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When in 1990 Ronald Reagan accepted the Theodore Roosevelt Award, the highest honor bestowed on an individual by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, he said: When men and women compete on the athletic field, socioeconomic status disappears. African American or white, Christian or Jew, rich or poor . . all that matters is that you’re out there on the field giving your all. It’s the same way in the stands, where corporate presidents sit next to janitors . . and they high-five each other when their team scores .

This means that the members of one race spend most of their practice time with players of the same race (see chapter 8 for a more elaborate account of stacking). Most African American college athletes play for schools that are predominantly white (with African Americans constituting only 5 percent or so of the student body). They differ from the rest of the student body in color and size. They may also differ in academic preparation. They often differ in economic resources. Consider, for instance, a six-foot, ten-inch poor African American basketball player from the inner city of Detroit.

Stanley Eitzen and Maxine Baca Zinn, “The De-athleticization of Women: The Naming and Gender Marking of Collegiate Sport Teams,” Sociology of Sport Journal 6 (December 1989): 362–70. 33. Michael A. Messner, Taking the Field: Women, Men, and Sports (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), chapter 4. 34. My thanks to Mike Messner, who made these points in his review of the initial draft of this project. 35. Mariah Burton Nelson, The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football: Sexism and the American Culture of Sports (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 8.