Confession: I’ve long loved the lexicon of a dice game happening on a street corner or in the basement of an after-hours spot or in the parking lot of a strip club or, an eon ago, in the halls of my high school: “Fever in the funkhouse, and I’m looking for a fin . . . Nina Ross the new boss . . . Box cars . . . Lil Joe out the back door . . . Six, eight running mates. Seven come eleven . . . Aces . . . Snake eyes . . . Mama need clothes. Baby need new shoes . . . Taking all side bets . . . Bet it back.”
Have also loved the sound of dice knocking in a fist, a dude blowing on them for luck with high flair, the pop of the finger snap that stressed each roll.
But as much as neighborhood craps games enamored me, I was not—even during my days as a denizen of the underground economy—a frequent participant in them. For one, it’s been hard to convince myself that the odds would ever favor me. For two, I’d often witness somebody who didn’t know when to quit and took a big-ass L. For three, the bigger dice games became a risk.
My days in the orbit of a dice game come strong to mind when I watch a game or a sports show today, damn hard to do without Kevin Hart and LeBron lending their ethos to DraftKings. Without Jamie Foxx shilling for BetMGM. Without Stephen A. Smith doing the bidding of ESPN Bet. That’s ditto for sports gurus touting the spread or a parlay or offering prognostications about the odds on their shows. To say nothing of the shows dedicated to talking overs and unders. Sports betting is now legal in 38 states. And business is beyond booming, as Americans bet $119.84 billion on sports in 2023, helping to generate a record-high $66.5 billion in revenue for Big Gambling, including $10.9 billion from sports betting alone.
But this new era of sports betting ain’t just more big business. It’s another industry undermining my people, targeting them with predation. Why do I think that? Because we arrived at this era by way of a law that’s been used to harm Black people and marginalized groups. Because Big Gambling resembles Big Tobacco in troubling ways. Because the industry must know that its efforts intersect with a culture, maybe the most influential culture in the Black community, that by and large has encouraged a reckless relationship with money.
This era began in earnest with the SCOTUS ruling in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association. The crux of the court’s 6–3 decision was that gambling should be the prerogative of states’ rights. Never, ever forget that the argument of states’ rights was used to preserve slavery and again to foster Jim Crow, that just two years ago, a Trump-packed SCOTUS used the alibi of states’ rights to roll back a woman’s right to choose. All of which is to say, in this skin, the history of the court invoking states’ rights is tantamount to leaving Black people (and other vulnerable groups) at risk for injustice.
Big Tobacco spent decades targeting Black people with menthol products. And there’s plenty evidence to support that fact, including an exhaustive report as part of Stanford University’s Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising. Per its report, which examined internal corporate correspondence dating back to the 1920s and decades of advertisements, Big Tobacco had been targeting Black communities by plastering ads on billboards and buses and subways; by enticing potential smokers with “starter” cigarette packs and discounts; by featuring Black celebs in menthol advertisements in Black newspapers and magazines.
My mother began smoking Kools in the 1970s and didn’t quit until she had three strokes in less than a year. When I was a boy, she’d send me to the corner store with a note to buy her a pack. Given that today 85 percent of Black people who smoke choose menthols, I was far from the only Black boy sent to fetch cancer sticks. Brown & Williamson was so cold it began sponsoring the Newport Jazz Festival in 1975, rebranding it the Kool Newport Jazz Festival in 1980 so people would equate that form of Black music with its product. In 2004, a New York Supreme Court judge issued a restraining order on the company’s Kool Mixx campaign, which was designed to associate Kool with hip-hop.
Big Gambling, too, is associating itself with Black culture. For sure LeBron and Foxx and Hart and Stephen A. have fans who aren’t Black, but who would argue against their immense influence on Black culture? The same could be said about the appeal of NFL Hall of Famer Shannon Sharpe and rapper-turned-podcaster Joe Budden, both of whom are featured in ads. Those men are at the pinnacle of their profession, which is to say that their association suggests gambling is for the rich, talented, and cool. Aspirations for us all, no?
