by Arthur Ashe
What went wrong within black America? We might as well ask what went wrong with America as a whole. What happened to blacks is, to be sure, only a heightened degree of the national weakening of morality and standards. As for black America, I don’t know of any single answer to that question, only several possible answers. However, the cruel irony of African American history is that although we are not nearly equal to whites in terms of opportunities and freedoms, we have declined as a group exactly at the time we achieved the highest degree of freedom we have ever had, and secured the largest number of rights we have ever had. It is almost as if the new rights and freedoms caused the decline, which of course is not true. At least, not completely.
I know that the deterioration occurred in my adult lifetime. Thus, I must bear part of the responsibility for the way in which African American culture has declined. Not I myself personally, but my generation collectively; if we wish to take most of the credit for what is creditable, then we must shoulder most of the blame for the amount that is discreditable. I see 1965 as the major watershed in modern African American history. That year dwarfs 1954 and Brown v. Board of Education. In 1965, when I was twenty-two years old, Stokely Carmichael (now Kwame Toure) promulgated the “doctrine” of Black Power and inaugurated the Black Power movement. He did so in one brilliant harangue in Greenwood, Mississippi, from which, in my opinion, black America has never adequately recovered. Carmichael was a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a youth-oriented offshoot of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
In promulgating Black Power, Carmichael wittingly or unwittingly (the former is much more likely) turned his back on the moral emphasis and genuine nonviolence of King’s leadership and moved toward a radically secular philosophy of racial emancipation. In retrospect, 1965 was the beginning of the end of the dominance of morality in African American culture. Instead, the amoral quest for naked and vengeful power would rule thereafter. No one should have to wonder where Black Power came from. It came out of the evil record of slavery and segregation, from the willful attempt by whites to keep blacks in a state of subservience through the denial to them of decent, just treatment in a society allegedly built on law. I am completely in support of the idea that blacks should garner as much power and wealth as we legitimately can. Nevertheless, I believe that Black Power, as promulgated, may have created many more problems than it ever solved, because legitimacy was deliberately excluded as a criterion.
I met Stokely Carmichael at least twice during the 1960s. In 1968, the year of the speech that got me in trouble with my army superiors, he also spoke at the Church of the Redeemer in Washington, D.C., at the invitation of the Reverend Jefferson Rogers. Something of Stokely’s militancy may have rubbed off on me and moved me to deliver my own remarks, although they were tepid compared to his language. Viscerally, emotionally, I admired Carmichael. His raw courage inspired me. Then, gradually, he and other young leaders at the time like H. Rap Brown and Huey Newton (of the Black Panthers) lost me. They lost me because they seemed to abandon principle in their thinking and their actions. What started as a movement toward liberation ended too often as a regime of dogmatism, coercion, hatred, violence, and what would later be called sexism. I saw a chilling similarity between the segregation that ruled my youth and the proposed new order under Black Power. For the first seventeen years of my life, white people in Virginia had told me what I could do, where I could go to church, in which taxi I could ride, where I had to sit on the bus, in which stores I could try on a coat. Then, in my second seventeen years, militant black people were trying to tell me, once again, exactly what to think and do. I rebelled.
In many respects, Black Power was an improvement over the old ways. Undoubtedly, an emphasis on morality led many blacks toward passivity, obsequiousness, and even self-hatred. Black Power promised a long overdue emphasis on gaining self-determination, self-definition, and wealth. Looking back, however, I see the simple truth that the old emphasis on morality was far more consistent with the acquisition of money and power than the doctrine of Black Power ever was. Defined by an excess of racial romanticism and chauvinism, Black Power as often as not drove a wedge between young black Americans and the very thinking and behavior that would enable them to achieve positions of power. The main tool for the acquisition of wealth and power is knowledge and self-discipline. In this way, young blacks could take advantage of the new freedom afforded by the civil-rights acts and the changing mores of the nation. But Black Power almost completely discredited the acquisition of knowledge and the rigor of self-discipline.
The discrediting of formal education as it existed in the United States was perhaps the most disastrous result of Black Power. Unquestionably, our formal education had ignored black history and culture. But when the idea of a black student learning Russian or Polish, medieval history or quantum physics, became anathema in the more militant circles, as it did, a disaster was in the making. Such an education, it was said, amounted to a betrayal of our racial heritage. The only legitimate areas of knowledge were those that could be defined through their connection to Africa. The assumption seemed to be that Africa itself did not need experts on Russia, Poland, medieval European history, or quantum physics, in addition to experts on Africa. If the discrediting of education started with the curriculum, it did not stop there. White teachers and professors became suspect or worse. The discipleship of student to professor, which is the principal method by which deep learning is passed on, so that experts nurture experts, became nearly impossible; how could a proud young black man subject himself to a white figure of authority? Finally, in increasingly wide circles among teenage blacks, learning itself became discredited. To study hard, to aim for good grades, has become to “act white,” which is supposed to be the gravest charge one can level at a young black man or woman today. However, since the best students in the United States increasingly are Asian, perhaps “act Asian” should be the charge; in which case the element of color disappears.
