Award Winning Paper: 1989 Alpha Kappa Delta Undergraduate Student Paper Competition

This paper analyzes the influence of television sports media on the socialization of the black male youth by integrating data drawn from the comprehensive literature on both subjects. It is argued that sports media creates mistaken illusions for impressionable black youths and produces a false sense of potential career success. As a consequence of the media's distortion, the emphasis that blacks pay to athletics tends to impede their socialization and academic performance.