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Crime and Athletes: The New Racial Stereotypes of the 1990's
by Richard E. Lapchick

Special for Society Magazine.

It is ironic that as we turn into the new Millennium, hopeful that change will end the ills such as racism that have plagued our society throughout past centuries, more subtle forms of racism in sport may be infecting American culture.

Polite white society can no longer safely express the stereotypes that so many believe about African-Americans. Nonetheless, surveys show that the majority of whites still believe that most African-Americans are less intelligent, are more likely to use drugs, be violent and are more inclined to be violent against women.

However, sport as it is currently being interpreted, now provides whites with the chance to talk about athletes in a way that reinforces those stereotypes about African-Americans. With African-Americans dominating the sports we watch most often (77 percent of the players in the NBA, 65 percent in the NFL, 15 percent in Major League Baseball (another 25 percent are Latino) 57 percent in NCAA Division I basketball and 47 percent in NCAA Division IA football are African-American), whites tend to "think black" when they think about the major sports.

Many athletes and community leaders believe that the public has been unfairly stereotyping athletes all across America. The latest, and perhaps most dangerous, stereotype, is that playing sport makes athletes more prone to being violent and, especially, gender violent.

Rosalyn Dunlap, an eight-time All-American sprinter who now works on social issues involving athletes, including gender violence prevention, said, "perpetrators are not limited to any category or occupation. The difference is that athletes who rape or batter will end up on TV or in the newspapers. Such images of athletes in trouble create a false and dangerous mindset with heavy racial overtones. Most other perpetrators will be known only to the victims, their families, the police and the courts."

Editor's Note: Dunalp is also the Associate Director for Member Services for the National Consortium for Academics and Sports.

On our predominantly white college campuses, student-athletes are being characterized by overwhelmingly white student bodies and faculties while they are being written about by an, a mostly white male media for a preponderance of white fans.

I recently spoke at an elite academic institution to a group of distinguished international fellows. I asked members of the audience to write down five words they would use to describe American athletes. In addition to listing positive adjectives, not one missed including one of the following words: dumb, violent, rapist or drug-user!

In the past two years, I have met with NBA and NFL players as well as college student-athletes on more than a dozen campuses. There are a lot of angry athletes who are convinced the public is characterizing them because of the criminal acts of a few.

Tom "Satch" Sanders helped the Boston Celtics win eight world championships. Sanders noted, "If they aren't angry about their broad brush depiction, they should be. The spotlight is extremely bright on athletes; their skills have made them both famous and vulnerable. Their prominence means they will take much more heat from the media and the public for similar situations that befall other people with normal lives."

He is now Vice-President for Player Programs for the NBA. That office helps guide players off the court to finish their education, prepare for careers after basketball, and help those that may have problems adjusting to all the attention that goes to NBA stars.

Many American men have grown to dislike athletes. Given the choice, a typical man might want the money and the fame but knows it is unattainable for him. After reading all the negative stories about athletes, he doesn't want to read about Mike Tyson complaining about being treated unfairly when Tyson has made a reported $100 million in his post-release rehabilitation program; or about the large number of pro athletes signing contracts worth more than $10 million a year.

The anger of some white men extends to people who look or act differently than themselves. They are a mini-thought away from making egregious stereotypes about the "other groups" they perceive as stealing their part of the American pie.

Big time athletes fit the "other groups." Whether it is an African-American athlete or coach, or a white coach of African-American athletes, when something goes wrong with a player, the national consequences are likely to be immediate.

Sanders expanded on this. "Everyone feels that athletes have to take the good with the bad, the glory with the negative publicity. However, no one appreciates the broad brush application that is applied in so many instances. Of the few thousand that play sport on the highest level, if four or five individuals in each sport - particularly if they are black - have problems with the law, people won't have long to wait before some media people are talking about all those athletes."

Here is the equation we are dealing with as stereotypes of our athletes are built. Fans, who are mostly white, observe sport through a media filter which is overwhelmingly made up of white men. There are 1,600 daily newspapers in America. There are only four African American sports editors in a city where there are pro franchises and 19 African American columnists. Both numbers, as reported at the recent conference of the National Association of Black Journalists, have almost doubled since 1998 and represent a positive sign. Nonetheless, there are no African American sports writers on 90 percent of the 1,600 papers!

