Racial Divides Persist on Compensation for Student-Athletes

The NCAA has spent much of the past decade fighting litigation from current and former student-athletes seeking compensation for their contributions in revenue-generating sports such as football and basketball, with one sociologist calling the uprising “the civil rights movement of our times.”

And as the NCAA Tournament, the governing body’s flagship event, tips off in earnest Thursday, a recent Morning Consult survey reveals a racial divide among the public when it comes to these collegiate amateurs -- many of whom are black -- and their rights to remuneration, which has been consistently rebuked by the NCAA.

In 2018, 56 percent of Division I men’s college basketball players and 48 percent of football student-athletes were black, according to an NCAA database.

The Feb. 26-28 survey of 2,201 U.S. adults found that 55 percent of black respondents supported paying student athletes a salary, compared with 31 percent of white respondents. And while 57 percent of white Americans said an academic scholarship is adequate compensation for student athletes, black Americans were almost split, with 37 percent saying yes and 39 percent disagreeing.

The survey polled 1,780 white U.S. adults and 279 black U.S. adults, with each subgroup having respective margins of error of plus or minus 2 and 6 percentage points.

Black Americans were also more likely than white Americans to support college athletes profiting off their name or likeness by partnering with brands, signing autographs or having intellectual property ownership in video games, jerseys or other products.

Professor Joe Feagin of Texas A&M University -- whose research has centered around racial and ethnic relations -- placed the discrepancy in sentiment into the context of the country’s history of slavery. For nearly all of the 20 generations of the country’s founding, Feagin explained, blacks didn’t have legal equality and opportunity, as the Jim Crow system of racial segregation was only struck down in the late 1960s.

“Any of these questions where it opens up more opportunities are going to be valued more heavily by blacks,” said Feagin, who added that the historical absence of the “cross-generational transmission of resources and wealth” for blacks is, in large part, the underlying explanation for why those surveyed sided more heavily with student-athletes.

Those financial opportunities Feagin alluded to include the NBA’s proposal to lower its draft eligibility age from 19 to 18 and thus, eliminating its 2005 “one-and-done” rule, which helped force the country’s top prep basketball stars to spend at least one year in college.

“When those families have talented athletes coming up in elementary and secondary schools, they are quite aware that there’s an opportunity here to generate resources for their families that is very difficult to come by in a systematically racist society,” Feagin said. “Over those 20 generations, we whites have been unjustly enriched, and over those 20 generations, black families have been unjustly impoverished.”

Racial differences appeared again concerning the approval of the NBA’s plan to eliminate the one-and-done rule: Fifty percent of black respondents supported the proposal, compared with 37 percent of white respondents.