RACIAL DISPARITY ACROSS SPORTS ON LONG ISLAND
HISTORY OF LONG ISLAND
Many people who are not from Long Island may not be aware of how divided Long Island is in terms of its racial demographics. This divide can lead to many different areas of life feeling segregated, such as who owns businesses, communities, resources, religion and even sports. Many believe that seeing people of different color separated in today’s age is fully a product of America and in particular, Long Island’s racial history.
“It was designed that way,” says Hofstra’s inaugural director of “Race,” Culture and Social Justice Jonathan D. Lightfoot. “Post-World War II Levittown is the quintessential suburb, specifically designed to restrict Black residency.” Placing restrictions on certain races many felt would result in people being separated by their communities. Dr. Lightfoot went on to surmise that having a very small number of districts being primarily BIPOC (Black Indigenous People of Color) was due to this separation and segregation of people way back in the 1940s.
On the island, there aren’t many topics that would make people feel as uncomfortable as the conversation on racial disparity, and one area where it is most glaring is sports.
RACIAL DISPARITY IN RELATION TO SPORTS
Sports, as with all things, can be heavily affected by race, in terms of who is on the field playing as well as making decisions on the sidelines or in an office. We see this even in the professional leagues with the NFL and NBA facing heavy scrutiny for being predominantly Black leagues with not many minorities being put to run the team or make decisions on the franchise. If the professional leagues are facing such problems one can surmise about lower-level sports and how they can possibly contribute to establishing this troubling precedent of separation and unfair treatment earlier on in an athlete’s life.
HER EXPERIENCE: MAYA BROWN
Maya Brown a current junior at Stony Brook University, details her experience growing up here on Long Island. Brown attended Freeport High School which is a predominantly Black and Hispanic school. She chronicles her experience while being on the dance team. “When we would go to towns like Garden City or Merrick which were predominantly White… it’s obvious the Whiter communities had better opportunities and better resources,” Brown says. “That’s because of the segregation that Long Island was built on.”
“There is a stigma associated with the [minority] teams that you’re poor or you suck because you don’t have some award-winning coach,” Brown says. “I had a friend who I think was on Newfield (a predominately white dance team) and she said they would go to a dance studio all the time. We practiced in a cafeteria, with no mirrors… that’s just what we had to deal with because we just didn’t have the money or the resources for the dance team.”
Coming from someone who dealt with the disparity these comparisons were tremendous and according to Brown weighed heavily on their minds, while also affecting the team’s performances in their competitions.
No matter the sport or area, one tends to usually see on overwhelming discrepancy in a particular demographic on a high school sports team on the Island. What is the reason for this? Can it just be attributed to the island being separated largely by race? Does economics and social status play a part in this, or are there more racial undertones at play? To answer that you would have to continue to delve into the history of Long Island.
BREAKDOWN OF LONG ISLAND
The main two counties that people look at when referring to Long Island are Nassau and Suffolk, county which comprises a large portion of the Island’s population ( near 2.5 million people). The racial demographic according to Worldpopulationreview.com is as follows….
- White: 85.8% Suffolk County, 77.3% Nassau County (New York: 71.2%)
- Black: 8.2% Suffolk, 12.2% Nassau (New York: 17.5%)
- American Indian: 0.6% Suffolk, 0.5% Nassau (New York: 1%)
- Pacific Islander: 0.1% Suffolk, 0.1% Nassau (New York: 0.1%)
- Asian: 3.7% Suffolk, 8.4% Nassau (New York: 8%)
- Hispanic or Latino of any race: 17.3% Suffolk, 15.3% Nassau (New York: 8%)
So majority of the population is White, which makes up more of the population than the other minority races combined.
ALONZO JONES TRIES TO MAKE SENSE OF THIS
“ It is a conflation of a number of things, one of them would be history in particular America’s racialized history,” says Alonzo Jones the associate athletic director of inclusion and championship life at Arizona State University. “One can translate the racial dynamic in sport to the geographical distribution of human beings.”
In other words, where one lives has a major effect on what sport one plays. Another factor that Jones brought up was that a sport like hockey for example which has ice as an element would originate and be popular in colder places and regions of the world. “The way Americans are geographically dispersed, not a lot of African-Americans live in dense cold places where there is a lot of ice,” Jones said
HUNTINGTON EXECUTIVE PROVIDES INSIGHT
A lot of these same sentiments were backed up by Dana Beard, who is an executive member of the NAACP in Huntington. “Hockey is a very expensive sport… a lot of the time disadvantaged individuals cannot afford it so they shy away from it and coaches don’t actively seek them out,” Beard says. This leads to another important issue as to why many, including experts, believe that sports may be segregated by, and it all comes back to socioeconomics. Based off research and data done by scientists decades ago, there are several studies and metrics that show that minorities are behind Whites in economics, earning less money and having less resources available to them in their communities. One such study, according to Nationalequityatlas.org, states “although education is a leveler, racial and gender gaps persist in the labor market. Black Long Islanders face higher rates of joblessness and lower wages at all education levels compared with Whites.”
