For My People? Linked Fate & African American Opinion on Paying College Athletes

• In Event: More Than Leisure and Play: Race and Gender Politics in American Sport

Abstract

In recent years, a growing number of college athletes, activists, and lawyers have called on the NCAA and its member organizations to share the millions of dollars in profit generated from college basketball and football games with the college athletes who participate in these sports. To date, the NCAA has successfully resisted legal efforts to pay college athletes, share profits with these athletes, or to allow these athletes to profit of the use of their names, images, or likeness (NIL). Interestingly, while a majority of white Americans have also expressed
opposition to these changes, these same surveys find that African Americans more strongly
support paying college athletes. What accounts for this racial divide, and more specifically black
opinion toward pay for play? While recent work has found a link between whites’ racial views
and their opposition to pay for play there has been little attention paid to the central determinants of black opinion on this issue, and how they may differ from those important to whites. In this paper, we argue that given the preponderance of African American male athletes
participating in college football and basketball that most Americans perceive the central
beneficiaries of “pay for play” to be young black men. As a result, we hypothesize that the
implicit focus on young black men in this debate activates notions of linked fate among African
Americans and subsequently drives their support for “pay for play” and NIL. In assessing the role of linked fate on black public opinion, we first rely on cross sectional survey data from pooled modules of the 2016, and 2018, and 2020 Cooperative Congressional Election
Studies. Here we explore the utility of college sports interest and knowledge, ethnocentrism,
attitudes toward the NCAA and college athletes, self-interest, and linked fate in accounting for
black opinion on pay for play and NIL. Second, in order to strengthen our causal claims, we
couple this cross sectional analysis with the results of a survey experiments in the 2018 and 2020 CCES in which respondents were randomly primed to think about either prominent white or African American college athletes, and then were asked their opinion on pay for play and NIL.
Our preliminary results suggest that linked fate is among the central predictors of black opinion
on pay for play and NIL. We take our results as evidence that race continues to play a key role
in the public debate over the future of the college athletics.

Authors

• Tatishe Mavovosi Nteta, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

• Lauren McCarthy, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

• Kevin Jay Wallsten, California State University, Long Beach