SPRINTING TO LEND A HAND
Russell Dinkins was one of the millions of Americans laid off from his job because of the pandemic. While many, understandably, have filled the time with exercise or hobbies, Dinkins has used his newly acquired free time to become the unlikely savior of men’s college track teams, which have been first in line for colleges’ coronavirus budget cuts.
In the last five months, he’s helped college runners who thought their teams were permanently eliminated at three different penny-pinching Division I schools. Athletes, alumni, and track fans at those schools are enormously angry and ready to fight, and Dinkins has helped focus that anger on their colleges’ racial hypocrisy.
The blueprint has worked in the Ivy League and Big Ten. Clemson, home of the best football program in the nation, will be the toughest test yet.
Athletic director Dan Radakovich announced the elimination of the Tigers men’s program in early November, sounding every bit like the villainous dean about to be felled by a scrappy band of misfits.
“We appreciate and acknowledge the potential efforts to support or to reinstate the men’s program,” Radakovich wrote. “However, the decision is final.” A Clemson spokesman told the Daily News that the status of the program has not changed.
Getting rid of track teams isn’t just costing young runners a chance to lace ‘em up. One in thirty Black male students at Clemson is on the men’s track and field team.
As Dinkins is fond of pointing out, 92% of Black male Division I athletes are in football, basketball and track. And the first two sports aren’t going anywhere. “If you cut track, you’re cutting one of the few sports where Black athletes take advantage of athletic opportunities, which provide a distinct pathway to admissions,” Dinkins told the News.
It’s a situation that is common across the American college system. There are very few opportunities for Black students; many of those opportunities are in sports; one of the three primary sports that Black men participate in is on the brink of elimination.
Colleges are using the pandemic to cut non-football budgets to the bone. Clemson, again, is just a particularly egregious instance of the broader trend, where men’s track teams are easy targets for cuts. It has a $92 million football coach who lords over a preposterous $55 million dollar facility. When faced with “significant financial challenges due to the ongoing pandemic,” the school decided to get rid of the $2 million track team.
Dinkins, seeing scarce opportunities for Black students going away, is trying to save the Black college athlete by saving men’s track. He’s already successfully helped save three programs that were slated for elimination: the men’s track/cross country programs at William & Mary, Brown, and Minnesota. Along with an energized group of athletes and alumni, he’s hoping Clemson will be the fourth.
“Any time a decision is made to add or discontinue a sports program, diversity is a factor, as are the impacts on gender equity and finances, among other considerations,” the Clemson athletic department said in a statement. It acknowledged the “difficult impact on their families, the staff, our alumni and fans.”
‘EXPLOITING BLACK LABOR FOR PROFIT’
Dinkins, a 31-year-old Black man, was an excellent runner at Princeton, good enough to win several Ivy League middle distance titles in college and harbor faint but reasonable Olympic dreams in the years since. He spent three years after college working at Princeton with first-generation and low-income students, work that he says prepared him for his sudden turn into highly specific activism.
The campaign at Clemson is the most aggressive yet, with a video explicitly saying that “What president James P. Clements & AD Dan Radakovich are doing is racist.”
“Clemson has a tradition of exploiting Black labor for profit,” starts the video, released Wednesday and produced by Dinkins and other supporters of the effort to save the team. It points out that the college is literally built on the plantation of John C. Calhoun, the former U.S. vice president and one of the major political and intellectual architects of the Confederacy.
Calhoun owned slaves on what would become the Clemson campus, and the video draws a direct connection between that and the modern-day Clemson athletic department. “As a school built on a PLANTATION, it’s sad to see that Clemson still doesn’t care about its black student population,” the Clemson 400-meter runner Kameron Jones tweeted on Monday.
The percentage of Black students at Clemson has fallen to 6%, in a state, South Carolina, which has long been between 25 and 30% Black.. “We’re already a