End The $lavery
link Marc Lamont Hill: NBA impasse: Owners & the help – Philly.com.
Hill’s right. Maybe it’s about time that legions of “black and brown” skinned men he refers to, those that have been taken advantage of from very early ages, should revolt. It’s long overdue for the slaves to push back against generations of oppressive treatment. How this kind of blatant discrimination and selective servitude can exist in this modern time is a disgrace.
As we all know, from a very early age, games such as basketball and football are introduced to young blacks much as drugs are offered to teenagers. By doing so, young minorities are lured away from the easier path of academic study or the more exciting life of a technical education. They can only look wistfully at their non minority friends as they pursue the glamorous fields of accounting, finance and motorcycle mechanics.
The oppression usually continues right through the college years as they are regularly bombarded with big ticket professional contracts, preferential treatment, cars, lucrative ad deals and of course the never ending adulation of fans and the media. Their luckier academic counterparts meanwhile are living cushy lives, studying in anonymity and working at menial jobs.
Once the athletes are roped into the life of professional sports, their lives really take a turn for the worse. They are forced to sign long term playing contracts guaranteeing them wheelbarrows of money stretching into infinity without being allowed to assume any risk for starting a team, building a stadium, marketing or any other organizational risk available only to the white slave masters. As of the last proposal offered by these rapacious NBA owners, the players were offered only a measly 50% of revenues. Why Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, the ACLU, PETA, Michael Moore etc aren’t expressing more outrage about this is a mystery. Of course, most of us assuage our guilt by paying hundreds and in some cases, thousands of dollars for tickets just to help out these poor athletes. If only Jerry Lewis wasn’t so old, he’d be spearheading an annual telethon for them.
To put some perspective on the compensation paid to professional slaves, er athletes, the average salary paid to an NBA player is just over $5 million dollars per year. Of course averages are misleading since an outstanding star can be paid many times that amount. This of course excludes endorsements and sponsorships. For a more thorough view of sports salaries, see http://www.nba.com/2011/news/features/steve_aschburner/08/19/average-salary/index.html
From this website, here are some numbers for player salaries:
NBA: $5.15 million (2010-11)
MLB: $3.34 million (2010)
NHL: $2.4 million (2010-11)
NFL: $1.9 million (2010)
As we can see, the NBA is definitely the most oppressive.
Surely in this inclusive, modern era, we should be able to make professional sports less about oppressing visible minorities. There should be avenues for young minorities to escape the prison that is professional sports. At the very least, they should be paid more than the scraps that are offered to them today. If not, one day, someone will get the bright idea of starting their own league. That’ll teach the owners. After all, the reservoir of talented ball players is limited. It’s not as if there are hundreds of thousands of people vying for spots on the plantation.