In 1993, a slew of European tourists who had come to Florida on vacation were murdered. The most publicized of these crimes took place in a Miami neighborhood called Liberty City, just a few blocks from a notorious housing project called the James E. Scott Homes, which residents referred to as The Canyon.
I was a reporter for a weekly paper in Miami at the time. I’d reported stories from The Canyon and felt it might behoove the journalistic mission to describe the place in greater detail. I didn’t have an angle. I just wanted to hang out long enough—a year of weekly visits, it would turn out—to begin to understand the lives of the women and children who lived there.
Like many public housing projects in poor areas, The Canyon was essentially a village of despondent mothers and restless children. I wound up spending most of my time there with a pack of young boys, none of whom had fathers. To these boys, and their mothers and aunties, one of the few heroic figures was a former NFL player who had returned to run a football program.
He was renowned for one of his rules, which I heard over and over: he didn’t accept any kid older than nine. After that, it was too late. He couldn’t undo whatever recalcitrance had been wired or whipped into them. And of course this was terribly sad. Because youth football was viewed as a form of salvation in Liberty City. Pop Warner championships drew thousands of fans. People saw the game as a way to instill discipline and self-respect, to keep wayward boys from taking the wrong path, a golden ticket.
“The only ones ever come back with money is the football players,” one mom told me. “Them and the drug dealers.”
I keep thinking about it from the point of view of the kids I hung out with, Nookie, Boo Man, the others. These boys lived with mothers or guardians who were too broken to care for them properly. They went to a school that was overcrowded. Their teachers saw them mostly as discipline problems. They had no positive male figures in their lives, no power in the world, no idea how to acquire any.
So I could understand why they were desperate to join a game that gave them a sense of purpose and direction, that earned them the approval and guidance of respected elders who recognized their potential, a game that offered them a chance at riches and fame, however remote. They accepted the need to sacrifice. They had to learn strategy, cooperation, how to channel their aggressive impulses, how to evade or defeat the opponent. They understood that the game in question gave people tremendous pleasure, but that it wasn’t economically productive for the local community. And though they preferred not to think about this part, they knew it came with considerable risks to their health.
Despite all this, some of them still wanted to sell crack cocaine.
Am I now suggesting that football is as bad for the African-American community as crack cocaine?
No.
I’m just making the point that neither is a realistic solution to the crises that poor African-American boys face growing up in this country. In fact, they are distractions from the systemic inequalities that keep such boys locked in a cycle of poverty and incarceration.
Without a doubt, football is great at getting boys motivated—mostly to play football. It can give the right sort of kid a leg up. But it’s “a way out” only for a handful. Less than 10 percent of the 100,000 high school seniors who play football will make a college squad, and fewer still will receive scholarships; 215 will wind up in the pros. That’s 1 out of 500 players. The others—the Nookies and the Boo Mans, the ones we prefer not to think about—need better child care programs and better schools and better job training and better wages.
Whatever laudable lessons football imparted to the children of The Canyon, it reinforced the idea that violence was a source of power and a path to destiny. Here’s how the commissioner of the local league explained it to Robert Andrew Powell, whose book, We Own This Game, offers a vivid chronicle of Miami’s peewee set: “Football is the most natural for them. Basketball puts limits on their aggression; baseball puts limits on their aggression. In football they had better well be aggressive. And with the background of these kids, where these kids come from, aggression comes naturally.”
Carlos Guy, the uncle of one player, put it like this: “Somebody a long time ago came to the idea that this—football—was the very best way to show that we could make it out, that we could rise above the slave mentality, segregation, and really be what we want to be. It’s not a part of the culture now. It is the culture.”
I keep trying to imagine what Dr. Martin Luther King would have to say about these statements. His image was all over The Canyon, staring out from the chipped murals that were painted every few years, in anticipation of some visit from a politician. Often, these murals included quotes.
Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.
Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation.
Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon … It is a sword that heals.
You know, sissy shit like that.
I suspect King would have been heartbroken at the notion that football is the dominant form of empowerment in communities like The Canyon. He might well have viewed the mindset as a form of self-colonization.