I LEARNED MUCH about the changing face of blacks and education during the lively “Proposition 48” and “Proposition 42” debates of the 1980s. Eventually implemented in 1984 by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the governing body of college sports in the United States, “Prop 48” sought to raise the high-school academic requirements for students entering college who wished to compete in intercollegiate athletics. Incoming freshmen who did not meet these academic requirements could be given scholarships but could not play for their schools during their first year. “Prop 42,” passed later, sought to deny athletic scholarships to such students. Behind the proposals were not only a spate of recent scandals in which former college athletes with degrees proved to be semi-literate but also a deepening sense that many athletic departments had subverted the true mission of their colleges and universities in the name of athletic Success. The issue became charged with racial tones because a disproportionately high percentage of college athletes in the major American sports—football, basketball, baseball, and track—are black.
The black presence in many colleges and universities is close to a sham. In 1983, an article by sociologist Harry Edwards in the Atlantic Monthly documented the sorry situation. Although entrance requirements were often pathetically low, 25 to 35 percent of young black high-school athletes could not meet them. In college, as many as 65 to 75 percent of blacks with athletic scholarships never graduated. Of those who graduated, perhaps 75 percent did so with degrees in physical education or some other major or concentration designed to reflect their athletic prowess but with limited use after school. (In 1993, ten years after Edwards’s article, a report revealed that one school, North Carolina State University, long famous as a power in collegiate basketball, had not graduated a single basketball player since 1985.)
Prop 48 allowed a freshman to play for one of the 277 Division 1 or top athletic schools only if the student had made a 2.0 grade point average (a C average) in hig
h school and only if his or her courses included English, mathematics, the social sciences, and the physical sciences. It also required the athlete to have a combined score of 700 (out of a possible 1600) on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) or 15 (out of a possible 36) on the rival American College Test (ACT). The SAT and ACT tests are mandatory steps at most American colleges. Previously, students required only a C average, without regard to the courses taken, and many of the courses were scandalously devoid of intellectual content.
These new requirements should present no challenge whatsoever even to the average student. In recent years, however, fewer than 50 percent of black students taking the SAT had scored as high as 700; on the ACT, only 28 percent reached 15. Meanwhile, more than 75 percent of whites achieved 700 or 15 on the tests. (If you scored 700 on the SAT and tallied 15 on the ACT, then 90 percent of students taking the test outscored you in verbal achievement, and about 65 percent outscored you in math.)
Although these proposals would affect athletes of all races, some black college presidents, charging racism, led the opposition to them and threatened to withdraw their schools from the NCAA. Among white institutions, presidents were generally for the changes, while athletic directors generally were not; in black schools, however, opposition was often led by presidents. The president of Southern University in Louisiana, for example, called the proposal “patently racist.” The proposal was caused, he said, by the fact that “the black athlete has been too good. If it is followed to its logical conclusion, we say to our youngsters, ‘Let the white boy win once in a while. ’ This has set the black athlete back twenty-five or thirty years. The message is that white schools no longer want black athletes.” Another official pointed out, without embarrassment, that the new entrance standards for athletes would be higher than the general entrance standards for most black colleges and even some white schools. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Jesse Jackson through his Operation PUSH group, the National Baptist Convention, and other black organizations also opposed the change.
I was one hundred percent behind the proposed higher standards. Lobbying behind the scenes, I also wrote at least one letter to The New York Times calling for college presidents to stand up for education; the Times also published my essay “Coddling Black Athletes,” in which I urged that “we should either get serious about academic standards or cut out the hypocrisy and pay college athletes as professionals.” I published another essay in Ebony in which I talked about having visited black high schools where “the obsession with sports borders on pathology.” I agreed completely with what the respected football coach Joe Paterno of Pennsylvania State University said in his provocative declaration at the 1983 NCAA convention: “For fifteen years we have had a race problem. We have raped a generation and a half of young black athletes. We have taken kids and sold them on bouncing a ball and running with a football and that being able to do certain things athletically was going to be an end in itself. We cannot afford to do that to another generation.”
I found myself opposing two nationally known black basketball coaches: John Chaney of Temple University and John Thompson of perennially ranked Georgetown University. Chaney called the NCAA “that racist organization.” As a highly publicized protest against the attempted passage of Prop 42, Thompson left the coach’s bench during at least two basketball games involving his team. Both of these men are genuinely interested in education, but the positions they took seemed on the wrong side of all the key issues involved in the devaluation of education among blacks in the United States. In a long, sometimes acerbic telephone conversation, Thompson explained to me in detail his objections. First, whatever the benefits to our society in general, blacks would suffer from the changes because fewer would meet the requirements and be allowed into college. Once again, he argued, when America decided on some rise in standards, blacks paid the lion’s share of the price for this change.
