Today, the Pac-12 and the SWAC announced a scheduling partnership in which the league’s basketball teams will play one another in home-and-home series, beginning in the 2022-23 season. From the release:
Student-athletes will participate in social justice and anti-racism educational components as part of the games. Programming for the student-athletes will be a collaboration between campus leadership from the two participating men’s basketball programs. In addition, campus athletics departments will facilitate private meetings between athletics directors and their respective senior staff as part of the partnership.
First off, the buzzwords: Yes, there are reactions out there to “social justice” and “anti-racism,” and to be fair to those reactions, there are certainly stories of extremeness within those movements. My personal perception is that judging movements by their edges is an inaccurate survey, and that generally, we all should be after the lessening and ideally elimination of racism, which is what those movements are, broadly speaking, trying to do. I don’t want to get too deep into that, though, because it isn’t the focus.
The focus is: Major college basketball programs are raising awareness not just of constitutional rights issues and race relations, but of HBCU’s as an entity.
In Division I college basketball, there are two conferences comprised exclusively of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (one of which is the SWAC). Few mainstream sports fans know this. A lot of more niche college basketball fans don’t know this. I didn’t know this until a few years ago, and I follow college basketball intently. It’s part of my job.
The more awareness can be raised of the existence of HBCU’s, the better. They have a proud history, but their history is also one that shouldn’t exist. We shouldn’t have been a country that necessitated the creation of specific schools to be sure Black Americans could receive a college education. Their present should be different as well. What does it say about the state of America that these schools, largely created to ensure educational opportunities for Black Americans in the post-Civil War era, are among the most poorly funded in the NCAA’s Division I level of competition? You can disagree all you want about the causes, but the problem is rather evident.
Awareness of HBCU’s, then, circles back to awareness of the difficulties that face and have faced non-white people in America, something that’s easy for white people in white communities, like me, to ignore, often completely unintentionally. HBCU’s exist in a blind spot. The Pac-12 and the SWAC are trying something that might help shed some light on it. Good on them both for that.
