Ep. 569 - What's truly needed are Black owned sports leagues
The Breakdown with Shaun King
The North Star
4.8 • 12.6K Ratings
🗓️ 8 February 2022
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It was thought to be one of worst 2 or 3 coaching jobs available. So now the NFL has 2 Black head coaches in a league that is 70% Black.
At the root of it all is ownership. The NFL doesn't have a single Black owner. In fact, in all of American sports, out of 100+ teams, only one majority owner is Black - in spite of Black people dominating the industry.
It's one of the greatest failures of integration. Brilliant black teams and leagues were destroyed - alongside Black owned businesses of every kind. Integration ultimately meant Black people integrating into white owned, white dominated spaces.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You may have seen the news in the NFL that a new black coach was just hired. |
| 0:06.0 | Lovey Smith, veteran NFL head coach and coordinator, was just hired to be the head coach of the Houston Texans. |
| 0:15.0 | And that makes two black coaches the Saints hired someone else. |
| 0:20.0 | We thought maybe they would hire a black coach. |
| 0:22.0 | So now that all the hiring is over, only one black coach was given a spot |
| 0:29.0 | out of the nine jobs that were available, making only two black head coaches in the NFL |
| 0:36.0 | at a time where there had been as high as eight or nine were all the way down to two. |
| 0:42.0 | And at the root of it, if we're really being honest, it's a question of ownership. |
| 0:48.0 | And I want to have a complex conversation that many of us like to avoid |
| 0:54.0 | because it's easy to make people think you mean something other than what you intend here. |
| 1:01.0 | But I want to talk about how powerful it was when black folk actually owned sports leagues. |
| 1:10.0 | The Negro leagues, they were black on football and basketball leagues and teams. |
| 1:16.0 | And because of the way integration went down, |
| 1:21.0 | every single franchise in American sports except for one, the Charlotte Hornets, |
| 1:29.0 | in all of sports, none of them are owned by African Americans. |
| 1:34.0 | Let me unpack and explain it. |
| 1:36.0 | Let me tell you where I'm going with this. |
| 1:38.0 | I think you'll find it interesting. |
| 1:39.0 | This is Sean King and you are listening to The Breakdown. |
| 1:44.0 | The Breakdown. |
| 1:51.0 | The Breakdown. |
| 1:54.0 | The Breakdown. |
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