Proposed Law: Cancel Modern Slavery in the US

A brave Democratic senator from New Jersey is trying to open one of the most significant Pandora’s boxes in America: the age-old, racist, greedy exploitation of college athletes.

In a characteristic delay of 155 years from the declaration of the end of slavery, a new law has been proposed in the U.S. that will put an end to a modern type of slavery in which people, mostly white, earn hundreds of millions of dollars per year from slaves, mostly Black, who receive for their efforts a full scholarship for their undergraduate college tuition. We are talking about the slavery conditions which exist across America, are broadcast all over the country and are watched by millions, in a shocking exploitation of humans who are given almost no choice. Now, finally, we have an end to this disgrace.

We are talking about a law proposed by New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker who, among other things, was a football player at Stanford. But it’s not just a law; it’s a declaration of rights for university athletes, which is meant to correct a decades-long wrong.

The proposal would aim to establish payments for student athletes (a concept that was born in the sick minds of university heads, in order to avoid finding themselves in the position of enslavers of slaves), profit-sharing, an option to transfer from university to university without penalty and health insurance throughout the student’s academic career. In addition, the university would be obligated to maintain complete transparency regarding the sources of its earnings. This would be earth-shattering for the sports world and for academia, both from a status and economic point of view.

Today, the situation is that universities can bring in more than $200 million a year from professional sports (especially men’s football and basketball, which fund the rest of men and women’s sports). In return, the players get a scholarship for four years. They can go through college (but are penalized if they take a year off or transfer), don’t get health insurance because of all the injuries and are not allowed to earn any money.

That means that the university can sell a quarterback’s image to an automobile dealership to use for advertising, and this can earn a fleet of vehicles for the university in return. However, if the quarterback gets a car from the dealership for his own use, he will be severely penalized.

The proposed law wants to put an end to this. Players should earn money from their own names and faces. Universities will have to give part of the dividends to their employees, athletes will be able to transfer universities as much as they want to without penalty (like any other student), health insurance will cover their sports-related injuries and they will be able to keep their scholarships until they finish their degrees.

This last demand reflects one of the ugly lies of the college sports industry, which is meant to validate this travesty: No one cares how much the student has learned; the main thing is that they can get the ball into the basket. There are instances of students who have completed a degree without even knowing how to read or write. Universities would hold on to whole departments of students who cheated for the athletes.

Athletics programs in America are clumsy, anyway. A boy of 13 who is a computer genius can get a job at Facebook or Google tomorrow. That is not an option open to a 13-year-old boy who wants to play sports. The main difference is the color of the candidates’ skin. Over the years, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has put obstacles in the paths of Black kids and exploited their backgrounds and their desire to free themselves from their past. The proposed law is the beginning of the road to ending to this slave market.

Whoever thinks that the comparison with slavery is too strong should note the reaction of the NCAA, which apparently does not plan to contest this law, on one condition: that it cannot be sued retroactively. There are too many Pandora’s boxes that the NCAA doesn’t want to open.