Racial Bias Affects Opinions on Paying College Athletes, According to CSULB Political Science Associate Professor
With the NCAA National Football Championship game less than one week away, Kevin Wallsten, associate professor of political science at California State University, Long Beach, and his associates have released findings of the role race plays on people’s opinions on paying college athletes. He partnered with Tatishe M. Nteta, associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Lauren A. McCarthy, assistant professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in an article in the Washington Post entitled, “Racial Prejudice is Driving Opposition to Paying College Athletes. Here’s the Evidence.”
The authors cited the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) that showed 53 percent of African Americans backed paying college athletes -- more than doubling the 22 percent support of whites. To find out whether racial prejudice influences white opinion on paying college athletes, they conducted a survey of opinions on “pay for play” policies using the 2014 CCES. In a statistical analysis that controlled a host of other influences, they found this: Negative racial views about blacks were the single most important predictor of white opposition to paying college athletes. A quote from the piece says, “When whites believe that a policy mainly helps blacks, their opinions on that policy are inevitably colored by their feelings toward blacks as a group.”
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