealistic visions of American Democracy and the ugly reality of Color Caste could not be contained forever and over time, sports would become an importan arena in which this caste segregation was subverted. In the 1930’s, boxing and track and field, two sports in which segregation was never as complete as it was in baseball, produced two Black athletes who became genuine American sports heroes, Jesse Owens and Joe Louis. In each instance, the moment of their coronation was a competition in which they beat athletes from an ascendant Nazi Germany, whose racial theories marked stigmatized much of America’s immigrant population as racial inferiors. Because of this, Jesse Owens victories at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and Joe Louis 1938 victory over Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium, marked the first time in American history that large numbers of white Americans perceived a Black athlete as fighting for them, and joyously celebrated their victory. And it was these moments which helped set the stage for the gradual steps taken by coaches at schools like NYU and UCLA and City College of New York to recruit black players for their football and basketball teams, and for the much bigger step taken by Branch Rickey to integrate major league baseball.
But the one thing to keep in mind, when charting the gradual integration of college and professional sports was that it was changes in the political climate in the nation and the world that cracked open segregated sports, not some miraculous growth in the talent level of black players. All throughout the 1930’s and into the 1940’s, before integration took place, the best white major league baseball players and the best white professional basketball players were competing against Black players, usually on all Black teams, and often losing! In the early 1930’s, the legendary New York Celtics basketball team, which was all white, played many games against the Harlem Renaissance Five, who were all black, and lost as many games as they won. Later in the decade, the Harlem Globetrotters, whose skill level was as impressive as their comedy, won the majority of their games against professional teams. The same thing was true in contests between barnstorming groups of major league players and Black teams like the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Homestead Grays. Satchel Paige was a legendary figure among white major leaguers well before he was signed to play for the Cleveland Indians in 1948 and there wasn’t a white player who competed against him who didn’t think that if the color line broke, he would be an instant star.
As historians, there is no better way to teach our students about the creation and destruction of the color line in 20th Century America than to draw examples from the history of race in sports, a history which is now richly documented in biographies, historical works, novels and documentary film,
The history of how gender barriers were broken in sports follows a somewhat different trajectory than the breaking of racial barriers. For women, the story is not about how female sports talent was kept out of competition, it is of a powerful, overarching gender system that kept female sports talent from developing on the grounds that such talent would masculinize women. For most of the twentieth century, women were socialized, in families, schools, and the media to think that competitive sports were a male domain, and were given few opportunities to develop athletic talent. It was not until the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, and the passage of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that women as an organized political force, began to define sports participation as a women’s rights issue and insist that girls have the same opportunity to participate in sports as boys. And it is through protests, and legal challenges, and struggles fought by women and men in families and communities that girls and women’s sports have expanded to become an integral part of organized athletics from the school to the university level as well as in neighborhood and recreational leagues.
How dramatic, and how recent this change is can be demonstrated by what took place within my own family. All my life, I was a competitive athlete, and I ended up as captain of my high school and college tennis teams. By contrast, my wife Liz, who is every bit as good an athlete as I am, never had a chance to play organized sports in school. She became an expert skier and swimmer, but when it came to school, the only team available was field hockey, so she put her energies into cheerleading, where her cartwheels and spins got her made captain of the squad. When Liz and I got married, we both, as committed feminists, agreed that if we had a daughter, I should teach her everything I knew about sports, so when my daughter Sara was born in 1977, I did exactly that. I started teaching her to throw hit and catch from the time she was 2 years old and when she was five, I took her down to the church
across the street and signed her up for baseball. When it became clear to everyone who watched her, that she could throw hit and catch as well as any boy, a whole world opened up, not only for Sara, but for other girls in the neighborhood. Sara ended up playing baseball, basketball and soccer on mostly boys teams, first in our neighborhood, then on teams that travelled around Brooklyn, sometimes being cheered, sometimes provoking protests. When she was ten, the boys CYO team she played on won the Brooklyn CYO championship with her as the starting off guard, and the coaches secretly got together, the next season, to ban girls from boys basketball. By going to the papers, we overturned the ban. But irrespective of Sara’s situation, girls sports in Brooklyn was a juggernaut that couldn’t be stopped. By the time Sara was 14, girls softball, basketball and soccer leagues had sprung up all over Brooklyn, and girls now had the choice of either playing with boys, or playing on all girls team. And school and college sports kept pace. By the time
Sara was applying to college, most American colleges, thanks to Title IX challenges and lawsuits, had as many girls teams as boys teams and Sara had a choice of playing college basketball, softball or tennis. When she chose tennis and ended up, like her dad, as the captain of her college tennis team, I realized history had come full circle and something of a revolution had taken place in sports and gender. Now a young girl growing up has almost as many sports opportunities as a young boy, and sees models of women athletes all around her, in her school and her neighborhood and on television.
