Too Dumb to Throw the Ball?

I'm a pretty big sports fan, and a follower of American Football in particular.

The NFL (National Football League) is celebrating its 100^th season with a lot of looking back, at great games, great plays and great players. And as the current season unfolds, the amazing success of black quarterbacks has me looking back, and observing gratefully that a racial barrier seems to finally have been overcome.

For most of the hundred years, including most of the Superbowl Era, which began in the mid 60’s, there were very few black quarterbacks in the sport. For those of you who aren’t fans, the quarterback is by far the most important member of a football team. He is the general of the offense. He controls the ball on every play, and by running with it, handing it off, or throwing it, manages the other ten players as they march down the field. It’s a complex and multi-faceted job, requiring the ability to quickly ‘read’ a defense, change the play at the last moment, make split-second decisions, and to demonstrate poise, judgement and leadership. And long after many Americans insisted that racism was no longer a part of the America’s character, you still hardly ever saw a black man leading a team from the quarterback position. And the reason – whispered, but known to everyone – was that blacks weren’t thought to be intelligent enough to manage the complexities of the position.

I won’t try to recount the long and varied history of the NFL in terms of racial inclusion. But a small number of blacks played in the league in the early decades, until the league segregated in the 30s. In the 40s it began to reintegrate, and by the time the NFL merged with the more integrated AFL in 1970, about 30% of the players were black. (as compared with about 10% of the nation’s population).

Russell Wilson & Patrick Mahomes

But black players were generally slotted into the speed positions, and only rarely did one make it into the league as QB, and when they did, almost always as a back-up. It’s said that though many black QBs excelled at the college level, they were often persuaded to change positions upon coming into the professional league. And there, even when they had success as QBs, it was usually credited to their athleticism and ‘instincts’ rather than their football knowledge and intelligence.

Warren Moon, who’d established his credentials in the Canadian Football League, was the first black QB to experience huge and sustained success when he came into the NFL in the 80’s as a starting QB and a star. Then Doug Williams led the Washington team to an impressive Superbowl victory in ’88. But despite these successes and the stardom of a few others over the years, like Randall Cunningham, Donovan McNabb and Michael Vick, the stigma persisted.

This state of affairs lasted right up to and through the presidency of Barack Obama. In a league in which more than 65% of the players were black in 2014, there were still only 7 or 8 starting black QBs on 32 teams. And very often, even these starting QBs were not highly regarded, sometimes credited mainly for their running ability, rather than as accomplished passers or capable team leaders.

And suddenly – seemingly, almost overnight – something has shifted. When you take a snapshot of the NFL today, you still find that only about one in three teams is led by a black quarterback. But the big change is in how they are regarded. Last year, began with a quartet of firmly established black QBs: Cam Newton, Dak Prescott, Deshaun Watson, and my favorite, Russell Wilson a sure bet to end up in the Hall of Fame, along with a few others fighting to establish themselves. Then, there was the sudden emergence of 2 more, Lamar Jackson and Patrick Mahomes, both new players leading their teams for the first time, and immediately making them much more competitive. Mahomes went on win the year's Most Valuable Player award, going to a black QB for only the third time, following Newton in 2015 and Steve McNair in 2003.

And this development carried over into the current year. Currently, when you look at the QBR – a rating that takes into account all of the different elements of effectiveness – you find black QBs heading the list. In fact 4 of the top 5 on the list are black, and the one exception is replacing the injured Newton. Sports talk shows these days are for the first time regularly mentioning multiple black QBs - Mahomes, Prescott and Wilson - as leading candidates to win the award this year. 

And, these black QBs, instead of being denigrated for their generally more mobile and elusive styles of play, are now having the styles of their teams adjusted to suit them, rather than being constrained to play the more conservative style of decades past.

It’s a positive step, and one that I celebrate. It reflects a shift in thinking that is long overdue. It’s not the end of racial barriers in the league, by any means. There is still an extreme shortage of blacks in coaching, management and ownership positions, the obvious place for veterans of the sport. As in the society-at-large, there is still a tendency for people to want to say a problem has been dealt with when only the most egregious wrongs have been addressed.

And, if only one of the 32 teams would come to its senses and hire Colin Kaepernick, another very talented black QB who was essentially black-listed because he took a knee when the national anthem was played, in order to call attention to the killing of unarmed black men by police.

A Good Racist?

An eighteen-year old photo of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in blackface has led to a furor of shock and self-righteousness, and I really don’t get it. No, I get it that blackface is a banned activity these days, that it has too direct a connection to the time when whites wore it to depict gross caricatures of blacks, as savage, ignorant half apes, or as cartoonish buffoons, either incapable of surviving the world, or deserving of extermination from it.

