According to Harry Edwards (1983), a sociology professor at the University of California at Berkeley, the exploitation of African American athletes has persisted for decades. Edwards argues that when these 17to 19-year-old athletes attend their respective universities they usually agree to a contract in which athletic performance is exchanged for an education. However, while the athletes generally do their part-resulting in huge gate receipts, television revenues, national visibility, donations, and more to university programs and athletic departments-the universities often fail to do theirs. Edwards attributes this dilemma to the impact of upon African American society. Popular beliefs that Blacks are intrinsically superior athletes and that are inherently beneficial for them, combined with the often dire life circumstances and the athletic aspirations of young African American men, make these student athletes especially vulnerable to this sort of victimization (p. 37). The misconception about is that profound advances have been made in the realm of interracial relations since Jackie Robinson became the first African American to play major league baseball. This view has been fostered by skilled sports propagandists eager to project patriotic views consistent with America's alleged ideals of racial equality. However, it also has been encouraged by observers of the sporting scene who remain oblivious to the race-related realities of American in general (Edwards, p. 37). Although the belief persists that the level of African American performance in is due to a race-related genetic characteristic, most educated people have come to accept this assumption as false. Studies attempting to demonstrate this relationship have failed due to theoretical flaws as well as to the complexity of the concept of race. Instead, evidence tends to support cultural and social-rather than biological-explanations for the success of African American athletes. One of Edwards'