Kylia Carter, mother of former Duke basketball star Wendell Carter, compared the NCAA to slavery when speaking at a meeting of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics.
“When you remove all the bling and the bells and the sneakers and all that, you’ve paid for a child to come to your school to do what you wanted them to do for you, for free, and you made a lot of money when he did that, and you’ve got all these rules in place that say he cannot share in any of that,” Kylia Carter said. “The only other time when labor does not get paid but yet someone else gets profits and the labor is black and the profit is white, is in slavery.”
She fails to grasp the concept of amateur and professional athletes.
“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.”
“To be honest with you, it’s nauseating,” she added.
“It feels to me that, this is kind of tough to say, it looks like there is an attempt to legalize purchasing people is what this looks like,” she said. “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. 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…”
Ah, poor Wendell, had to suffer through a free Ivy League education for a season.
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Yet, she praised Duke and said going there “was a wonderful experience and everything that he needed it to be for him to come to the next level.”
Wendell Carter declared for June’s NBA draft after one season at Duke. He is expected to be selected in the first round.
