This column, by contributing writer William C. Rhoden, first appeared in The Sporting News dated May 11, 1992, in the immediate aftermath of the violent civil unrest that gripped Los Angeles after four white police officers were exonerated April 29 in the beating of motorist Rodney King.
For approximately 96 hours last week, our sports equilibrium was thrown out of kilter by a series of events that seemed to worsen with each day.
We watched replays of Los Angeles police officers beating a motorist, then of civilians dragging a man from his truck, kicking and stomping him to death. We saw businesses, homes, even a medical center burned. We witnessed this nightmare of destruction and saw perhaps more graphically than ever before, what we had become as a nation.
In sports, as in nearly every other industry, it was impossible for business to go on as usual. A few arenas were damaged, baseball games were canceled, basketball games postponed. One NBA playoff game was moved from California to Nevada. Dodgers outfielder Darryl Strawberry's brother, a member of the Los Angeles police department. was wounded when a sniper opened fire on his squad car.
TSN ORIGINALS: At the intersection of sports and the 1992 Los Angeles riots
Now the cleanup process must begin.
In those cities that burned, citizens must clear away the rubble and rebuild. Relationships and attitudes must also be repaired.
While the short-range focus will be on police brutality, the larger concern is addressing the conditions of our society that encourage the police, or anyone else, to abuse a certain segment of the population without fear of reprimand or reprisal.
For those conditions to be eliminated, a substantial amount of individual house cleaning needs to occur. Before taking part in protest marches and demonstrations, we need to deploy additional cleanup crews in the circles in which we move.
For ultimately it is not what one says publicly about freedom that matters, but how vigorously one fights for it behind closed doors.
The Los Angeles police officers who beat Rodney King that night unleashed the full force of their hatred because they felt that no one outside their immediate circle was watching. Had they known a camera was filming the arrest they certainly would have been more careful. They would have subdued King, read him his rights, then carefully but firmly escorted him to a patrol car. The tape would have been used as a training film. Instead, it has become one of the most shocking accounts of police violence to be documented in the last 25 years.
It is easier to wear buttons and mouth slogans than to challenge the attitudes of neighbors and colleagues who create the problem in the first place. For us to reverse our present course, however, we need to clean up our own arenas.
Racism does not work in isolation. Bigoted behavior in one area — whether it be the abuse of women, the bashing of homosexuals, the desecration of a synagogue or the failure to put minorities in front-office positions — symbolizes a deep-seated cancer of hatred that exists throughout society, in all fields, at every level.
Let's look at sports, for example, specifically the sports media. During the last 30 years, my profession has turned out a number of noble and enlightening pieces about the plight of Black and Hispanic athletes and has recently begun to focus on the disparity between opportunities for men and women in high school and college sports.
For all the penetrating coverage, sports media have stubbornly remained a white, male-dominated preserve, from top to bottom.
The process of cleaning up our own arena means removing the artificial barriers that discourage women and minorities from entering the profession. For those who are already in it, it means allowing talented people to progress and flourish, sink or swim, like the majority of their white male colleagues.
For those who control the editorial content of newspapers, magazines and television, cleaning house means eradicating stereotypical images as soon as they appear.
The process of getting one’s house in order does not just apply to those in control. For minorities, rather than banging on the same closed doors and negotiating the same hostile attitudes, those who feel frozen out or thwarted should mobilize their resources to create new opportunities, alternative vehicles. Build new arenas right next to the old ones, if necessary.
A change of attitude needs to take place with the sports industry itself, the owners, their teams, the individual players.
In the popular team sports — football, basketball and baseball — Blacks and Hispanics have been virtually excluded from positions of ownership and control. Their presence also is negligible in myriad front-office positions as well as coaching and managerial duties. After more than 40 years of integration, the formula remains basically unchanged: Blacks and Hispanics play and fade away, whites control.
This has led to an expression of the same frustrations by minority athletes as are often seen in other industries. The significant difference is that the athletes' frustrations are assuaged by million-dollar salaries that mitigate against protest or working collectively to force change within the industry.
Despite consistently being the most widely publicized group of males in America, Black athletes are a nonexistent political force, constituting what Dr. Dick Barnett, the former New York Knicks player, calls the “Impotent Empire.”
In the days immediately following the Los Angeles violence there were suggestions that Black professional athletes should make some collective public statement or take collective action to protest the Los Angeles verdicts. Perhaps they might refuse to play one playoff game or wear black ribbons and patches in order to carry the message across television that even millionaire celebrity Blacks resent a blatant miscarriage of justice.
No such hue and cry was forthcoming. Athletes spoke as individuals — some echoed the national sense of outrage, others privately admitted they had been wrapped up in the games and hadn't followed the trial.
We'd better wake up, as a nation of people.
On the same day the policemen were acquitted in Los Angeles, a white South African policeman was found guilty of murdering a Black youth.
Wearing ribbons of protest is fine.
But we have arrived at a point where we must have deeper individual commitment to expanding human freedom and to fighting against those forces who would oppose it.