I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It - Charles Barkley [39]
At the time, I felt I needed to attack the subject because on the whole I don’t think athletics are good for black kids. I really don’t. I got to this point because every single time I go and talk to black children or teenagers at a school or at an event, they only want to play sports. I’ll ask them what they want to do after high school or about their plans in the next few years and it’s always “I want to play pro basketball” or “I want to play in the NFL.” Every single one, it seems to me, wants to play sports for a living. It’s like there’s some mental block, or they’ve been conditioned or brainwashed to feel they can’t do anything but play sports. And it’s scary to me. It bothers me. Obviously, I’m not against sports; I’m thankful for everything a career in professional sports has given me. But I don’t know of any other culture where the children all want to do the same thing. I’ve never heard of any other situation like that.
I know this is complex and there are some real contradictions here because the most really influential group of black people in America is made up of a lot of athletes. There aren’t any Martin Luther Kings or Malcolm Xs or Medgar Everses leading the black community right now. Almost everybody, among the most prominent people in our communities right now, who has achieved any status the past twenty-five years has done so through athletics, which in a way is really a shame. We have a lot of hardworking people, folks doing backbreaking work. But we still don’t see the doctors and lawyers and engineers we need to see and need to have portrayed and need to treat as role models. And the ones we do have don’t have any real platform. They’re not doing anything controversial enough or scandalous enough to get profiles in the mainstream magazines. Athletes and entertainers are the only ones among us who have the platform, mostly because they’re on television every day.
So when you seriously start to think about it, our kids are so limited in the number of successful black people they can see or be exposed to. They see athletes and entertainers and what else? How often do they see scientists and engineers and writers? They don’t. I know in my own neighborhood, I didn’t know any black doctors or lawyers or professional black folks. They weren’t in the projects where I grew up. I know a whole lot of these kids I’m talking to come from neighborhoods that ain’t all that different from mine.
I’m not saying that poor white kids and Hispanic kids don’t have similar issues with this, because I suspect they do, too. And I’m not saying that only professional people can be role models. A guy working the nine-to-five cleaning the streets or running the grocery store on the corner could be a great role model. You need to see honest, hardworking people and appreciate what they’re doing with their lives. And just because somebody doesn’t have a college degree doesn’t mean he or she can’t help give some direction to a kid who can’t get it anywhere else. But we also need our kids to see some professional people they can aspire to be like, and they don’t see enough. Every kid can’t be Michael Jordan or Will Smith, and shouldn’t want to be. But this is what they see in their lives every day, because for so many of them they ain’t got anything positive going on at home.
Anyway, this had been bothering me for a while and I wanted to use my own platform to address it. And I never thought so many people would miss the bigger message. I found it interesting in the spring of 2002 that somebody came up with this TV campaign: “Parents, the anti-drug.” Isn’t that the same point I was making in the role model commercial? That campaign is a damn good reminder. But it’s nothing different from what I was saying in the role model commercial. What’s different about it? It doesn’t say, “Athletes and celebrities, the anti-drug,” does it? I wasn’t supposed to have any ideas of my own or