onlookers celebrated<\/a>\u00a0Collins as a 21st century Jackie Robinson, but the comparison diminishes the fire Robinson went through as Major League Baseball\u2019s first black athlete. Black segregation was a horrible reality in the 1940s \u2013 segregated drinking fountains, buses, even a separate \u201cNegro League\u201d for black ballplayers. Robinson broke those barriers. The same-sex marriage debate aside, no equivalent barriers exist for the 7-foot tall Collins. Even so, being gay in the testosterone-soaked culture of male sports has surely been uncomfortable for Collins. I played competitive basketball through college \u2013 and while I don\u2019t know if any of my teammates were gay, it would have been uncomfortable to admit in swaggering, cheerleader-chasing locker rooms.<\/p>\nMajority cultures work both ways. A talented male classmate of mine had his heart set on a career as a professional dancer in New York theater \u2013 but as a straight man he found it difficult to fit in to the gay theater culture and eventually left despite a bright future with a top New York dance company.<\/p>\n
Collins \u201couting\u201d this week also was a refreshing glimpse into sports meritocracy.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhether he is straight, gay, black, white, from Earth, or from Mars is immaterial. Just help us win,\u201d tweeted the Miami Heat\u2019s Sane Battier, a former Detroit Country Day High School superstar. Battier\u2019s sentiments echoed that of most players and coaches who put a premium on skill \u2013 not color, sex, or creed.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s an example to the political and academic world\u2019s which still insist on retro- \u201cdiversity\u201d quotas for college admission. Higher ed\u2019s lawsuit against Michigan\u2019s civil rights law, for example. In a telling intersection of sports and politics during the MCRI debate in 2006, Michigan State Basketball Coach Tom Izzo was dragged out to the microphones to lend his support for his university\u2019s admission quotas. A savvy MCRI student supporter \u2013 about 5\u20195\u2033 and Asian \u2013 put on an MSU basketball jersey and attended the press conference to mock Izzo for the lack of short Asian players on his NCAA team.<\/p>\n
Point taken. Regardless of his sexual orientation, Jason Collins belongs in the NBA because he\u2019s qualified. The same standard should hold in the classroom as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jason Collins is no Jackie Robinson, but his coming out as a gay NBA athlete sheds light on the difficulties of being a minority in an athletic culture \u2013 even as sports sets a noble example of meritocracy. Some\u00a0onlookers celebrated\u00a0Collins as a 21st century Jackie Robinson, but the comparison diminishes the fire Robinson went through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,87],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12870"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12870"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12872,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12870\/revisions\/12872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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