And, as a Black American born in the 1950’s, I’ve known the sting: a realization that another thinks you beneath humanity and not worth respecting, not because of who you are, but because of something about you. Even if such an experience isn’t followed by an oppressive use of power – physical harm, incarceration, loss of job, home, agency – it still hurts.

But, while I like to think that all forms of ‘isms’ can be overcome by knowledge and by human to human contact, I don’t for a moment expect I’ll ever live in a world where they don’t exist. Should we really make life-long purity in the area of racial expression the minimum standard to remain acceptable in public life?

Racism is bad. But is everyone who is racist a bad person? You might think, from the reaction that gaffes such as Trudeau’s get these days, that the merest ‘racist’ expression makes one as loathsome and beneath contempt as a murderer or a serial pedophile. But, in my opinion, it’s an over-reaction to treat such things as extreme examples of wrong-doing.

No, everyone who has a racist thought isn’t a bad person. Many such people grew up in a culture where isms abound, or were influenced to mistrust and look down on some type of ‘other’, and simply accepted that. Most of us have such flaws, whether the very obvious kind, like being anti-black or anti-woman, or a less observed or well-defined kind, like being anti-young, anti-poor, or anti-uneducated, or maybe anti-the unhygienic (those who never developed the habit of brushing their teeth or changing their underwear as needed. Most of us have a revulsion, an active dislike, or at least a discomfort and wariness about some particular type of 'other' person, which is expressed through an automatic discounting, or worse. Obviously, that’s not good. It’s not even okay. But shall we just dismiss a third, or a half, or ninety percent of all human beings as unredeemable, because of the epidemic of stereotyping and pre-judging? I don’t think so. I’m not willing to write off that many of the flawed yet somehow endearing human beings I know. And I’m grateful for those who have chosen not to write me off, for my insensitivities and worse.

As much as I hate what Trump stands for, I’ll even defend something he said and was blasted for, when he commented that there were ‘good people’ on both sides of the Civil War monuments protest in Charleston in 2017. Though he may have intended to equate the virtue of the two sides, it wasn’t what I heard. And I think it was absolutely true – and fair to point out – that there were essentially good people supporting the presence of those confederate statues.

Most people who don’t carry and display an active prejudice have probably worked long and hard to overcome one. And most of them probably know that such aversions have their roots in fear. And they’ve probably learned not to be so afraid.

People. That’s what we are. And racism is like a low IQ, or a genetic defect, or really bad breath. It infects quite a lot of us without removing us entirely from the category ‘Good Person’. What makes it so much worse than those other sins, of course, is that a single racist outlook, shared by a large number of people, as in the US, or which is encoded into the very blueprint of a nation, historically and over time – again, as in the US – can oppress and even destroy an entire people. This is the form of racism that most demands our attention: the institutional, law-encoded kind, that's often so integrated into the social fabric that it's near invisible.

But must vigilance go to the point of bringing down every individual who cannot prove that they’ve never offended a people, even out of ignorance? I find this current state of hyper-vigilance both sad and disturbing. Is there anyone who wouldn’t fail such a test? I know I’d fail it, and if what people tell me is to be believed, I’m a pretty decent guy who doesn’t intentionally hurt or hate anyone, even racists.

Even intentional racism isn’t the incurable disease we often treat it as. I could tell you about a few good racists I’ve known. But I’ll hold it to one. Bud was the father of a white woman I loved and lived with. He wasn’t happy about her associating with the likes of me. Of course he didn’t know me, and this wasn’t about me, after all. Stoned racist.

He wouldn’t allow me to stay in their home for a particular Christmastime visit, but he allowed me into the house when I came to pick up his daughter and his grand-daughter, who was not my biological child, though I always wished she was. He studied me, cross-examined and debated me for half an hour, and politely shook my hand when I left. But still he did not approve.

A few years on, I met Bud again at a graduation for his grand-daughter. He apologized to me for his previous behavior, and thanked me for the role I’d played in his daughter’s and grand-daughter’s lives. Good racist.

As least by my account, by my experience. So yeah, it took him coming around. He hadn’t always been good. But when he started to take me in as just another human being, apart from the fixed ideas and categories in his head (something I must have managed too, though my own are harder to see and not at all fun to acknowledge), ultimately, our lives were lived in love-connected support of one another.

I’m glad I didn’t write Bud off. Nor he, me. But if you judged either of us by things we’d said, done or thought, five or ten or eighteen years earlier, writing us off might have been the only option. Trudeau is my no means a faultless politician or public figure. But judging by what he has attempted to accomplish, and his efforts to humanize government and political discourse, I’ll give him a pass on the blackface.