Tackling Sports Racism

HUMAN NATURE is sufficiently complex that it is difficult enough to figure out why someone does something, let alone why someone doesn't. The fundamental reasons why very few minority students participate in varsity athletics at Harvard, then, are unlikely to leap to the eye.

S. Allen Counter, director of the race relations Foundation, is making it a priority this time to delve into the question of minority athletes' level of satisfaction with their athletic experience. And John P. Reardon, director of athletics, has said he will soon begin inquiries of his own.

The problems are now merely hinted at, and obviously much more information is needed. While it is fairly well known that there are only two Blacks on the entire 100-man varsity football team, there is no reason to believe that minorities are much better represented on other teams. Heavyweight Varsity Crew's 31-man contingent last year, for example, had no Blacks at all. Nor is the difficulty only Harvard's; it affects the entire Ivy League.

Close investigation is unlikely to reveal any single villain--such as "racist coaches" or "alumni pressure"--in a complex situation which starts with the Harvard application process and ends with minority students' career aims. It is precisely because the situation is so complex that a good, thorough investigation is needed.

THERE CAN BE little question that Harvard's "problem" with minority athletes, whatever its extent, begins before students actually arrive on campus. Mere precisely, it begins with the students who never make it to Harvard. To the chagrin of some football team partisans. Harvard has never offered specifically athletic scholarships. In the battle of dollars to recruit top high school athletes. Harvard is literally unarmed.

The intentional flip side of this admissions coin is that the minority students who do come to Harvard are by and large academically high-powered. "Our population of minorities seems to have gotten here by dint of hard work," says Marlyn M. Lewis '70, assistant dean of the College. Many of these students simply have no desire to play varsity athletics.

Once the class is formed, as Reardon points out, there are two basic issues--the number of minority athletes who sign up for a sport, and the number who stay. Counter says that the rate of minority students who drop out somewhere in the process is very high. But this is just the sort of figure that Counter must try to document, because as Reardon notes, non-minority athletes also quit sports all the time.

One of the greatest difficulties in getting to the heart of some minority students' complaints is that they deal with a highly subjective question, subtle bias. It would be difficult to quantify as subjective a quality as how much "encouragement" a coach gives different players. And while many minorities complain about being played less frequently in relation to their talents, Reardon points legitimately to the danger of second-guessing. Difficult decisions on playing time, he says, are exactly the coaches job. Almost as difficult is sifting through the complaints to find out which of the perceived biases are actually racial. A truism of varsity athletics is that no player feels his coach fully appreciates him. "I think you can talk to six white halfbacks on the football team who think they're not getting enough playing time," Reardon says.

A MORE SUBTLE FACTOR, but nevertheless a crucial one, is the degree to which minority athletes are satisfied with the social aspects of their athletic participation. Varsity athletics require an enormous time commitment, with practice every afternoon and occasional work in the evenings. Like anyone else deeply involved in an activity, an athlete must expect to get some social enjoyment out of it--a need more difficult to fulfill if there are only two or three minority players on a team.

In Harvard football at least, this problem is intensified by the fact that most starters are seniors. In other words, if minorities get no social fulfillment out of the sport, for two years they will probably not even have the compensation of playing regular ball.

It is also important to acknowledge that this is a problem shared by most of the Ivy League. Reardon recalls that he went down to the Harvard-Princeton football game last week, and there were not many Blacks playing for Princeton either.

Counter and Reardon are to be lauded for looking into the question of minority participation in athletics. If numbers alone tell the tale, there are problems indeed. But one piece of alarming evidence should not preclude a thorough and serious investigation which explores all of the complexities of a very complex situation. Once they isolate the problems, the real work can begin.