The ultimate message football sends to young boys, of whatever color or socioeconomic status, is that they are valuable not for the content of their character, not for their intelligence or creativity, but for how fast they can run and how well they can throw and catch and, especially, how hard they can hit. That’s what scouts and recruiters want. That’s how you get rescued.
Consider The Blind Side by Michael Lewis, a 2006 bestseller that later became a blockbuster film. Lewis tells the story of Michael Oher, a painfully shy African-American teen from the projects of West Memphis who happens to be six feet six inches tall and 345 pounds. Thanks to his unusual combination of size and speed, he is accepted at a private evangelical high school, adopted by a rich white family on the east side of town, and molded into an All-American.
There’s an undeniable buzz in tracking Oher’s rise from a destitute kid with no prospects to a prodigy besieged by college recruiters. But Lewis never seems to acknowledge that he’s telling a different story as well, one of racial exploitation. In fact, he highlights all the rule bending done to keep Oher college-eligible. The administration at his high school accepts him, though he can barely read. When his GPA proves too low for the NCAA, his adoptive father, a canny former college basketball star named Sean Tuohy, finds a loophole. He has Oher tested to prove he’s learning disabled, then has him take numerous easy, on-line courses. Lewis treats these measures as ingenious. We are meant to cheer the fact that Oher has gamed the educational process.
Tuohy’s indomitable wife also plays a key role in the reeducation of Oher:
Leigh Anne was now making it her personal responsibility to introduce him to the most basic facts of life, the sort of thing any normal person would have learned by osmosis. “Every day I try to make sure he knows something he doesn’t know,” she said. “If you ask him, Where should I shop for a girl to impress her? he’ll tell you, Tiffany’s. I’ll go through the whole golf game. He can tell you what six under is, and what’s a birdie and what’s par.”
Leigh Anne treats her adopted son more like a giant kachina doll than a human being.
Oher himself recognizes the ulterior motives swirling around him. “He didn’t go so far as to treat Leigh Anne with suspicion but, as Leigh Anne put it, ‘With me and Sean I can see him thinking, If they found me lying in a gutter and I was going to be flipping burgers at McDonald’s, would they really have had an interest in me?’ ”
No one ever answers this question.
Instead, the Touhys convince Oher to attend their alma mater, Ole Miss, where he becomes a star bound for the NFL. We are meant to view all this as an inspiring underdog saga, spiced with the proper pieties about Christian charity, the power of hope, and individual destiny.
Michael Lewis is one of our finest journalists. He gets that Michael Oher is part of a larger system. “What the NFL prized,” he writes, “America’s high schools supplied, and America’s colleges processed.” He understands that assets like Oher have to “go through the tedious charade of pretending to be ordinary college students” to make the pros.
For this reason, I kept wondering why Lewis never addressed that haunting question: why did the Touhys rescue Michael Oher? His avoidance could be due to the fact that he and Sean Touhy are old friends. But I suspect it’s deeper than that.
It has to do with a much more fundamental blind spot that prevails when it comes to sports and race in America. And while I could talk here about other sports, such as basketball, football is the prime example, not just because two-thirds of its players are African-American but because it fuels our most insidious and intractable stereotypes about such men: that they are inherently animalistic.
Like most fans, myself included, Lewis prefers not to parse the perverse arrangement by which watching young African-Americans in tight pants engage in mock combat has become our most profitable form of entertainment. Nobody wants to look at this stuff. Nobody wants to ask the awkward questions.
Such as: What is the relationship between our nation’s racial history and our lust for football? What does it mean that football fever tends to run so hot in those states where slavery was legal and Jim Crow died hardest? What does it mean that millions of white fans cheer wildly for African-American men in the context of a football game when, if they encountered these same men on a darkened street, they might very well reach nervously for their cell phone? Is football a way of containing African-American rage? Is this why any African-American athlete who speaks too brashly or associates with friends from the old neighborhood has “character issues”? Does it relieve the racial guilt of white Americans to lavish so much money and adulation on a few African-American men? Is it an oblique form of financial restitution?
