"The Only Thing Left for the Whites Is a Couple of Coaching Jobs": Revisiting the Discursive Influence of Pre- and Post-Brown Media on Desegregation and Resegregation in Collegiate Sports

Abstract

Former CBS sports analyst, "Jimmy the Greek" Snyder said "The only thing left for the Whites is a couple of coaching jobs" (Shapiro, 1988, pp. A1, A10). The Supreme Court's landmark <i>Brown I</i> and <i>II</i> decisions brought a sharp increase in the visibility of some of the most exceptional black college athletes the country. Subsequently, many segregated, white institutions began to recruit these black "superspades" (Harris, 1993, p. 52; and Davis, 1995, p. 627) per team and mass media sources began to compare/contrast blacks and whites via sporting events. This manuscript revisits historical and contemporary messages of the mass media regarding blacks vs. whites in college athletics and considers how mass mediated sports involve (1) discursive innovation (Hughes, 2005), (2) a revolutionary message, (3) simplistic appeals to emotions, (4) rhetorical figures generating an aura of "presence," (5) invocations to a collective identity that is conducive to a situation-distressed collective group seeking a solution to social problems as a means of escape, and (6) dramatization of polarized aggression between forces of good and bad that is indicative of impending doom or hopelessness restricting individual perspectives in favor of collective group identity (Lewis, 1988). The manuscript discusses how this particular construction of messages may have contributed to the desegregation and resegregation (Orfield, 2001) of the two most visible, NCAA Division I sports: men's college basketball and football. Moreover, the article provides evidence of the necessity for an ongoing academic investigation of sports and athletes in education.