But as with race and sports, it would be too soon to declare the revolution is over and we can declare victory. While sports and fitness have become women’s domains to a degree unimaginable to past generations, the most popular and highly publicized professional sports, football, baseball and basketball, remain overwhelmingly male domains where women are often presented as prizes of competition, the bare midriffs and cleavage of the cheerleaders reminders of the reward that awaits the male athlete when his athletic labors are over. Today, in American sports, the woman as eroticized object coexists with the image of woman as ferocious competitor, creating a tension which some might find exciting, but others confusing and demoralizing. Nowhere is this polarity dramatized more than in the “Swimsuit Issue” of Sports Illustrated, the single most popular issue of any magazine published in the United States, where women are marketed as sex objects for a predominantly male readership. That there is nothing comparable for women goes without saying. What is a young girl to think? For whom is she developing her physical talents? And to what end? That her athletic talents are now respected is gratifying, but when it comes to men and sports, is it still all about sex? Where is real equality? Or is that an illusion too?
These questions, as disturbing as they might be, remind us of the excitement that awaits us, as teachers, as we use sports to reveal important themes in American history and culture. There is no point of entry into American culture and civilization that will tell us more about how our fellow citizens think and live and imagine themselves than sports, and we now have great books and films as sources to reveal those mysteries. Hopefully, the articles to follow will serve as resources for you in your teaching, and incentives for future research. Let the games begin!
Mark Naison
February 16, 2010
Monday, March 1, 2010
Hiding Elite Athletes: How Academic Departments Can Be Complicit in Undermining Academic Integrity
Hiding Elite Athletes: How Academic Departments Can Be Complicit in Undermining Academic Integrity
Mark Naison, Chair, African and African American Studies
Whenever athletic scandals erupt at major universities, whether it be the University of Tennessee, Florida State University, or SUNY Binghampton, several conditions are usually present
First, the University administration makes a major financial commitment to achieve national success in sports and declares this to be an institutional priority
Second, the University agrees to admit students whose academic profile is far below the University norm if they will help teams in high profile sports win.
Third, the University puts pressure on its Academic Advising Staff to use any and all means to make sure that high profile athletes are eligible to compete, including having assignments written, or tests taken, by surrogates.
Fourth, the University identifies institutions which offer correspondence courses or on line courses which athletes may take to receive college credits, and approves those credits without investigating whether the courses are legitimate or the athletes are the ones actually doing the work
Fifth, the University identifies Departments and individual faculty members who support the University’s sports initiative and are willing to allow elite athletes to get course credits without meeting the normal attendance criteria or submitting the work normally required in the courses they offer.
As a faculty member and a Department chair, it is the fifth of these conditions that I find most disturbing. Wherever academically unprepared and, at times, functionally illiterate athletes, are admitted to Universities and receive high enough grades to maintain their eligibility, some members of the faculty are giving athletes grades they don’t earn, or offering them tutorials and independent studies which allow them to circumvent normal academic requirements.
At SUNY Binghampton, the Department that served that purpose was the Department of Human Development, chaired by a person who also was a faculty member in Africana Studies.
Which brings us to college athletics dirty little SECRET- that the vast majority of academically unprepared athletes being brought into elite programs are African Americans, and that the rationale for their admission is often phrased in terms of a mission of social uplift, namely, giving young people from underprivileged backgrounds a chance to get a college education
It is on such grounds that faculty members in African American Studies and Africana Studies are often approached by University administrators to help academically marginal athletes remain in school. And the appeal is often seductive, especially at schools where the number of African American male students who are not athletes are extremely small.
However, at Fordham, such an appeal will not work
The faculty of the Department of African and African American Studies is, to a person, opposed to admitting academically unprepared student athletes or for watering down our courses to allow them to remain eligible. All of our courses have heavily workloads which we categorically refuse to modify to accommodate elite athletes. If the Athletic Department or Athletic Advising Office wishes to find a place where basketball players can “catch a break,” African American Studies at Fordham is the last place they should look
It is possible that Fordham can arrive at the best of all possible outcomes- achieving respectability in Men’s Basketball without watering down our academic standards or sacrificing academic integrity.
