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Many believe slavery was banned with the Emancipation Proclamation more than a century ago, but today's nationalists believe strongly in what we call modern-day slavery. Nationalists are suggested to be skeptics, suspicious of assertions that all people can live in the same region and be equal without the fear of one module oppressing the others. One of the chief goals of a nationalist is to attempt to encourage group solidarity and heighten national consciousness. Last week a critic of my column wrote me and explained, "Slavery is long gone. White people do not want slavery to come back either. Don't you think it is time for black people to move on from that as well and stop being stuck in the past?" The same critic later wrote, "It is not a nightmare for you to live in America. Would you rather be running around naked in Africa eating raw meat and braving the heat of the desert or getting an education at LSU?" I was not shocked by this response. In fact, since the beginning of my column I have become quite used to ignorant rants, but the level of unawareness depresses me. The chains may be gone, but slavery is most certainly not over. We hear about shackled laborers in Pakistan, cane-cutters in the Dominican Republic and child "carpet-slaves" in India, but as usual this is an example of focusing on other countries to take the attention off of the enslavement happening right here in "the land of the free." I could riddle off a number of examples that would make sense to me and others who are socially conscious about the societal issues facing America's poor, minorities and immigrants, but instead I will use LSU football as an analogy for modern-day slavery. I love watching football, but when I came to this University I had never seen such an unhealthy obsession in all my life. But that's another column. My concern now is the revenue football brings in and the compensation, or lack thereof, the players are receiving. Let's say hypothetically that tickets are being sold for $10 each; we all know they're not, but since most of you are hypersensitive about football we will cut the athletic department a break. The stadium seats 92,400 people. At $10 a ticket and a full stadium the profit is $924,000 for one game. This does not include concessions, LSU paraphernalia and the price some people pay to sit on the 50-yard line. There are roughly 100 players every season. Each player, at least the ones on scholarship, are provided with tuition, housing, books, a meal plan and miscellaneous assistance. The total for in-state athletes, which makes up more than half the team, comes to about $10,000 a year per athlete. So in one year the athletic department is dishing out about a $1,000,000 in scholarships, which is the revenue from one game on tickets alone, not to mention corporate sponsors. To be fair, I will admit I am omitting a few things, including the fact LSU football is one of the only programs in the country that gives money back to the school, which sometimes endorses other sports, the renovations to Tiger stadium and the millions of dollars plus the annual salary Les Miles receives. It still doesn't add up. According to USA Today, the NCAA averages better than half a billion dollars a year in revenue from TV rights to its men's basketball tournament. That does not include payouts from the 28 football bowls, which exceed $184,000,000. "We have a model for paying players. It's called professional sports," NCAA President Myles Brand said. It's so easy for a man who is making millions of dollars a year to dismiss the work ethic of collegiate athletes. The truth is the percentage of professional athletes that go pro is very low. Instead the majority of these athletes, of all ethnicities and backgrounds, leave the field, court, pool or track with a series of painful and permanent injuries and a long mental and physical recovery period. As far as I am concerned, this is modern-day slavery. Andre Gide, French author and winner of the national Nobel Peace Prize in literature in 1947, said, "The nationalist has a broad hatred and a narrow love." I beg to differ. Eradicating modern-day slavery and achieving national liberation for the demographics of people seeking it may come off as extreme dislike to others, but to me, it just seems natural.
----- Contact Shanelle Matthews at smatthews@lsureveille.com
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