Forty Million Dollar Slaves

Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete was published in 2006. This book is nonfiction written by New York Times columnist William C. Rhoden. Rhoden was the creator of “Sports of the Times” while he worked for the New York Times. During his time with the company his composition concentrated on a touchy subject of his; authenticities that shaded contenders confront in their sport as well as life in America too. In this book, the American sport journalist investigates the situation of black athletes in modern civilization.

While they share in the riches, fame, and profound respect to which world class athlete have turned out to be acclimated despite everything they, as indicated by Rhoden, they need genuine influence inside the business that they made. He illustrates an image of the history of black athletes in the United States that contrasts the conduct of black athletes, on early plantations, disagreeing that their control within the sports industry is no better than the power black people had under slavery.

Rhoden is a firm believer in athletes playing a big role in generating their own bondage. He also considers that the current systems have shaped a series of removing aptitude black athletes from the inner-city areas and small towns and inserting them in overpoweringly large colleges and professional environments. In these environments they are taken advantage by everyone including agents and owners, and these people isolate them from their roots. Some of the athletes that Rhoden uses as case studies are Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson, Arthur Ashe.

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These people are he uses to investigates the racist history of sport in America.

Many books are written on the history of African American athletes. In this book Rhoden takes a different approach delivering his message through poetic brio and passionate arguments. In the chapters on the athletic style he competes with the development of a distinct and unmistakable style that African American athletes influence their status within the sports’ industry. He depicts the historical background of colored competitors; Rhoden’s book can be served as a guide for black athletes.

The book is also extremely autobiographical. William Rhoden also includes his journey of being an athlete who played football at a historically black college, Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland in the late 1960s. As a football player her participated in many events such as the Whitney Young Classic at the Yankees Stadium. He worked for the Afro-American Times and Ebony before joining The New York Times as a sports author, all of which added to his point of view on the substances that black athletes appear in America. He uses his life experience as a prism through which to translate events.

In a standout amongst the most captivating snapshots of the book, he relates how an elderly inhabitant of the to a great extent African American neighborhood of Harlem, where Rhoden lives, revealed to Rhoden that Babe Ruth, the considerable white baseball star of the 1920s, inhabited 409 Edgecombe Avenue, where Rhoden presently lives, strolling on the viaduct over the Harlem River to go to Yankee Stadium, where he played. Forty Million Dollar Slaves is an individual reflection and additionally a social tract.

In addition to giving the history of the black athletes, this book also works as a guide for black athletes, signifying what they need to be conscious of and what they should avoid while being a black athlete. This guide is essential so that black athletes can know what equalization is and what they need to know so they will not be taken advantage of like most black athletes are. Rhoden fights that, as they end up separated from the lives they have known, many black athletes detach and move toward becoming ‘corporatized substances’ that meet their expert obligations in any case, in route, lose vision of the issue that keep on plaguing the lion’s share of African Americans in the United States.

Rhoden argues that while black athletes are among the most famous and highest remunerated salaried individuals working today, this fact does not mean that they are in control of their own destinies. Rhoden is aware that his title, which propose that even an athlete earning forty million dollars can still be a slave is provocative. Without a doubt, he offers space to people, for example, dark business visionary and Charlotte Bobcats proprietor Robert Johnson, who are reluctant to acknowledge completely Rhoden’s similarity.

Rhoden’s bigger point and it is a point about race in America, not simply race in sports is that the adventure to full liberation for African Americans isn’t yet total. Utilizing the similarity of the scriptural Exodus every now and again utilized by African Americans to portray their very own mission for opportunity, Rhoden sees the dark competitor as yet meandering in the desert, as yet finding a path in the wild no place close to the guaranteed place where there is independence and balance.

This book inclines to infer that all black athletes come from similar socio-economic background and it has been implied that more consideration might have been given to those athletes who don’t imitate to the outline upon which the book’s thesis is founded. Rhoden recommends that effective blacks never again want to work for balance as for monetary and social matters for their race and that this absence of political responsibility has transformed dark competitors into a ‘lost clan.’ in the meantime, Rhoden clarifies that after years, even hundreds of years, of managing dangers to and the loss of their vocations, black athletes are living in a period where it is smarter to stay under the radar with regards to social activism, instead of hazard the damage of corporate sponsorships and the expert open doors that they have at long last accomplished.

Rhoden traces African American athletic activity back to hypothetical roots in African culture and approaches on suggesting that the concertation of sporting culture in the United States may pivot on this African American influence, even though by using similar situations in Australia and Canada one might argue otherwise. He gives a dull conspectus on how sports were used on slaves’ plantations to give African American men an outlet for aggressive drive that might otherwise have been turned against their oppressive masters. Although sports, particularly boxing, developed a major opportunity for black male empowerment, Rhoden deals with the facts that the roots of these athletic practices in the perspective of slavery should indicate historians to think twice about whether athletics are automatically empowering and emancipating for black Americans.

Throughout this book Rhoden includes that those expert black athletes who do figure out how to remain associated with the black community will probably move toward becoming focuses of the sports media, or in other words predominantly white entity. Prior to standing firm social or political issues, they have to consider the harm that may be done to their meriting potential. Rhoden refers to the Trayvon shooting, in which an unarmed young person that was a decent individual was murdered by an area watch chief, as an outstanding case, in which dark competitors, for instance, Dwayne Wade and Lebron James indicated open help for a reason and persevered through no expert backfire. All things considered, diverse players around the NBA take an interest and showed their assistance.

Rhoden make another great point involving the history of race in America, noting that the path to racial equality has not been one of seamless progress; even after the Civil War there have been times when racism and white social control increased rather than decreased. He political scientist Ira Katznelson made a similar statement in his 2005 book When Affirmative Action Was White. For instance, in the late nineteenth century, most horse jockeys were African American; particularly prominent was Isaac Murphy, the most famous jockey of his day, who died at thirty-five. In Murphy’s day, black jockeys were the norm, and had been for decades. Apparently, slaves had excelled as jockeys. White anxiety led to the.

In result, this was a great book to read especially for me being a Division I basketball player. Every person that is a black athlete for a college or universities and professional needs to read this book. Rhoden brought to light some great points that make me think twice about how I felt in some of the cases that he uses throughout the book. It is essential for athletes to know their worth and to know that they are the prize. In this book Rhoden really focuses on that fact that most of these athletes do not have the knowledge because most of the recruiters for these colleges and universities looks at the inner cities’ players. It is essential for black athletes to not get caught up on how these colleges and universities look and what they can give to you, but do they really care about you and will you benefit from them in the long run. Many players need to think about their future when it comes to picking a college or university and how will they help them after they are done playing their sport.