Thompson’s second objection was that the proposition endorsed standardized tests (SAT and ACT) that were culturally biased; in addition, they are hardly infallible at predicting later success, including academic success. “Cultural bias” is the phrase of choice for nationalistic blacks when their philosophy collides with the basic demands of education. If whites do better, then the tests must be culturally biased. No one raises this question when the children of poor immigrants from Southeast Asia outclass native-born Americans in scholastics. My own position is different from Thompson’s. Can one attribute a low test score to socioeconomic bias? Perhaps. Can one invoke cultural bias to explain a 700 SAT score? Ridiculous!
To Thompson’s first objection, that black athletes would be barred by the new standards, I asserted my belief that any loss in numbers would be short-term. In response to the new standards, black youngsters would simply rise to the challenge and meet them. To the objection of cultural bias, I responded that Thompson could hardly come up with a credible alternative set of requirements that would yield a higher number of qualified entering black students. Did he really want an essay test, instead of the multiple-choice format of the SAT and ACT tests? Then, I told him—only half in jest—no black kid would get in, since the quality of writing among black students in general had become notoriously poor. As for John Chaney’s mantra that black kids “deserve a chance”—of course they do, I responded. Everyone deserves a chance. What Chaney’s plaintive cry reflects, however, is the obsession with entitlement that is rampant among young blacks. The idea that society owes them special favors for average efforts has taken root with a vengeance.
In my essay “Coddling Black Athletes,” I wrote:
We need to address the deep-seated cynicism of coddled, black public-school athletes, many of whom are carried through school with inflated grades and peer group status that borders on deification. High school coaches need to be held accountable for the academic preparation of their would-be Michael Jordans.
The critics of Proposition 42 seriously underestimate the psychic value that black athletes place on their athletic success and how that could be used to motivate them academically. The screening process for superior athletes starts earlier—when they are 11 or 12—and is more efficacious than for any other group of Americans. Social status is conferred at once. And they learn early that they don’t get the idolatry, attention, and, ultimately, Division 1 scholarships for their intellectual promise.
Proposition 42—or something like it—would motivate high school coaches and their best players to take education seriously. Most important, that dedication to academic concerns among athletes would set a tone in the schools that would very likely inspire nonathletes to study harder.
The ethos of entitlement must be countered. I remember a distressing visit to Stamford High School in Connecticut, at the invitation of coaches there, to meet their varsity athletes at the time that “Prop 48” was being hotly debated. I asked the kids—many of them black, and most of them male—if they thought it fair that persons who performed weakly in academics should be given athletic scholarships. The response of every black male was that he was entitled to the scholarship, even if someone more qualified academically would be deprived of one. Not one suggested that athletes should be held to the same standards as nonathletes in competing for scholarships. They argued that they had spent endless time in training, that blacks had been discriminated against, and so on; it finally came down, however, to their sense of entitlement. On display was the increasingly dominant African American adolescent ethos of entitlement, of “You owe me,” which I consider monstrous. One can be sure that an adolescent with such an attitude will make no particular effort at scholastics. Why should he? His teacher (black or white) owes him a passing grade.
I can understand the argument that blacks should have been paid reparations for slavery and segregation. By an act of Congress, Japanese Americans interned during World War II received $20,000 per family for that injustice. Germany is still paying reparations to Jews through its relationship with the state
of Israel. No one has paid black Americans anything. In 1666, my state, Virginia, codified the conversion of black indentured servants, with limited terms of servitude, into slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation came in 1863. In my time, no one has seriously pursued the idea of making awards to blacks for those centuries of slavery and segregation. We may indeed be entitled to something. But our sense of entitlement has been taken too far. One of the major tasks of my teachers as I grew up was to make sure that no black kid gave up the struggle to do better because of despair in the face of segregation. We were taught that segregation counted for nothing against our duty to ourselves to work hard and do well. Our future, if we stayed in the South, was circumscribed by the “Sacred Six” list of jobs for blacks, serving blacks. By choosing one of these careers—physician, dentist, lawyer, teacher, minister, or mortician—one could even have a measure of prestige and prosperity. We nevertheless worked hard. Should we now give up because of an oppressive sense that we have not been compensated for historic wrongs done to us? Absolutely not.
The cult of entitlement is not limited to the poor. One Christmas not long ago, I was in the company of a close friend of mine, a successful doctor, and his son Bobby, who was himself a recent graduate of an elite private college and a renowned law school. African Americans all, we were guests in the sumptuous home of a nationally known television personality, also a black American. Our talk turned to affirmative action.
“Bobby,” I asked my friend’s son, “would you have accepted entrance into the law school under the rule of affirmative action, if your grades were not good enough for normal admission?”
“Yes, I would have,” he replied.