I am not, nor would I ever suggest that most or even many of the white writers are racist. However, they were raised in a culture in which many white people have strong beliefs about what it means to be African-American.

The obvious result is the REINFORCEMENT of white stereotypes of athletes, who are mostly African American in our major sports.

According to the National Opinion Research Center Survey, sponsored by the National Science Foundation for the University of Chicago, whites share the following attitudes:

• 56 percent of whites think African-Americans are more violent
• 62 percent think African-Americans are not as hard working as whites
• 77 percent of whites think most African-Americans live off welfare
• 53 percent think African-Americans are less intelligent

It can be expected that some white writers learned these stereotypes in their own upbringing. When they read about an individual or several athletes who have a problem, it becomes easy to leap to the conclusion that fits the stereotype.

Sanders said, "Blacks in general have been stereotyped for having drugs in the community as well as for being more prone to violence. However, now more than ever before, young black athletes are more individualistic and they resist the 'broad brush.' They insist on being judged as individuals for everything."

But even that resistance can be misinterpreted by the public and writers as merely being off-the-court trash-talking.

SPORTS SPECIFIC PROBLEMS
There are, of course, problems in college and pro sports. For the purposes of this article, I will only deal with those that involve problems and perceptions of athletes.

Our athletes are coming from a generation of despairing youth cut adrift from the American dream. When the Center for the Study of Sport in Society started in 1984, one of it's primary missions was helping youth balance academics and athletics. Now, the issue for youth is balancing life and death.

We are recruiting athletes:

• who have increasingly witnessed violent death. If an American child under the age of 16 is killed every two hours with a handgun, then there is a good chance that our athletes will have a fallen family member or friend. More American children have died from handguns in the last ten years than all the American soldiers who died in Vietnam. Tragedies in places like Paduka, Kentucky and Littleton, Colorado have shown us that violent deaths are not limited to our cities.
• who are mothers and fathers when they get to our schools. There are boys who helped 900,000 teenage girls get pregnant each year so we are increasingly getting student-athletes who will leave our colleges after four years with one or more children who are 4-5 years old.
• who have seen friends or family members devastated by drugs.
• who have seen battering in their home o who were victims of racism in school. Three quarters (75 percent) of all students surveyed by Lou Harris reported seeing or hearing about racially or religiously motivated confrontations with overtones of violence very or somewhat often.
• who come home alone: 57 percent of all American families, black and white alike, are headed by either a single parent or two working parents. We desperately need professionals on our campuses who can deal with these nightmarish factors. The reality is that few campuses or athletic departments have the right people to help guide these young men and women into the 21st Century.

So what are our problems?

ACADEMIC ISSUES IN COLLEGE SPORT
Academically, we get athletes who have literacy problems. The press discusses that student-athletes have literacy problems extensively throughout the year as if it was a problem unique to athletes. However, it is rarely reported - and never in the sports pages - that 30 percent of all entering freshmen must take remedial English or Math. Academically, we get athletes who will not graduate. It is - and always should be- an issue for college athletics to increase the percentages of those who graduate from our colleges. However, the demographics of college have now changed to the point where only 14 percent of entering freshmen graduate in four years. If an athlete does not graduate in four years, some call him dumb; others say the school failed him. Few note that he may be typical of college students.

Don McPherson nearly led Syracuse to a national championship when he was their quarterback in the 1980s. After seven years in the NFL and CFL, McPherson worked until recently directing the Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) Program. MVP is the nation's biggest program using athletes as leaders to address the issue of men's violence against women.

McPherson reflected on the image of intelligence and athletes. "When whites meet an uneducated black athlete who blew opportunities in college or high school, they think he is dumb. They don't question what kind of school he may have had to attend if he was poor, or how time pressures from sport may have affected him. If they don't make it as a pro athlete, they're through without a miracle.

"I met lots of 'Trust Fund Babies' at Syracuse. They blew opportunities. No one called them dumb, just rich. We knew they would not need a miracle to get a second chance.

"I played at Syracuse at a time when being a black quarterback had become more acceptable. But the stereotypes still remained. As a player, people still remember me as a great runner and scrambler. I had not dented their image of the physical vs. intelligent black athlete."

This was in spite of the fact that McPherson led the nation in passing efficiency over Troy Aikman and won the Maxwell Award. He won many awards but Don McPherson was most proud of being the nation's passing efficiency leader.

