Washington(CNN) It's impossible to overstate how tremendous the announcement was -- and what it might signpost about banishing persistent inequality in certain quarters of American life.
On Monday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed Senate Bill 206 -- aka the Fair Pay to Play Act -- which will allow college athletes in the state to sign endorsement deals.
More specifically, barring any legal challenges, California will let student athletes at its public and private universities profit from their names, images or likenesses once the first-of-its-kind law goes into effect in 2023.
Why's SB 206 such a big deal, one trumpeted by basketball phenom LeBron James?
In the broadest sense, it signals the arrival of some degree of much-overdue fairness to the National Collegiate Athletic Association. According to audited financials, the NCAA brought in $1.06 billion in revenue for its 2017 fiscal year (the majority of this money came from the Division I men's basketball tournament).
But regardless of the NCAA's earnings, it's largely banned its athletes from being paid. California's law, while not applicable to all the governing body's players, works as a counterweight to the skewed hierarchy of big-time sports.
"I have deep reverence, deep respect for the NCAA and college athletics. I just think the system has been perverted, and this is fundamentally about re-balancing things," Newsom said.
Look a bit more closely, though, and you'll see that California's maneuvering also seeks to correct something else stitched into our cultural and political fabric: racial inequality.
As The Atlantic's Jemele Hill wrote in a recent piece for the magazine, "Black men make up only 2.4% of the total undergraduate population of the 65 schools in the so-called Power Five athletic conferences. Yet black men make up 55% of the football players in those conferences, and 56 percent of basketball players."
Or think of it like this: Unpaid black athletic labor has long reliably buttressed some of the most beloved, ritualized activities at undergraduate institutions -- at predominantly white institutions, in particular -- while typically white college presidents and coaches reap the benefits.
Worse still, the NCAA has historically been vociferous in pushing back against the majority of efforts to pay players. In California's case, the NCAA had previously urged Newsom to veto the bill, arguing in a letter to the governor that it would "erase the critical distinction between college and professional athletics" and give the affected schools "an unfair recruiting advantage."
Newsom issued a defiant response to defenses of this sort: "Other college students with a talent, whether it be literature, music or technological innovation, can monetize their skill and hard work. Student athletes, however, are prohibited from being compensated while their respective colleges and universities make millions, often at great risk to athletes' health, academics and professional careers."
Small wonder, then, given the racial dimension of the politics of student athletics, that the NCAA's regulations are frequently portrayed by critics as a plantation or the Jim Crow South -- always with an eye toward corporate profit from black bodies instead of toward concern for the players.
It remains to be seen whether California's move might augur similar changes elsewhere in the country. But it's not too early to say that this law is a key step toward empowering a variety of college athletes in a way the sporting world has long skittishly, shamefully avoided.