African-American Fixation and Modern Superiority in Sports
Sports are significant in many ways to any individual of the society and their values can notarize any political ideology. Sports have often been considered as a missionary tool of liberation, as anti-hegemonic. Fascists, communists, liberal marketers and filibusters have always revered sports. Even political group of dissidents has also vituperated sports, paradoxically. Sports have marked itself as the most powerful form of human expression during all of man's time. Sadly, sports fail to serve the United States ideology in any ways people decided to define democratic values during this, the American Century, when we became the most powerful purveyors of sports in all history (Gerald Early, Performance And Reality Race, Sports and the Modern World).
Race does not comprise of a system consisting of the privileged or discredited abilities. It is rather an entirety of clashing rumination of what it means to be a human. In today's time the portrayal of sports, is as antediluvian as race. In their contestable bestseller, Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein said, "Given a chance, each clan will add up its accomplishments using its own weighting system, will encounter the world with confidence in its own worth. What would African-Americans bring to America's multicultural carnival? The dominance of many black Athletics" (The African-American Sports Fixation, (http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~africam/sportsfix.pdf).
The fixation of black Americans with the world of athletics is primarily due to the search for their identity and respect. Many Black Americans consider the path of sports as the only way to attain popularity and augmented opportunity. Sports fixation serves as a pride for the Black American community. There are numerous reasons, which contribute to the Black American sports fixation. Rudy Washington, Executive Director of the Black Coaches Association, said, "the fundamental problem is the home life, the black community, because in no other race is sports such a dominant factor every day as it is in the black community"(The African-American Sports Fixation, (http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~africam/sportsfix.pdf).The superiority or dominance of black athletes in the sports arena has compelled the audience to associate racial identity with black physicality. As a result of their history as slaves and laborers, the blacks are frequently thought of being good in sports. Due to their physical strength they are usually positioned in sports rather than any other activities which involves intellectualism.
Black American's sports fixation is the direct result of the exclusion of blacks from every cognitive elite of the past century and the resulting starvation for race heroes; it has always been a defensive response to the assault on black intelligence, which continues to this day (The African-American Sports Fixation, (http://istsocrates.berkeley.edu/~africam/sportsfix.pdf).Sports fixation is more dominantly found in the Black American middle class. Media is also responsible for the Black's obsession with sports. The media usually concentrated on portraying the black Americans as everything rather than intellectuals. It apprehended the pretentious Black and his misbehaviors. Black doctors, lawyers and business people were covered on a very small scale. Twenty to thirty years ago many blacks were campaigning against the blaxploitation films, which concentrated on showing the Black race as violent, narcissistic and anti-social. An example of such a film is Superfly produced in the 1970s. Media covered the Blacks greatly after they made their substantial place in the athletic world. This attracted many Black Americans into sports who saw it as a chance of finally gaining good recognition by the media.
The academic side such as school systems is also not far behind in contributing to Black student's preoccupation in the sports world. The discouraging attitude of school systems is destroying and discouraging the academic achievement of these students. Peer pressure in schools tends to dwindle Black American's inclination to succeed academically. It is highly essential for the Black community to reevaluate their perception of academic learning. The general perception of these children in school is to act white in pursuit of scholastic accomplishments.
Black American students are still a victim of inequalities in many school systems. This was greatly pointed by Jonathan Kozol, who is an educator and an activist. In many cities, which he visited, racial isolation was a criterion, an enforced regime of deprivation and near-total societal rejection. Local particularities seem as only minor variations on the America-wide, systemic assault on dark and poor children (Black Children Still Victimized By Savage Inequalities, (http://www.blackcommentator.com/13_education.html).After his journey, Kozol insisted that...
The probability that a child will succeed is considered unimportant when compared to the possibility that a child might succeed. The racist implications of these educational problems are impossible to ignore. These deplorable conditions help reinforce white racial superiority by keeping minorities in a subservient position when compared to whites. The fact that many affluent suburban schools have minority students does not erase the fact that the single greatest predictor
Some newspapers, Kozol points out, muse in utilitarian terms. They argue that those children who are likely to produce more returns are likewise more deserving of financial support. But the most brutal irony of the way poor children are treated in New York is the fact that the legislators and the affluent public are more willing to spend money on incarceration than education of poor children. Most of the
Kids are hungry, their parents are in jail, and the good schools are in the suburbs, where the Congress people live. Their schools are upscale and well funded, while the inner-city schools suffer all the same problems the schools in the other chapters faced. The administrators feel whites would do anything to keep blacks out of their schools, including move away if too many blacks came into the district.
Then the healthcare provided to rich and poor children is starkly different. Kozol suggests that African-American children do not get proper medical care which makes them more likely to fail in school. Then the high dropout rates among blacks confirm the racist biases of legislators who argue that spending on black children is bad investment. When Kozol visits a wealthy suburban school and talks to children in advanced schools,
Murray characterizes educational romantics as people who believe that the academic achievement of children is determined mainly by the opportunities they receive and has little to do with their intellectual capacity. Educational romantics believe the current K-12 education system is in need of vast improvement. Murray describes two types of educational romantics, one set on the Left and one on the Right, and differentiates between the two thusly: "Educational romantics of
noble savage..." etc. The Noble, Savage Age of Revolution When Europeans first came to America, they discovered that their providentially discovered "New World" was already inhabited by millions of native peoples they casually labeled the "savages." In time, Europeans would decimate this population, killing between 95-99% of the 12 million plus inhabitants of the Northern Continent, and as many in the south. Before this genocide was complete, however, the culture of
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