Wrapping up a game in college sports usually means an athlete takes off his or her jersey and heads for the showers. Once the jersey is off, most athletes blend right in with the masses. At Cal Poly, though, many black athletes say their student peers always see them with a jersey on.
“One of the first things I remember when I came to this school is at a party, someone asked me, ‘So what sport do you play?’ ” said Louis “L.J.” Lumpkin, a track and field athlete and psychology junior. “In a way, it’s kind of a compliment, but then I realize that’s what people assume when they see me on campus. I know it’s not everyone, and I know people weren’t trying to be insulting by it, but it gets old.”
He said being an athlete and a student isn’t a walk in the park.
“We’re held more accountable than the average student,” Lumpkin added. “We have to be more careful because it’s easier to get reprimanded if you’re a familiar athlete. The only real benefit we get is priority registration, and it’s only during the season and it’s only to schedule classes around our sport. And the whole idea that we’re here just to play sports is wrong. Most athletes hold 3.3 GPAs. I’m here for my education first and foremost.”
Coming from Salinas, where the community is largely Latino, Lumpkin has come to cope with a lack of ethnic diversity at home and at school.
“It kind of feels like you’re alone and you want to relate to certain people, but you know they can’t,” he said. “At the same time, you don’t want to be that stereotypical ‘I’m-mad-at-everybody’ black person, but you also want to let people know that it offends you.”
According to California State University data, as of fall 2007, of the campus’ total enrollment of 19,777, just 237 – or 1.2 percent – were black. It was the lowest percentage throughout the 23-campus CSU system.
That kind of statistic is enough for people to make assumptions, track and field athlete and social sciences senior Jhana Samuels said.
“With numbers like that, basically, people assume, ‘Well, you must be here to play a sport,’ ” she said. “That’s what most people think.”
Kinesiology department chair Camille O’Bryant knows the black-athlete stereotype all too well.
“I can say from the different classes I have taught over the years, many black students have come up to me, both male and female, and said they have experienced this stereotype on campus,” she said.
Even if the black demographic were to increase, O’Bryant suspects, one gender would experience the stereotype more than the other.
“My guess would have to be that the men would experience more of the stereotyping, because most of us think about sports as a male place,” she said. “Not just the stereotype that they’re an athlete because they’re black, but that they only got into Cal Poly because they can play a sport, typically gets attached to males more than females.”
Football player and microbiology senior Jaymes Thierry sees the stereotyping of black students as athletes on campus as part of a larger ignorant view of black students.
“That’s basically saying that all we can do is run, jump, catch and kick,” he said. “But we can’t whine and get bogged down about things like that because we’re all guilty of that. Even black people stereotype other races.”
The biggest problem with the campus’ lack of ethnic diversity, he said, is its “under-cover racism.”
Consequently, he wasn’t surprised to hear about the recent case involving a noose, a Confederate flag and an alleged sign with discriminatory slurs at the on-campus crop house.
“It wasn’t the first racial thing I have experienced here,” he said. “Sometimes at parties, the white kids call black kids n—s here and there. It’s just a feeling of being a black person and going to certain places with certain people. I don’t think a generalization can be made, but there is definitely racism around here.”
Lumpkin could also recall acts of racism that were directed at him off campus.
“There are times when I’m out and about and I’ll hear someone yell ‘n—‘ out of their car,” he said.
The crop house incident put other athletes on more of an alert to racism on campus.
“It made me more reluctant to open up to people I don’t know,” said women’s basketball player and business junior Tamara Wells. “Because the incident is so fresh, I have become more aware that racism is out there – not that I wasn’t before, but now I’m more concerned for my safety.”
Wells sought comfort with her team.
“We all feel passionately about each other and we’re all friends,” she said. “As a team, we came together and spoke about the issue at hand and attended a lot of the meetings to prevent acts (like the crop house incident) from happening again.”
Most black athletes said it would be nice to see the school undertake more efforts to recruit more minority students but that they understand why not many black students attend Cal Poly.
For some, those questions concerning recruiting were answered by associate director of admissions, recruitment and financial aid Walter Harris in a recent Mustang Daily story concerning the recent diversity forum hosted by Associated Students Inc. president Angela Kramer.
“From what Walter Harris said in the paper, ‘People have to compete on the same playing field whether they had the same opportunities for preparation or not,’ ” Samuels said.
Athletics academic adviser Shannon Stephens said teams end up being athletes’ support systems.
“I definitely believe athletics provides a diverse kind of group, with regard to this campus,” he said. “Athletes walk onto this campus and already have a common bond with the people on their team. And for athletes who are a minority, it’s a first huge step when they walk into this environment.”
Athletic recruiting and academic recruiting are similar in that they don’t look at race as a factor, Stephens said, but athletic recruiting is different because it is more personal.
“The athletes we recruit have met with their coaches and some of their teammates, with me; we’ve done in-house visits and they visited the campus once or twice,” he explained. “They know people before they come here. So I think that if administration did something similar to that, in which a minority student knows people before they get here, I think it can really help.”