How true are the allegations of racism and sexism in the highest ranks of stock car racing?
I don't know how many of you have been following the Mauricia Grant case. She's the black, female NASCAR inspector who has filed a $225 million dollar lawsuit against NASCAR over allegations of on-going sexism and racism that she endured during her two-plus years of employment with the sanctioning body.
Author Dave Zirin opined on it over at The Huffington Post, and you can get the factual details from the Associated Press coverage.
I don't want to get into the merits of the case, since it appears that both Grant's complaints and NASCAR's defense have merits, and as the case goes on, legal disclosures and hopefully some good investigative journalism will shine a spotlight on where the truth lies.
I know none of the players personally, but I do have some experience as a racer and a crew member, as well as 25 years as a journalist, and hopefully my thoughts here will encourage you to view this case rationally and in a modern context.
Racing in general, and southern stock car racing in particular, has a checkered past, and I'm not just talking about the flags. But in 2008, it is a modern sport with modern leadership that runs it like any other business. It is, in some ways, more sensitive to media scrutiny because, unlike other pro sports, the drivers and teams depend on direct corporate sponsorship for funding. Bad publicity is bad for business.
I've worked in the NASCAR garage as a crew member for eight years, and I've been hanging around race tracks, even racing for a few years myself, since 1983. I have to say that politics and political correctness are no more present in the garage area there than they are on the playing field of any other sport. No more, no less. We need to remember that.
But as in other sports, what goes on on the field is quite different from what happens in the owner's booth or among the officiating bureaucracy, which are one and the same in NASCAR, a sport with just one owner and one family at the top. I hope I'm being helpful by pointing that out because the unique structure of the sport makes it much easier to focus the criticism that leadership deserves for allowing the apparent racism and sexism Mauricia Grant alleges to go on.
And I say this because I hope the criticism remains focused where it belongs, on the business operations of NASCAR, and the France family, because I would hate to see the fans and competitors, who in my experience are almost universally welcoming and tolerant of all comers, tarred by the negative images this case paints.
In all the discussion of Grant's case, I have never heard of a driver or member of a competing team accused of any bad behavior.
In addition, when I hear NASCAR fans being dismissed as lowbrow neanderthals, I am reminded of Dateline NBC's attempts to incite anti-Muslim response by sending two apparently Arab or Muslim men to a NASCAR race at Martinsville, Va., in April 2006 and filming the crowd's response to them. The result: no one bothered them at all. It was a major black eye for NBC News, considering the insidiousness of the tactics, and a big "attaboy" to NASCAR fans, though no one who lives the sport was surprised.
We also need to realize that baseball crossed its color line in 1947; the NFL, despite being integrated at its founding in 1922, had a "no blacks" policy from 1933-1946; the NBA's two founding leagues integrated in 1946 and 1950 respectively; and the NHL got its first black player in 1958, though from 1961 until 1978, there were none.
Wendell Scott was the first, and to date, only, black full-time driver in NASCAR's top series now known as the Sprint Cup, when he moved up in 1961 after years of proving himself -- against long odds -- locally throughout the 1950s. He raced in Cup until 1973 when a bad wreck forced him into retirement. Five other black drivers have made just nine starts in NASCAR's top series.
For women, the record has been only slightly more optimistic. Though no woman has ever won a race in the top series, there have been more credible female competitors over the years, dating back to Louise Smith in 1949.
Now, it's fair to say no one is asking "why aren't there more minorities?" and "why aren't there more women?" about the NBA, the NFL, Major League Baseball or the NHL the way they do about NASCAR. But neither will you hear anyone in NASCAR claiming any victim status for the scrutiny they face on this subject.
I feel strongly that, for my sport to grow and prosper as a business, it must put more diverse faces front and center -- as drivers, crew chiefs, crew members, car owners and leading officials. I won't go so far as to say my sentiments are universal, but anyone who cares and thinks beyond the superficial about NASCAR realizes this and feels the same way.
Among fans, there is a hunger for diversity in racing. Look how people have reacted to Danica Patrick's appearance on the Indy Car scene. All that's missing in NASCAR is for the right personalities to step up and succeed. But that's easier said than done. It is a performance-based business in more ways than one, and succeeding on one's merits takes years to develop. Tiger Woods was getting golf lessons from his father when he was in kindergarten. For Jeff Gordon, it was the same with go-karts.
Some crew chiefs observe that those who rise to the top in NASCAR are those who have hung around race tracks and garage areas on the local level as soon as they were old enough and for as long as it took to catch on with a team, learning what they could, doing what they could. I believe that's true. Hell, that's how I did it.
Until urban kids -- black or otherwise -- and women start hanging around the pits at local race tracks more often, or have parents willing to make the commitments that families like Jeff Gordon's and Tigers Woods' did to support their kids' efforts in sports, diversity will remain a long time in coming.
But progress is being made. It would be truly unfortunate for those at the top, in the leadership of the sport, to ruin it for everyone by failing to address bad behavior on their watch.