But we as faculty cannot just stand by and allow the academic progress of athletes to be an issue determined by other parties.
It is the Faculty’s responsibility, both individually and collectively, to make sure that if we do achieve basketball success at Fordham, we do it the right way.
Our vigilance is Fordham’s best defense against the kind of scandal that befell one of the nation’s best public universities- SUNY Binghamton.
Mark Naison
March 1, 2010
Mark Naison, Chair, African and African American Studies
Whenever athletic scandals erupt at major universities, whether it be the University of Tennessee, Florida State University, or SUNY Binghampton, several conditions are usually present
First, the University administration makes a major financial commitment to achieve national success in sports and declares this to be an institutional priority
Second, the University agrees to admit students whose academic profile is far below the University norm if they will help teams in high profile sports win.
Third, the University puts pressure on its Academic Advising Staff to use any and all means to make sure that high profile athletes are eligible to compete, including having assignments written, or tests taken, by surrogates.
Fourth, the University identifies institutions which offer correspondence courses or on line courses which athletes may take to receive college credits, and approves those credits without investigating whether the courses are legitimate or the athletes are the ones actually doing the work
Fifth, the University identifies Departments and individual faculty members who support the University’s sports initiative and are willing to allow elite athletes to get course credits without meeting the normal attendance criteria or submitting the work normally required in the courses they offer.
As a faculty member and a Department chair, it is the fifth of these conditions that I find most disturbing. Wherever academically unprepared and, at times, functionally illiterate athletes, are admitted to Universities and receive high enough grades to maintain their eligibility, some members of the faculty are giving athletes grades they don’t earn, or offering them tutorials and independent studies which allow them to circumvent normal academic requirements.
At SUNY Binghampton, the Department that served that purpose was the Department of Human Development, chaired by a person who also was a faculty member in Africana Studies.
Which brings us to college athletics dirty little SECRET- that the vast majority of academically unprepared athletes being brought into elite programs are African Americans, and that the rationale for their admission is often phrased in terms of a mission of social uplift, namely, giving young people from underprivileged backgrounds a chance to get a college education
It is on such grounds that faculty members in African American Studies and Africana Studies are often approached by University administrators to help academically marginal athletes remain in school. And the appeal is often seductive, especially at schools where the number of African American male students who are not athletes are extremely small.
However, at Fordham, such an appeal will not work
The faculty of the Department of African and African American Studies is, to a person, opposed to admitting academically unprepared student athletes or for watering down our courses to allow them to remain eligible. All of our courses have heavily workloads which we categorically refuse to modify to accommodate elite athletes. If the Athletic Department or Athletic Advising Office wishes to find a place where basketball players can “catch a break,” African American Studies at Fordham is the last place they should look
It is possible that Fordham can arrive at the best of all possible outcomes- achieving respectability in Men’s Basketball without watering down our academic standards or sacrificing academic integrity.
But we as faculty cannot just stand by and allow the academic progress of athletes to be an issue determined by other parties.
It is the Faculty’s responsibility, both individually and collectively, to make sure that if we do achieve basketball success at Fordham, we do it the right way.
Our vigilance is Fordham’s best defense against the kind of scandal that befell one of the nation’s best public universities- SUNY Binghamton.
Mark Naison
March 1, 2010
Thursday, December 24, 2009
What I REALLY Want for Christmas
Friends
Christmas in my family is a great holiday, and people are really generous, but most of the things I want are things they can't give
Below is the list of things I REALLY want for Christmas. I am not sure I am going to get any of them, but if never hurts to ask
What I REALLY Want for Christmas
1. A New Body, With Joints that Don't Ache
2. Health Care Legislation that Has a Public Option, And Provides Real Competition to the Insurance Companies
3. An Educational Reform Movement That Is Led By Teachers, Not Bankers and Lawyers! What A Concept!
4. The Passage of Medical Marijuana Legislation in All 50 States of the Union, Especially New York!
5. The Immediate Reopening of the Night Centers, After School Centers and Music Programs in the New York Public Schools That Were Shut Down in the Fiscal Crisis of the 70's
6. The Release of All Non-Violent Prisoners from the Nation's Jails and Prisons and Their Enrollment in Schools and Drug Treatment Programs
7. The Immediate Approval of Domestic Partner Benefits for Faculty and Staff at Fordham and All Other Jesuit Universities.