Beard gives the example of a private school on Long Island named Portledge in Locust Valley that is strictly dominated by hockey, with the majority of their students being non-African Americans and says they “actively seek out these children for that particular reason. Basketball and football in my opinion are the easier sports to attract funding, it appears African Americans are dominant in it, and it is also labeled with aggression,” Beard says.
This is an interesting perspective to take as many in this country know of the racial stereotype surrounding Black people and violence, with there being a stigma that they are considered to be more aggressive and violent than their White counterpart (which was pointed out by Beard.)
ANOTHER ATHLETE WEIGHS IN
Trevor Coston, another high school athlete that grew up on Long Island and played football at John Glenn High School in Elwood, talked about the importance of minorities having people that look like them to look up to. “Even though there aren’t as many African American coaches… you can probably get a kid from football or a former basketball player who played at the high school to kind of come back and help the high school, so you get a familiar face,” Coston said.
“In the other sports there is not really those figures to look up to when you think about it especially in Long Island. So you talk about money and then who you kind of can relate to,” Coston said. He went on to talk about how sometimes it is easier to want to play a sport and feel more comfortable from his experience if you see someone who looks like you as a mentor, teaching you the game.
PERSPECTIVES FROM HIGHER-UPS AND THOSE IN CHARGE
Timothy Mullins, the director of physical education, health and interscholastic sports for Blue Point, is someone who is tasked with making personnel decisions for many parts of a team. He also attributes seeing the lack of diversity to the way Long Island is separated and the demographics of a community. As someone who is tasked with supplying jobs for people in athletics he takes pride in hiring whoever he and his staff feel is the most qualified regardless of their color or physical makeup. He states however that he would love to see diversity more across all sports and hopes that programs “push into all communities,” Mullins says.
This sentiment is partly echoed by Pete Blieberg, the assistant executive director of Suffolk County athletics, as well as another football coach on Long Island who chooses to stay anonymous. “I am not being naïve and saying it doesn’t happen but in my [45 years] I have not seen it happen,” Blieberg says in regards to intentional racial separation in his district. “The better people are going to rise to the top regardless of their gender or their race.”
“Listen if a kid can play, you put him [in] there and watch him do what he can do,” said a Long Island football coach who asked to remain anonymous. “That’s just the basic make up of sports, you play your best kids.”
On the other hand, another football coach puts emphasis on wanting to see more minorities in key positions on and off the field and has an idea on how it can be done. “Getting African- Americans into the education field where they can make a difference and sow the seeds of how important education is, we need more African- Americans,” says David Shanahan, the athletic director and football coach of John Glenn High School (where Trevor Coston played), in response to how they can achieve having more diversity.
CULTURAL SHIFT: THE BLACK RENAISSANCE
While there has not only been a change on Long Island, but the entire country towards encouraging more diversity in all fields, most people still feel that there is more work that needs to be done. “Right now I’m calling this like others are a Black renaissance,” says Dr. Jacqueline Harris, executive director of Access 7 Services and board member of the Freeport Roosevelt Branch of the NAACP. “[This] is a time when people are really paying attention to kids of color, people of color and what’s happening to them to a greater degree, so I think a lot of things are getting more attention.”
This is a topic that while many don’t have concrete answers on what must be done in order to thoroughly correct this issue in sports on Long Island and the U.S, they share similar sentiment and ideas. “I can tell you schools are much more proactive now in creating diversity and inclusivity committees and looking at their practices and their hiring’s,” says Jeremy Thode, athletic director of the Center Moriches High School district. “When you look at the makeup of your school you want everybody to represented… at least I do, my district does.”
STEPS TOWARD DIVERSITY AND INCLUSIVITY
Thode has become a pioneer for diversity on Long Island by helping to start diversity and inclusivity work with the Long Island Nets basketball program at Nassau Coliseum. Together with the leadership of the athletic organizations of both section 11 and 8 (Suffolk and Nassau county respectively) along with many athletic directors and students from a lot of these different communities, they reach out to many different areas to speak on the experiences they face while dealing with athletics. It’s not only dealing with race but with women in sports and LGBTQ communities as well. Based off these results in the survey they are giving education and lessons by having students facilitate conversations with a professional (from LI Nets or athletic background) and conducting webinars about particular topics.
Programs like these are what, according to Thode and other people in the athletic field, will help educate people on the right way to go about diversifying sports and including many different people to interact with one another in athletics. This also speaks to Dr. Harris’s and several coaches who were interviewed points about educating people on a certain topic, which would start a conversation that would lead to interactions between people from different backgrounds.
LOOKING AHEAD
Most people would agree that having diversity across all sports benefits exposing different opportunities to children that never would have existed if not given the care and attention. Sports like work, school, and other things, allow people from different backgrounds to connect and interact, some in the heat of competition and a team atmosphere. Many people may look at this subject and neglect its importance but it is all intertwined in the effect of racial separation and treatment stemming from ages ago. Moving in the right direction is great, but there is definitely a lot more that can help diversify sports for all our youth growing up, especially here on Long Island.
