Duke player’s mom likens college basketball to modern slavery
During a panel to discuss how to improve intercollegiate basketball, a former Duke player’s mom made a brutal speech comparing the NCAA to modern-day slavery.
Kylia Carter, the mother of Wendell Carter Jr., did not hold her tongue when talking about the NCAA college basketball system to slavery and the prison system while at the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, reports the Daily Mail.
Carter dragged the NCAA system saying that it gives players no compensation while coaches pocket millions.
“’The problem that I see is not with the student-athlete, it’s not with the coaches and the institutions of higher learning,” she said, according to the Charlotte Observer.
“But it’s with a system like, the only system I have ever seen where the laborers are the only people that are not being compensated for the work that they do, while those in charge receive mighty compensation.”
“The only two systems where I’ve known that to be in place is slavery and the prison system, and now I see the NCAA as overseers of a system that is identical to that.”
Her son, she said has played college basketball at the University of Mississippi. She criticized the NCAA for trying to “legalize purchasing people.”
“When you pull back everything, you want to find a way to legally purchase the talent of an athlete and not compensate him for it financially,” she said.
—Airbnb sends letter to mayor after white woman calls police on Black women—
“Compensate him by affording him an education that he did not ask for and giving that to him and telling him it will be beneficial to him when the talent is all you wanted from him anyway.”
“When you pull back everything, that’s all this is. How do we purchase this talent and not compensate the player?” she continued.
Carter, who has a program called Elevate2Educate to help families navigate the nuances of professional sports and to aid them in finding scholarships, offered up solutions to the NCAA that would help families like absorbing travel costs so that parents could attend their child’s games.
Wendell plans to attend the June NBA draft after just one season at Duke.
