Race and Sports

The recent triumph of Washington Redskins quarterback Doug Williams, the first black quarterback to win the Super Bowl, points out once again the central role of sports as the forging ground of America's racial myths and symbols. For decades, black colleges, such as Williams' alma mater of Grambling, have sent their brightest hopes off to the NFL with the hope of seeing one of them finally become the black Unitas, Namath, or Bradshaw. And for decades they've seen their field captains automatically converted into defensive backs and wide receivers.

The unspoken, dirty little secret was that the NFL didn't think blacks were smart enough to play quarterback. They couldn't be trusted with the intellectual task of analyzing defenses and calling plays. And they certainly couldn't be expected to lead and give orders to their white teammates.

Just a few weeks before the Super Bowl, CBS sports commentator Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder was fired for racist remarks about black athletes. The Greek indicated that black athletic success is the result of anatomical genetics. Which, of course, means it's not the result of hard work, discipline, and skill. The Greek gave inconvenient public voice to attitudes so widely held that, as the fate of black quarterbacks indicates, they hold sway without articulation.

None of this is new. Sports have been a racial battleground at least since the turn of this century, when Jack Johnson, boxing's first black heavyweight champion, turned the world upside-down by beating up white men for a living.

Sports have also provided our most prominent and popular images of reconciliation through interracial teamwork. Years before the Supreme Court school desegregation decision, Jackie Robinson's arrival in baseball's major leagues signaled the arrival of a new day in American race relations. When my Southern high school was finally desegregated in the early '70s, it wasn't the church or the PTA that was expected to provide an example of peaceful coexistence, it was the football team.

The flawed superficiality of the interracial teamwork platitudes should be obvious. Blacks not only don't play quarterback, they for the most part don't coach, manage, or own teams anywhere in American sports. And even that is just the tip of the iceberg. Dozens of black athletes have found out the hard way that whites who speak their mind on or off the field are "colorful," "controversial," or "free-spirited," while blacks who do the same thing are "moody," "uncooperative," and "fired."

At the same time, black prominence in American sports also reflects black Americans' genius for turning the very limitations placed upon them into weapons with which to confound the white man. The most obvious example is in religion. Blacks were given Christianity as a civilized means of pacification. It was expected to make them happy with their lowly place in the divinely ordained order of things, with the assurance of eternal rest in the hereafter.

Whites had no reason to question the wisdom of this strategy. After all, Christianity had worked perfectly well in Europe to ensure docility throughout centuries of feudalism. But blacks took the same religion that had buttressed the ancestral hierarchies of Europe and turned it into a religion of liberation.

THE BLACK ROLE IN sports also has its roots in the ideology of slavery. Those English and Anglo-American gentlemen of the Enlightenment had to jump through some fairly sophisticated intellectual hoops to justify turning human beings into chattel. They virtually had to invent racism as we know it.

One of their most enduring conceptions involved turning their European mind-body dualism into an intercontinental division of humanity that prevails to this day. The darker races were assigned the realm of the body, i.e. intuition, sensuality, and lots of physical labor. Whites kept for themselves the realm of the mind -- rationality, abstraction, and the right to rule. White people projected onto blacks the arational qualities they feared most in themselves -- violence, emotionalism, and, above all, sexuality.

The persistence of this projection can be seen even now in the psychotic fear directed at young, black men by millions of Bernard Goetz groupies. It can also be found among well-meaning, "anti-racist" whites, who unconsciously make black people into natural fountainheads of spirituality, rebellion, and funk. Which, of course, denies their inalienable human right to be cerebral, agnostic, conservative, or straight-laced.

But the myth of the black super-physicality left athletic achievement as one of the rare leverage points for forcing the question of black equality into the mainstream of American life. Jackie Robinson first had to prove his superhuman skills. Then he got a chance to display his equally extraordinary dignity and intelligence. As a result, cracks were made in the white American psyche and doors were opened for more substantive gains.

The shame is that four decades later, those elemental lessons should have been assimilated and the list of black "firsts" completed and forgotten. Instead, in 1988, the process of honoring black aspirations and achievements is, in many ways, only at the starting point.

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.