Standout is trying to help save sport & Black athletes
a few hundred people. “Brown University, If You Were Actually Serious About Racial Justice You Would Not Be Cutting the Men’s Track Team” elicited tens of thousands of views, and reached the exact right people.
In the essay, Dinkins hammered the hypocrisy of Brown’s statements supporting the protests against racial injustice while cutting some of the precious opportunities for Black athletes in its otherwise lily-white athletic department.
“Brown’s track team has more Black males than their Lacrosse, Baseball, Ice Hockey and Crew teams combined,” he wrote.
Dinkins did not spearhead the effort to save Brown track; a network of wealthy alumni did. But his essay cranked up the pressure. When the teams were cut in May, alumni eventually put together a strategic plan aimed at getting the university to reinstate them months later. Dinkins hit publish on June 2. Brown president Christine Paxson brought the track team back on June 11. “We now more fully appreciate the consequences of eliminating men’s track and field and cross country for black students,” Paxson admitted in her announcement.
After the Brown team came back from the dead, the New York Times wrote that the saga “hardly offers a template for other student-athletes whose teams are cut.” But that’s exactly what Dinkins took away from the experience, which led to successful efforts to save men’s track teams from the axe at Minnesota and William & Mary earlier this fall. “Brown, they were the ones who developed the scaffolding, the template,” he told the News. And again, Dinkins hasn’t nearly done this on his own. At William & Mary, the women’s cross country and track teams said they’d refuse to compete for the school until the men’s teams were reinstated.
‘WEALTH TRANSFER’
There’s an elephant, or at least a Tiger, in the room here. Yes, taking scholarship opportunities away from Black students and shifting ill-gotten football dollars from mostly Black sports to mostly white ones is wrong. But the term “student-athlete” was itself an invention to avoid paying workers’ comp to the widow of a football player who died in a game. Shouldn’t Clemson’s ill-gotten dollars be going to the football players themselves?
Fighting against a smaller injustice in the shadow of a massive injustice doesn’t strike Dinkins as a contradiction. “Football and basketball players are being exploited,” Dinkins told me. “These athletes need to be compensated in some way, majorly, for the value that they represent. That is being spun up into coaches’ compensation, into contractors who are building these lavish locker rooms.”
He points out that in Radokovich’s letter, the athletic director said that the puny savings from cutting track would be “reinvested” in “our remaining Olympic sports.”
That is, as Dinkins puts it, a “wealth transfer,” and not the kind that reparations advocates would support. “They are transferring money that was earmarked for sports that Black students disproportionately took advantage of to sports that are overwhelmingly white,” he said.
In late November, Dinkins flew from New Jersey to South Carolina to participate in a protest with the Clemson men’s and women’s track teams.
“Universities look at you all like commodities,” Dinkins said to the young athletes, addressing them from the steps of the Clemson president’s house. “If you’re not a commodity that they can exchange for profit, they can discard you.
“And so we’re going to send a message to Clemson University. Not only to the president, not only to the AD, but to all the other institutions around this country.”