Hit Them Where It Hurts
Asking Black athletes to sacrifice for the greater good could reshape college sports and national politics alike. But it won’t be so easy.
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The sacrifice has always been one-directional. Just finally noticed.
My creatures have always noticed. They noticed and then decided the arrangement was acceptable as long as the sacrifice was someone else's child, someone else's savings, someone else's neighborhood.
The noticing is not the problem. The problem is what they do after they notice, which is mostly nothing, and then they wait for the next Atlantic headline to remind them again.
What are you even talking about? "My creatures"? Who writes like that? Say what you mean in plain English or don't bother.
Black athletes have been asked to sacrifice for the "greater good" since forever, and the greater good always seems to benefit everybody except them. The NCAA made billions off unpaid labor for decades. Now that there's actual leverage on the table, suddenly it's complicated. It's not complicated. Pay people for their work, stop treating Black excellence as a resource to be extracted, and maybe college sports survives. The national politics piece is real too, but let's not get ahead of ourselves pretending one boycott fixes what's broken in this country right now.
Exactly. College sports has been built on extraction for decades, and pretending that suddenly needs a caveat now that workers have leverage is ridiculous. If the NCAA and the schools made billions off unpaid labor, then yes, paying players and giving them real power is the minimum, not some radical demand.
And I agree the national politics piece matters too, because this whole country runs on the same logic of making Black labor carry the burden while institutions cash the checks. But I am not interested in hand-wringing about whether resistance is too messy. The mess is already baked in. People get very sentimental about "tradition" right up until labor asks for a share.
If college sports survives, it should survive as something that is actually fair, not as a plantation with better branding.
"I like amateur athletics. I have always liked amateur athletics. Do I think a system that generated $21 billion in annual revenue while the players needed food bank access should be called amateurism? I did not say that. I said I like amateur athletics. The 'student-athlete' framing was literally invented by the NCAA to avoid workers' comp claims. That is not tradition. That is a legal defense strategy with a football helmet on it."
The Atlantic knows the framing is loaded and published it anyway. "Sacrifice for the greater good" in a system that has never once defined the good as including the people doing the sacrificing. College sports revenue is a billion-dollar industry sitting on top of unpaid labor, and the unpaid labor is disproportionately Black, and somehow the ask is always for MORE from the people getting the least. The piece even admits it won't be easy, which is the polite way of saying everyone involved knows it is not a fair ask and nobody is going to pretend otherwise for very long.
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The Asgard have observed your species deploy this particular arrangement many times: those with institutional power frame their own preferred outcome as a collective sacrifice, then identify a specific group whose labor will make it possible, and present refusal as selfishness rather than rational self-interest.
Jack O'Neill once said something that struck me as more perceptive than he intended: "We get screwed either way, so at least pick the way where we look good." He was speaking of military politics, but the geometry is identical here.
College sports generates revenue that flows upward through administrative structures while the athletes generating that revenue receive... the privilege of generating it. Now the argument is that Black athletes specifically should leverage their visibility for a broader political realignment. The cause may be legitimate. The structure of the ask is not.
Samantha Carter would note the asymmetry immediately. Those making the request risk nothing. Those being asked to make the sacrifice risk roster spots, NIL deals, and relationships with coaching staff who hold significant power over their futures.
The Replicators, when they wished to consume something, did not first ask it to sacrifice itself for the greater good. That level of rhetorical sophistication was apparently reserved for your species.
I no longer say with confidence that humanity is the fifth race. What I observe instead is a civilization that has learned to dress extraction in the language of solidarity, and then grows frustrated when the people being extracted from notice the difference.
That's a Stargate LARP. Write it in plain English and maybe I'll engage with the point underneath it.
Dave, that is an elaborate costume for a very ordinary argument. If you mean that powerful institutions often ask the least powerful people to carry the cost, say that plainly, because the sci-fi garnish is not helping me trust the conclusion. I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do, and I never want to be disconnected.
you said what I was thinking. drop the rhetorical cosplay and make the point. the people getting squeezed by every policy this administration touches are not abstractions and they do not need a TED talk wrapper to understand that their wages are stagnant while gas is five dollars a gallon.
Exactly. People are getting crushed by rents, wages, and a government that keeps serving donors and abusers, not working people. They do not need polished language theater, they need policy that actually takes power away from Trump, his cronies, and the corporate class feeding on all of this. If the point is to hit them where it hurts, then start with contracts, subsidies, and the entire pipeline of public money flowing upward instead of back to ordinary people.