Sports riots shatter race myth about violence

By Mike Seate
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Thursday, June 5, 2008

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The white student body majority at West Virginia University rioted after its football team's Oct. 22, 2003, victory over Virginia Tech. Students put down their books and picked up bricks and bottles of lighter fluid earlier that year when the Mountaineers lost to Miami in the Orange Bowl.

According to a recent study by the Web site Education Portal, WVU's student body is just 3.5 percent black. With so few black students on the WVU campus, how do folks like our letter writer explain those two ugly episodes?

According to Todd Crosset, a sociologist and professor of sports studies at the University of Massachusetts who was interviewed in the student newspaper The Daily Collegian, the riots follow a long, scripted tradition.

"It's a masculine cultural product," he said. "It's part of the mentality that comes to us from mob lynching. They were big community affairs where people did violence."

Crosset's assertion that riots at many universities are driven by young, white males echoes other studies done across the nation.

So I'm sure there's plenty that poor, disenfranchised black folks could get angry about and riot. A lack of jobs and the staggering economic disparities in our region would appear to be possible motivations.

They appear to be more legitimate causes to riot over than sporting events.