Some thinkies to ponder...

[silveradept]

I was struck some time ago, perhaps by the kerfuffle about Tiger Woods and his wandering eye, to a time of my past where, in my home province, there was the occasional offhand comment about how people of color were slowly and inexorably taking over sport, and that soon, there would be no such thing as a white man in any sporting contest (at least, in the ones that Americans cared about across the country, instead of regional contests like ice hockey or footie). This was portrayed as a bad thing, likely in a "master race" sort of way, the implicit assumption being that white people, at their core, would and should always be better (or at least, competitive) with the other skin colors.

But then, thought I, what if we looked at sport more like the gladiatorial contests, intentionally funneling all the people Romans, err, Americans think of as inferior to battle each other, with the promise of lucrative rewards to the person that manages to kill off all the others, and then perversely encourage this response by institutionalizing certain conditions that make sport look like the only way out, or at least a good enough way out that lots of people will fight each other for the promise of the contract, rather than working to improve their station as a whole? In that case, the continued colorization of sport would indicate that more people were buying into this idea, which seems very bad.

This is likely making mountains of molehills, but it would explain why there's a heavy, heavy push by people of color who made it out of the pile alive to keep young people from entering the arena - it's a long shot at best, and those that don't make it will usually get chewed up.

These are the things we think about at work, or when we have a free moment to connect dots. My own brain can be very scary to look into at times.