"I should have shattered the image of the athletic and mobile black quarterback and replaced it with the intelligent black quarterback. Unfortunately, stereotypes of football players, mostly black, still prevail. They make me as angry as all the stereotypes of black people in general when I was growing up."

McPherson wore a suit to class and carried the New York Times under his arm. He was trying to break other images of African American men and athletes. But McPherson said that those whites who recognized his style were both "surprised and said I was 'a good black man' as if I was different from other black men. Most students assumed I was poor and that football was going to make me rich. Like many other blacks on campus, I was middle class. My father was a detective and my mother was a nurse."

There is a common belief that student-athletes, especially those in the revenue sports, have lower graduation rates than students who are not athletes. The facts do not bear this out. Yet it is difficult to get accurate reporting.

Irrespective of color or gender, student-athletes graduate at higher rate than non student-athletes.

• White male Division I student-athletes graduate at a rate of 58 percent vs. 57 percent for white male non-athletes. African-American male Division I student-athletes graduate at a rate of 42 percent vs. 34 percent for African-American male non-athletes.
• White female Division I student-athletes graduate at a rate of 70 percent while 61 percent of white female non-athletes graduate. African American female Division I student-athletes graduate at a rate of 58 vs. only 43 percent of the African-American female non-athletes.

The disparities, however, remain when we compare white to African-American student athletes:

• White male Division I basketball student-athletes graduate at a rate of 52 percent versus a 38 percent graduation rate for African-American male Division I basketball student-athletes, still higher than the 34 percent grad rate for African-American male non-athletes.
• White female Division I basketball student-athletes graduate at a rate of 71 percent while only 57 percent of African-American female Division I basketball student-athletes graduate.

College sport does not own these problems. They belong to higher education in general and its inheritance of the near bankruptcy of secondary education in some communities. The publication of graduation rates, long feared by athletic administrators, at once revealed those scandalous rates, but also showed what poor graduation rates there were for all students of color. It turned out that our predominantly white campuses were unwelcoming environments for all people of color.

African-American student-athletes arrive on most campuses and see that only seven percent of the student body, three percent of the faculty and less than five percent of top athletics administrators and coaches look like them. Unless there is a Martin Luther King Center or Boulevard, all of the buildings and streets are named after white people.

In many ways, the publication of graduation rates for student-athletes helped to push the issue of diversity to the forefront of campus-wide discussions of issues of race, ethnicity and gender. Educators finally recognized what a poor job they were doing at graduating all students of color.

DRUGS AND ALCOHOL IN SPORT
We will get athletes who use drugs. CNN Headline news will understandably run footage of every name athlete who is arrested with drugs. It has become a common belief that athletes have a particular problem with drug and alcohol abuse. Reoccurring problems of athletes like Darryl Strawberry reinforce this image but facts do not bear this out.

According to an extensive Los Angeles Times survey of athletes and crime committed in 1995, a total of 22 athletes and three coaches were accused of a drug-related crime in 1995. That means that, on average, we read about a new sports figure with a drug problem every two weeks! Anecdotally, those numbers have seemed continue in succeeding years. Each new story reinforces the image from the last one.

Their stories are and surely should be disturbing. But those stories are rarely, if ever, put in the context of the 1.9 million Americans who use cocaine each month or the 2.1 million who use heroin throughout their lives. A total of 13 million or a staggering 6 percent of the American population use some illicit drug each month! When you look at the 18-25 male age group in general, the percentage leaps to 17 percent. Twenty-two athletes represent a small fraction of a single percent of the more than 400,000 who play college and pro sport in America.

The NBA's drug policy with the potential of a life-time ban is generally recognized as a model for sports. The policy may have stopped a substance abuse problem that existed before its inception. Now players recognize that using so-called "recreational" drugs can seriously hurt their professional abilities in one of America's most competitive professions. Don McPherson emphasized the point that "our personal and professional lives have to be clean and sharp. We cannot afford to lose the competitive edge or our careers will be cut short. There are too many talented young men waiting to step in our shoes."

The NBA's Sanders insists that African-American athletes are still being stereotyped as drug users because "blacks in general have been stereotyped for having drugs in the community...I know they (athletes) are hurt by the broad brush" used by the public when it come to African-American athletes.