Somehow there’s no current federal agency tasked with oversight of Big Gambling, which, Ibullshityounot, is policing itself by way of the American Gaming Association. The group created the Responsible Marketing Code, which is why gambling ads often end with a little warning. Per the code, there should be a “conspicuous reasonable gaming message, along with a toll-free helpline number, where practical.” (Italics mine.) The code also includes this: “Sports wagering should not be promoted or advertised in college or university-owned news assets . . . or advertised on college or university campuses.” As well as “partnerships with colleges or universities should not include any component that promotes, markets or advertises sports wagering activity.”
That last part of the code was prompted by gambling companies having signed deals with several universities. One deal proposed “Caesarizing” Michigan State’s tailgating space. In another, Louisiana State sent a mass email encouraging recipients (including current students) to gamble. When, in another deal, the University of Colorado at Boulder accepted $1.6 million to promote gambling on campus, PointsBets offered the school an extra $30 every time somebody placed a bet on its app using a promo code. All three of those schools were pressured into cutting short the terms of those deals, but what do you bet they’d already succeeded in luring collegiate bettors?
Not only did Big Gambling spend big bread on advertising at colleges, but those ads without doubt targeted versions of my younger self: Black youth who’ve been sold the dream that a college education secures class ascension. In the 1990s I entered college with Pell Grant aid. Three decades later, not much has changed about the economic state of Black college students, as per “Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education,” a series of reports conducted by the American Council on Education. One report noted that Black students are often found to have lower persistence and completion rates, more debt, and lower median annual earnings than their white peers. Another report featured data from a 2020 study by the Department of Education, which confirmed that a larger share of dependent Black undergraduate students (44 percent) came from families in the lowest income quartile—more than any other group.
Shouldn’t college be a place to secure a financial future, not be tempted to squander it? While some of those student athletes have begun earning significant NIL money, what about the financial outlook of regular students? What about the neighborhoods from which a preponderance of those Black students is likely to have hailed?
Neighborhoods like my old one. Where the music that shaped us said “C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me)”; said “Money Ain’t a Thang”; said “Can’t Tell Me Nothing”; said “Got Money”; said “Fuck Up Some Commas” and “Blow a Bag.” Places that implored us to get rich or die trying or get it how we live. Places that invented making it rain and the money phone. Might those college students, like me, have a stepdad who robbed a bank, an uncle who blew his meager salary on slot machines, another uncle who mentored them on drug dealing with the maxim “The fast ten beats the slow twenty”? Might they, too, claim as home a place where masked men barged into after-hours gambling spots and robbed people at gunpoint? Could they, too, tell a story like the one I could tell about a dude we called Goggles, who after losing five figures in a dice game was shot to death in his home grabbing more bread to gamble?
But perhaps that’s not your life. Perhaps the ubiquity of Big Gambling and its harm on Black folks and other vulnerable people ain’t your problem. Perhaps the systemic oppression that Black people have mischaracterized as a generational curse means little to you. Maybe gambling for you is grounded in seeing your dad (one half of your unbroken home) play a little poker with his pals on Friday nights, their pot never exceeding a steep grocery bill. Maybe the only time you find yourself in a windowless, clockless Vegas casino is for the bachelor party of your college roommate, a dude whose parents borrowed zero dollars to cover his tuition, a trip during which your never-cash-strapped wallet never emptied. Or maybe your gambling is limited to wagering lunch money on fantasy football at your six-figure-salaried gig. And if I’ve described you, well, bucko, count your immense blessings.
According to the National Council on Problem Gambling, 2.5 million people have a gambling addiction and another 5 to 8 million have a mild to moderate problem. Studies galore attest that Black people have a disproportionate likelihood of problematic gambling. But even if in the big scheme the Black people victimized by Big Gambling won’t number in multitudes, they are my concern. And what Big Gambling never mentions in its cheery, celebrity-driven, you-too-can-beat-the-odds-and-win-a-windfall advertisements is this: It’s all fun and games till it’s your people suffering.