And what does it mean that we give so much scrutiny to their bodies? That we think nothing of calling them “studs” and “beasts” and “specimens”? Are we turning them into fetish objects? And what does that mean? Can anyone really watch the NFL Combine—in which young, mostly African-American men are made to run and jump and lift weights for the benefit of mostly old white coaches, and us couch potatoes—and not see visual echoes of the slave auction?
For that matter: Isn’t the whole system by which young African-Americans are harvested from this country’s impoverished precincts, segregated from the general population, and exploited for their extraordinarily profitable physical labors, a kind of extravagantly monetized plantation?
Yes, football attracts fans of all races and classes. Yes, players choose to compete and are well paid. But the power dynamics remain eerily familiar: a wealthy white “owner” presides over a group of African-American laborers. Is the “slave mentality” something that a signing bonus erases? Do the millions absolve everyone involved? Does it matter that players risk grievous injury? That they are cast off like beasts of burden?
Does football provide white Americans a continued sense of dominion over African-American men? Do their huge salaries give us the right to pass judgment on them incessantly? To call up radio programs and yell about how they’re lazy or money-hungry or thuggish? Do we secretly believe they belong to us? Why do we enjoy seeing them play through pain? Why do we berate them for cowardice when we ourselves wouldn’t last ten seconds in an actual game? Is this cycle of hero worship and vilification one way in which white men express anxiety over their perceived physical inadequacies relative to men of color? Is that why the sportscaster Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder got fired, in 1988, for saying “the black is a better athlete … because he’s been bred to be that way” by the slave owner? Was he made a scapegoat for expressing sentiments the rest of us prefer to hide?
Why do white fans react with such shock and horror when African-American players, who are rewarded for ruthless aggression on the field, exhibit these traits elsewhere? Is the obsessive coverage of their violent crimes a public justification for our private prejudices?
What does it mean that 95 percent of our most famous African-American citizens are athletes? Or that, when we see a physically imposing African-American in the lobby of a fancy hotel, or a television studio, we immediately think: football player. Why don’t we think doctor or software engineer? Are these assumptions a form of bigotry? If not, why not?
I’m going to get hammered for asking these questions. Fine. Hammer away. But don’t pretend that’s the same as answering.
Or consider poor Jonathan Martin, last spotted dancing his tortured interracial tango with Richie Incognito. The saddest—and most overlooked—story told by The Wells Report is that of his racial reckoning.
Martin grew up in a family that prized education and professional achievement. Had Martin chosen to attend Harvard, where he was accepted, he would have been the university’s first fourth-generation African-American student. Instead, he went to Stanford, where he majored in Classics and became a football star widely respected by his comrades.
His problems began when he joined the NFL. African-American teammates accused him of not acting “black enough.” He was too intellectual and sensitive. Like that famous punk Martin Luther King, he avoided violent confrontations, which is why Incognito, playing to type, targeted him. Martin blamed his problems on “white private school conditioning, turning the other cheek.”
Other players urged Martin to confront Incognito. Instead, he turned his hatred inward, grew disconsolate, and harbored suicidal thoughts. The episode that led him to leave the Dolphins is revealing. Martin was in line at the cafeteria. Incognito was sitting at a table with the other offensive linemen, most of them African-American. He called out to Martin that he didn’t want his “stinky Pakistani ass” to join the group. When Martin approached the table anyway, the other linemen rose in unison and, at Incognito’s instigation, moved to another table. Martin had been denied a place at the table.
Soon after, media reports noted Incognito’s use of racial epithets. The Wells Report included two text message exchanges between Incognito and a white teammate in which they joke about murdering black people.
PLAYER B: That’s a solid optic made specifically for a .308 battle rifle
INCOGNITO: Perfect for shooting black people
PLAYER B: Lol
And yet African-American teammates still voiced support for Incognito and disdain for Martin. Better a racist than a race traitor. That’s what Jonathan Martin was, after all, in the eyes of his comrades. African-American football players don’t come from educated families. They don’t have a life of the mind. They don’t practice nonviolence. With internal standards like that, who needs racial oppressors?