In the same Los Angeles Times survey, 28 athletes and 4 coaches had charges related to alcohol. None of these 32 cases were put in the context of the 13 million Americans who engage in binge drinking at least 5 times per month. Yet we read about a new athlete with an alcohol problem every 11 days. Such images can surely create a building sense of problems in athletics if they are not viewed in the context of society.

McPherson remembered being "shocked" when he arrived on Syracuse's campus to see how much drinking went on each night among students in general. He felt compelled to call football players he knew on other campuses. "It was the same everywhere. Now when I go to speak on college campuses I always ask. It is worse today. Athletes are also part of that culture, but insist that practice and academics crowd their schedules too much to be in bars as often as other students."

ATHLETES AND VIOLENCE
We are getting athletes who have fights during games, in bars and on campus. Is there a link between the violence of a sport and one's actions away from that sport? There is certainly a growing body of public opinion that assumes that; media reports regularly imply that the violence of sport makes its participants more violent in society.

Are sports any more violent today than 20 years ago when no one would have made such an assertion? Or is it the fact that our streets and our schools surely are more violent. According to the National Education Association, there are 2,000 assaults in our schools every hour of every day! It is an ugly phenomenon that is neither bound by race, class, geography, nor by athlete vs. non-athlete.

ATHLETES AND GENDER VIOLENCE
We do have athletes who are the perpetrators in cases of gender violence. In the wake of the OJ Simpson case, any incident involving an athlete assaulting a woman has received extraordinary publicity. The individual cases add up to the mind-set stereotype of 1999: athletes, especially basketball and football players, are more inclined to be violent towards women than non-athletes.

Joyce Williams-Mitchell is the Executive Director of the Massachusetts Coalition of Battered Women's Service Groups. As an African American woman, she abhors the imagery of athletes being more prone to be violent against women. "It is a myth. The facts do not bear this out. All the studies of patterns of batterers defined by occupation point to men who control women through their profession. We hear about police, clergy, dentists, and judges. I only hear about athletes as batterers when I read the paper. They are in the public's eye. Men from every profession have the potential to batterers."

There have been, of course, too many cases of athletes committing assaults on girls and women.

However, there has never been a thorough, scientific study conclusively showing that athletes are more inclined. The only study that comes close was written by Jeffrey Benedict, Todd Crossett and Mark McDonald. It was based on 65 cases of assault against women over three years on 10 Division I campuses. Thirteen (13) of the cases involved athletes; 7 were basketball or football players.

In spite of the authors pointing out the limitations of both the small numbers and the fact that they did not control for use of alcohol, tobacco and the man's attitude toward women (the three main predictors of a male's inclination to gender violence), the press regularly quotes their study without qualification. Media reports never state that it is a study that came up with 13 athletes over three years. They simply say that the study concluded that nearly 20 percent of all campus assaults are committed by student-athletes and most are committed by basketball or football players.

Rosalyn Dunlap underlines that "This is racially loaded conclusion. When I was a student-athlete at the University of Missouri, I never thought of keeping myself safe from a 260 pound football player anymore than any other man on the street. In fact, male athletes on campus protected me."

Here is some critical data usually missing in the debate about athletes and violence against women.

• In 1994, 1,400 men killed their significant others. OJ Simpson was the only athlete accused of murder.
• In 1998, an estimated three million women were battered and close to one million were raped. According to various reports in the press over the past five years, between 70 and 100 athletes and coaches have been accused of assault against a woman each year.
• In data released earlier this year in the Chronicle of Higher Education's annual campus crime survey, there were 1,053 forcible sex offenses in 1997. Less than 35 student-athletes were arrested.

Gender violence is a serious problem of men in America. The cost of crime to America is pegged at $500 billion per year according to a National Institute for Justice research report for the Justice Department released in March 1996. Gender assault and child abuse account for $165 billion - more than one third of that total! Men who beat their significant others are statistically also likely to beat their children.

Dunlap, who works with McPherson to create more awareness about the issue, said, "There are no men who should be exempted from being educated about the issue of gender violence although many believe they are. It is a problem for naval commanders, day care providers, fraternities, guys at a bar, in corporations, in halls of higher education and, yes, on athletic teams. But no more so on athletic teams."

