the BigAmateurism monologues

Last week the California Senate and NJ Democrat Senator Cory Booker buried the only two revenue-sharing proposals in the state or federal legislative landscape. The California bill, the “College Athlete Race and Gender Equity Act,” did not survive banishment to the Appropriation Committee’s “suspense file” (discussed in Episodes 113 and 117). The bill was designed to remedy the race-based financial exploitation of African American athletes in football and men’s basketball. The quiet death of the California bill is an inflection point in profit athletes’ attempts to have their true value to the college sports enterprise recognized tangibly. At the same time, in a Drake Group symposium on the integrity of college sports, Sen. Booker disclosed the removal of the revenue-sharing provisions of the “Athletes’ Bill of Rights” legislation introduced in the Senate in 2020. In its place will be a provision that provides “clarity” and “strength” to existing Title IX and gender equity laws and policies. This episode analyzes the demise of revenue-sharing and false choice between the interests of Black profit athletes in football and men’s basketball on the one hand and women’s and “Olympic” sports athletes on the other. This propagandized false choice appears to be a defining criterion in the content of any federal legislation under the rubric of “athletes’ rights.”