By David K. Shipler
At Sunday’s Super Bowl, the United
States will congratulate itself on another racial milestone, the first time two
Black quarterbacks have played in the culminating game of the country’s most
popular sport. “Jalen Hurts and Patrick Mahomes will make history on Sunday,” crowed CBS News.
But the history is a lesson in bigotry,
illustrating how devious stereotypes can be.
The latest “first” is a cause for
celebration, to be sure. It is no exoneration of American society, however, for
the racial assumptions that have made this so long in coming still whirl around
Blacks, whether professional athletes or ordinary mortals. Tangible barriers
that are broken often leave a strong residue of bias—in this case, about the interactions
of the mind, the body, and the power of Blacks on the field or off.
Americans love to chart progress. We have
had the first Black president, the first Black vice president, the first Black
defense secretary, the first Black secretary of state, the first Black Supreme
Court justice, the first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and on.
And now “the first Black House Minority Leader in history” as President Biden said
in his State of the Union Address, congratulating Representative Hakeem
Jeffries.
Whether
Jeffries was pleased or displeased by the label was hard to tell by the neutral
expression on his face. Not every Black or Muslim or woman or gay person who gets
past the obstacle loves being defined primarily that way. Jeffries and the rest
of us might reasonably wonder if the day will ever come when the phrase “the
first Black [fill in the blank]” can be relegated to a distant past.
The first Black quarterback to start
in the Superbowl was Doug Williams, who led the Washington Redskins to victory
in 1988. He won the Lombardi Trophy and was named the game’s most valuable
player. But he hadn’t been the team’s starter at the beginning of the season, when
Black quarterbacks overall started fewer than 10
percent
of NFL games.
Several years later, for my book A Country of
Strangers,
I looked into the patterns of prejudice that was keeping Black players out of
the quarterback position. A system of tracking was putting high school athletes
on career-changing detours, especially if they came from mostly Black schools,
according to Richard L. Schaefer, former attorney for the National Football
League Players Association. On college teams, he said then, talented Black
quarterbacks were being bumped to other positions considered more physical than
mental. “I think it’s a subtle, perhaps even subconscious, kind of bigotry.”
The bigotry pairs two of the society’s longest-standing stereotypes of Blacks as both physically strong and mentally weak. Since at least the days of Thomas Jefferson, who codified those images in his book Notes on the State of Virginia, there has been a tendency in white America to see the body and the mind as opposite poles, perceptions that persisted and shaped college and NFL coaches’ decisions centuries later.
