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Ear to the Ground

Sports Stars Try to Level the Academic Playing Field

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Posted on Feb 1, 2007

Basketball superstar Baron Davis and the Chicago Bears’ Brendon Ayanbadejo have started an organization to raise awareness of the dwindling enrollment of minority students at their alma mater, UCLA. California’s anti-affirmative action Prop. 209 has had a devastating effect: This year’s freshman class of 5,000 contains fewer than 100 African American students, 20 of them on athletic scholarship.

Visit We Should Not Be the Only Ones’ website for more information.

Los Angeles Times:

Ayanbadejo and former UCLA basketball star Baron Davis have formed We Should Not Be the Only Ones (weshouldnotbetheonlyones.org) a group whose name refers to the increasing indication that the only black students UCLA appears to want are those with exceptional vertical leaps or 40-yard dash times.

The numbers demand words. Loud words, angry words. For the fall 2006 freshman class, less than 100 African Americans enrolled, the fewest in more than 30 years. Twenty of them were on athletic scholarship, which means we’re getting dangerously close to making a fact from the stereotypical assumption that a black student on campus is an athlete. A ranking of African American student admissions in the fall of 2005 put UCLA 29th among the top 30 colleges and universities.

For those athletes who want to make a difference, it means stepping into the hostile venues of bureaucracy and politics.

“It’s a daunting task, but you’ve got to start somewhere,” Ayanbadejo said. “We’re at the point where we’re saying, ‘This is enough.’

“We’re here to bring light to the situation, see if we can make change through dialogue and bring people on board.”

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By Chaseme, February 2, 2007 at 2:58 am #
(Unregistered commenter)

It’s only going to get worse when bush has all of his supporters in place. From the Supreme Court to a job at 711, this is what makes the NeoCons and KKK (one in the same) proud.

These people, the ones who supported bush and paid for both of term in office and the ones who constantly cry: “Day tuk ur jerb!” (They took our job).

And, this is why this poem applies:
‘I’m tired’

A six foot three inch bald head Black man
Being kicked around and kept down wherever they can
At work at school on the highway, “don’t move!”
“Get your hands up, lay down!” Can’t keep my feet on the ground.
Trying to pull myself up by my boot straps, my mind is peppered with hatred
Every time I see that, “you’re murderer, you rob, you steal” on the American news.
If you’re caught up in materialism, capitalism guess what, you lose.
This American system has black men running full speed, dead last.
Except, on the track field, football field, basketball court.
If you choose another profession, it’s for white men of course.
You cry and you scream racism, discrimination, you’re fired!
Can’t fight this schizophrenic, racist American system, it’s too big
I moved away, I’m tired.

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By yours truly, February 1, 2007 at 5:21 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

Of course this has nothing to do with our legacy of slavery.  After all ours is the land of he free and home of the brave, so if you can’t get into UCLA it’s your own damn fault.  And if you don’t have health insurance that’s your fault too.  Enough of this blame game, ours is the land of opportunity, or so we’re constantly being told.

Which means wer’e racing backwards in time now, as, until forty or so years ago the Univesity of California (every campus) was, with notable exceptions here and there, mostly a while male enclave.  This showed up especially in the graduate schools.  Perusal of lhe graduate school yearbooks prior to the sixties were noteworthy in the rarity of black faces, with very few women (except in education, nursing and liberal arts) and with maybe an occasional Latino in each graduating class.  These yearbooks are a vivid reminder that, back then, as increasingly now, if one wasn’t a white male, higher education?  Forget it!

Then, in the sixties, breakthrough, or so it was thought.  Alas, it’s turned out to be temporary, much like what happened after the Civil War, before Jim Crow asserted its ugly ways.

And now we’re going back, way, way back, and who knows when or whether it’ll stop?  Unless, of course, we change the world, which begins the moment we see to it that Congress cuts off all funding for the Iraq war and and then impeaches President George Bush, after which he’s carted off to the International Court of Criminal Justce, there to be tried for his crimes against humanity, whereupon empire collapse.  And then?  It’ll be up to us.
.

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