Hidden Figures and the Super Bowl: The Skewed Relationship Between Black Athletes and Black Academic Performance

Along with 111 million other Americans, we watched the Super Bowl Sunday. Depending on your perspective, it ranked as a classic because of New England’s historic comeback or as a colossal disaster because of Atlanta’s unprecedented meltdown.

 A Movie   The first month of 2017 we’ve been as enthralled by a movie as we normally are by football.  Hidden Figures chronicles the “colored computers” – African American women who worked as mathematicians for NASA, helping plot trajectories for the early Project Mercury flights.  What does the movie have to do with the Super Bowl?  A lot, we think. Though the three of us disagree about some implications of this determination, none of us doubt the tie or the importance of the issues it raises.

The player introductions demonstrated the on-field black dominance of pro football. Each team’s starting 22 included 14 African-American players.  That dominance extends into the college ranks. Clemson’s national championship football team featured ten African-American starters on defense and six on offense.  In basketball, black players comprise 75% percent of National Basketball Association rosters and the best college teams aren’t different.

Woodson and Henry contend that African-American success in athletics results from the investment society makes in athletic facilities, financial rewards for coaches, and junior college alternatives for athletes not ready to play at major colleges.  They argue that similar investment in African-American scholastic endeavors would produce similar results, an assertion Rob contests because he sees the academic and athletic structures as too different to draw such a conclusion without more evidence than we have.  

Facts and Figures   This racial composition of sports teams leads us to the Hidden Figures analogy.  African Americans do not come close to similar academic performance. In a 2013 study, for example, 81% of white 12^th graders scored better than the average African American 12^th grader in math and 78% of white 12th graders scored better than the average African American 12^th grader in reading.

 This, we stress, is not about deemphasizing sports in school or society. We do not attack youth sports programs.  Our children benefitted greatly from participating in athletics.  Sports programs serve a useful purpose in developing young people, including youth from families historically lacking in educational achievement.

The movie, however, makes us ask how the United States can produce more minds like the spectacular ones in Hidden Figures, as well as better educate the masses. African Americans, like the women in Hidden Figures, continue to excel at the highest levels in many fields. The hidden figures remain with us.  But the nation must also confront how to raise achievement levels of all students.     

One thing we know works and a debate   While we don’t underestimate the role of poverty in the educational achievement gap, evidence abounds that parental and adult support make a huge difference in the development of young minds. Before we reach the issue of government funding for public education, we emphasize that educational achievement starts with parental/adult involvement and support for the individual student. That support runs the gamut from simple encouragement to helping with homework to tutoring to parent-teacher contact. Parental involvement lifts mediocre schools and makes good schools great.

Despite consensus on that point, we differ on a related issue. Woodson and Henry contend that institutional racism plays a predominant role in limiting African American academic achievement. They point to essentially abandoned public schools that have become little more than prison pipelines and where the war on drugs often serves as a vehicle for criminalizing young men of color, creating a culture of hopelessness.  Rob acknowledges that such racism exists, but argues that his colleagues put too much responsibility on it, giving blacks a pass for their academic failings.    

 Leaving aside political debates about “taxing and spending” and mind numbing battles over “school choice,” most people who’ve thought about this understand the need to better fund public education. We acknowledge both sides of the arguments about teacher pay and the role of teacher unions. Experts disagree about why some things work in education and others don’t. Still, given America’s middling standing among developed nations in student achievement, doesn’t it make sense to resolve our differences over these process issues and find a way to better educate young people?

We believe education can help solve many of the nation’s economic and racial problems.  The days of a high school diploma automatically leading to a middle class income are going fast and won’t come back.  As Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum demonstrated so well in their 2011 book That Used to be Us, increasingly, the ability to earn a good living depends on understanding mathematics, science, and business and possessing critical thinking skills, not making things with your hands.   An educated populace, equipped with superior analytical and critical thinking skills, we think, might also give us a better chance of breaking through our never ending racial discord.

Inspiration   The Hidden Figures women should inspire all Americans and African Americans in particular.  Rob asks that if they could do what they did, given the obstacles and handicaps under which they worked, what excuse do blacks have for not equaling or exceeding their accomplishments in a much different world, one with many fewer legal and institutional barriers to success?  As he sees it, no one now must petition a judge to get into engineering school, as Mary Jackson had to.  No one must sneak a book out of a public library to learn computer programming like Dorothy Vaughn, and no accomplished mathematician like Katherine Johnson has to run to a different building to use a rest room.

Woodson and Henry, however, argue that obstacles African Americans face today present at least as much of a challenge as those in Hidden Figures.  They point to loss of control of public schools and the exodus of the African American middle class to the suburbs brought about by desegregation, creating an underclass trapped in failing inner city schools and devastated by a mean spirited war on drugs.  They assert investment of more money in education (and less in prisons), with the laser focus currently reserved for athletics, would produce the kind of success African-Americans enjoy in sports.  Rob challenges this position, contending, again, that the arenas differ too much to justify such a conclusion.       

Despite some differences in philosophy, we agree communities of color need a new emphasis on education. Success in sports and academics is not mutually exclusive.  Hidden Figures and the Super Bowl provide examples equally worthy of emulation.