8. The Conversation of Abandoned and Partially Occupied Luxury Buildings in New York and Other Cities into Affordable Housing
9. The Rehiring of Park Recreation Supervisors at All NYC Vest Pocket Parks, Another Position Eliminated in the Fiscal Crisis of the 70's
10. Hiring the Indigo Girls and Parliament Funkadelic to Perform at This Year's Spring Weekend at Fordham
11. An African Music Festival at Yankee Stadium That Brings Together the Best Afican Rappers and Musicians from Africa, Europe, the US and Candada
12. That There Be a DJ at Fordham Graduation and Students March To Their Seats to the Sounds of "Flashlight" and " Thank You Fa Letting Me Be Myself Again":
13. That Fordham Adopt Roosevelt High School Across the Street and Use All Of Its Resources to See That Students There Get a Great Education
14. That the Next Big White House Event Be Catered By Johnson's BBQ
15. That Oprah Do a Feature on PS 140 and "Books in the Hood," Two of the South Bronx' Greatest Institutions, That Are Doing Wonders for the People of That Community
16. That American Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan Be Brought Home Before the End of 1010, and that All My Brothers and Sisters in Uniform Be Out of Harms Way
17. That All My Wonderful Students, Past and Present, and the Equally Wonderful People I Have Met in My Bronx Research, Find Jobs In the Fields They Are Trained For
18. That Americans Realize They Are Part of the Global Community and Act Like They Are Its Members, Not Its Rulers
19. That All My Friends- And People Around the World- Know Love and Peace and Happiness in the Coming Year
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Christmas in my family is a great holiday, and people are really generous, but most of the things I want are things they can't give
Below is the list of things I REALLY want for Christmas. I am not sure I am going to get any of them, but if never hurts to ask
What I REALLY Want for Christmas
1. A New Body, With Joints that Don't Ache
2. Health Care Legislation that Has a Public Option, And Provides Real Competition to the Insurance Companies
3. An Educational Reform Movement That Is Led By Teachers, Not Bankers and Lawyers! What A Concept!
4. The Passage of Medical Marijuana Legislation in All 50 States of the Union, Especially New York!
5. The Immediate Reopening of the Night Centers, After School Centers and Music Programs in the New York Public Schools That Were Shut Down in the Fiscal Crisis of the 70's
6. The Release of All Non-Violent Prisoners from the Nation's Jails and Prisons and Their Enrollment in Schools and Drug Treatment Programs
7. The Immediate Approval of Domestic Partner Benefits for Faculty and Staff at Fordham and All Other Jesuit Universities.
8. The Conversation of Abandoned and Partially Occupied Luxury Buildings in New York and Other Cities into Affordable Housing
9. The Rehiring of Park Recreation Supervisors at All NYC Vest Pocket Parks, Another Position Eliminated in the Fiscal Crisis of the 70's
10. Hiring the Indigo Girls and Parliament Funkadelic to Perform at This Year's Spring Weekend at Fordham
11. An African Music Festival at Yankee Stadium That Brings Together the Best Afican Rappers and Musicians from Africa, Europe, the US and Candada
12. That There Be a DJ at Fordham Graduation and Students March To Their Seats to the Sounds of "Flashlight" and " Thank You Fa Letting Me Be Myself Again":
13. That Fordham Adopt Roosevelt High School Across the Street and Use All Of Its Resources to See That Students There Get a Great Education
14. That the Next Big White House Event Be Catered By Johnson's BBQ
15. That Oprah Do a Feature on PS 140 and "Books in the Hood," Two of the South Bronx' Greatest Institutions, That Are Doing Wonders for the People of That Community
16. That American Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan Be Brought Home Before the End of 1010, and that All My Brothers and Sisters in Uniform Be Out of Harms Way
17. That All My Wonderful Students, Past and Present, and the Equally Wonderful People I Have Met in My Bronx Research, Find Jobs In the Fields They Are Trained For
18. That Americans Realize They Are Part of the Global Community and Act Like They Are Its Members, Not Its Rulers
19. That All My Friends- And People Around the World- Know Love and Peace and Happiness in the Coming Year
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