There have been numerous cases in corporations in which women brought suits against the corporation for harassment and/or assault. The Boston Globe gave extensive coverage to the case in which there were 16 formal legal complaints for incidents from sexual harassment to rape at Astra USA, Inc., a chemical company. Mitsubishi had a suit against it placed by 29 women for the same reasons. No stories about Astra suggested that working in a chemical company produced this climate. At Mitsubishi, no one suggested any relationship to the manufacturing process is a link to gender assault. So why do stories about athletes imply such a linkage to athletics? Does it fit white America's racial imagery?

McPherson believes it does. "Football and basketball mean black. When the public talks about gender violence and athletes, it talks black. No one discusses the problems of golfer John Dailey or Braves manager Bobby Cox. Warren Moon was another story altogether.

"Problems about athletes hit the papers and people think they detect a pattern because of the seeming frequency. But no one else's problems get in the papers. How do we make legitimate comparisons?

"With Astra and Mitsubishi, we look at the corporate climate and don't generalize about individuals. But with athletes, especially black athletes, we look at players and look for patterns to add up."

Some observers say athletes are trained to be violent and we can expect that to carry over into our homes. If this is true about training, then what about the training we give to police, the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines to use lethal force. Will they come home and kill?

McPherson adds, "There is no logic to connect these cases but we do fit our stereotypes of African-Americans with such images when we carry through the implication for athletes."

With all the recent publicity about the horrors of gender violence, it would be easy to forget that it was America's big, dirty secret until the notoriety surrounding the OJ Simpson case. Few were willing to talk about gender violence. But we can never change if we do not confront this disease that is devouring our communities. The same unwillingness to confront racism diminishes society's ability to eradicate it.

Neither were being realistically discussed on college campuses nor in corporate board rooms. We are paying a horrible human price as we realize that society rarely told men that their dominating and controlling actions against women have helped create a climate in which there is a seemingly uncontrollable tidal wave of men's brutality against women.

I believe that athletes should take a leadership role on this, just as they have on drug abuse and educational opportunities. In 1990, Louis Harris completed a landmark study which showed that our children desire to participate in changing their society and viewed athletes as their first choice in terms of who they wanted to hear socially relevant messages.

The MVP Program, organized in 1992 by Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society, has been on more than 55 campuses over the last seven years training male athletes to be spokespeople on the issue of gender violence. Each of those schools has become proactive on an issue that has hurt so many women and their families. Don McPherson worked full-time for MVP for several years.

Our society is unraveling at a breakneck pace and McPherson insists "we have do more to help our youth survive by including our athletes rather than excluding them in helping our youth. The stereotyping of our athletes does not help. We need to be ready with facts to dispute the easy labels."

McPherson and Sanders both argue vigorously that America's athletes not only don't fit the emerging stereotypes about athletes and crime but that the vast majority of pro athletes are extremely positive individuals.

Sanders said, "when I look at the many NBA players who have their own foundations and who are very involved with giving back to the communities where they play and where they came from, I know they are hurt by the stereotypes."

McPherson asserts that "most of the players in the NFL are deeply religious, family-centered men who are constantly giving back to their communities with time and money."

Rosalyn Dunlap wonders when the public and the media will stop being cynical about athletes. "I hear so many people say that if athletes do something in the community that they do it for publicity. Why can't we accept that athletes want to help.

"Sport and those who play it can help educate us and sensitize us. While we can't ignore the bad news, we should also focus on the overwhelming good news of what athletes do to make this a better world."

What is the power of sport? Lin Dawson, a ten year NFL veteran who has spent much his post playing career in efforts to improve race relations, said "sports can bring good news that can lift the weight of the world. That is a powerful gift to possess, one we all share when we use it in the most noble way we can - to lift the spiritual poverty that hovers over our children. That spirit is the antidote to the loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted that so many young people are burdened with. We can give them the richness of spirit that comes with being part of a real team, being interdependent and being able to count on a brother or a sister in a time of need."

Sports figures are in a unique position to affect change. Among them are a few who have dramatically hurt the image of the vast majority.

Dawson added, "The community needs positive role models now more than ever. They can help young people to believe in what they cannot yet see. Our children need faith considering what they do see in their communities."

The distortions about our athletes and the crimes that a few of them commit need to be put in their real social context. The misleading perceptions need to be corrected so we can focus on the truth and what is really necessary. In that way, we can help America live up to the dream that Jackie Robinson created for us more than 50 years ago.

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