What if they gave a game and nobody (black) came?

by David Benjamin

 “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

— Frederick Douglass

 

MADISON, Wis. — In the summer of 1969, I stumbled into a small cauldron of racial tension. The locale was a steel fabrication plant in Orlando that had been integrated a few years before. The social barrier between white and black steelworkers lingered, as dense as the Romulan force-field in a “Star Trek” episode. I was new on the job and swiftly pegged as “the hippie.” So I found myself eating lunch among the black and Puerto Rican members of the crew.

Otherwise, my side-by-side co-workers down in the paint shop were Bobby, an amiable, just-married teenage white kid, and a University of Alabama football recruit named Wayne. Wayne was also white. He had to be. The Crimson Tide tolerated no black boys on its teams. 

(Both Bobby and Wayne had issues with women. Bobby was painfully chafed from too much newlywed sex. Wayne had a knocked-up girlfriend, who had become, by necessity, his fiancée. But that’s beside my point.)

Last Saturday afternoon, as I was watching football, I remembered Wayne, a wide receiver, tall, angular and as handsome as a magazine model, but not real good at wrangling I-beams. The teams I was surfing on TV represented states like Georgia, Texas, Florida, whose universities in 1969 would not—like Wayne’s alma mater—permit an African-American, no matter how gifted, to darken the sideline in their football stadia. 

That Jim Crow tradition at Alabama wavered in 1970, when an integrated team from the University of Southern California came to Legion Field in Tuscaloosa and humiliated Wayne’s team, 42-21. This loss freed coach Paul “Bear” Bryant to do at ‘Bama what he’d been prevented from doing at the University of Kentucky, recruit black kids. By 1971, Wayne had two African-American teammates. Knowing Wayne, I suspect he was nice to them.

But as I watched TV Saturday, I found myself sharing a perception that a Harvard Crimson writer, Patrick Quesada, noted a couple of years ago: “I challenge anyone to look at the stands during a game and not notice what I did: black players and white fans.”

Here in Madison, just before the fourth period at every Camp Randall home game, TV cameras scan the University of Wisconsin student section during a tradition called “Jump Around.” To spot a black face in that bouncing throng is like looking for a peppercorn in a snowbank. Contrarily, down on the field, the demographic is drastically different. More than thirty Badgers, including half the starting lineup, are black. 

A while ago at Creighton University, coach Greg McDermott articulated this dichotomy, referring to his mostly African-American basketball team as “the plantation.” Since the moment McDermott undiplomatically—but accurately—characterized his players as glorified field hands, athletes at major universities have successfully sued to elevate their status, from slave to sharecropper. Most prominent players on, say, Alabama’s football squad (but not the swimming, track or volleyball teams), can now collect royalties for the use of their name, image and likeness (NIL) in advertising and promotion campaigns. 

Hooray for that. It’s an undoubted sign of social progress that black athletes once banned from the playing field in most of America are now entitled to a few endorsement bucks from their local Subaru dealer. But, speaking of social progress, why aren’t these kids fighting for rights more significant than symbolic access to a mess of pottage?

What? Jocks should agitate for social justice? The risk is daunting. Take Colin Kaepernick. He sacrificed his NFL career by kneeling during the Star-Spangled Banner, a subtle gesture intended to draw attention to police brutality against the black community in America. After which, the cops killed George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Laquan McDonald (among hundreds of others).

Before he knelt, I never liked Kaepernick. Now I do. But I also believe he didn’t do enough. The right to be safe from racist cops is important. But even more important to the black community—to all Americans—is the right to vote. 

Today, in the majority of U.S. states, especially those old Jim Crow bastions in the Southeastern Conference—Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, Texas, etc.—right-wing lawmakers are concocting schemes to frustrate the right to vote. True to Southern tradition, these anti-voting measures focus most fiercely on black and minority communities—plus, coincidentally, all those white kids in the student section.

On Saturday, as I watched a black quarterback throw a fifty-yard touchdown pass to a black receiver, who was being chased by a black cornerback, it came to me that these three kids, and all their black teammates on both teams and in every team across America, have more power than Congress, the president or Donald Trump’s Supreme Court to abort the rebirth of the Jim Crow election. In one stroke of solidarity, black athletes could plunge bigtime football back into its Dark (well, White) Age. All they need do is take off their helmets and hang up their cleats. Walk out. See if 115,000 people will come to Michigan Stadium to watch a handful of white guys play six-man ball against another half-dozen white guys. 

See if Lambeau Field would be as electric and exciting if Aaron Rodgers has nobody to catch his passes, and there’s nobody but Rodgers to run the ball, and the other team doesn’t have anyone to chase Rodgers around the field. Last Sunday, the Packers played Buffalo, whose defense would have shrunk to two guys (2) if all the black players had said, “Wait a minute. Why should I play football in New York, for a stadium full of white folks, when the white politicians back home in Texas won’t let my grandmother vote?”  

Another relevant question: Would Aaron Rodgers play at all if all his black teammates went on strike? He is, after all, a major-league athlete, one of the few white demographics who have actual human relationships with black people. 

Former NBA player Etan Thomas stated the issue in plantation terms: “You know when a company goes into an underdeveloped country and sets up shop there, and hires the locals there for pennies while the company makes billions of dollars. Then pretends that they are doing the locals a favor by providing a job opportunity for them that they otherwise wouldn’t have, and [provides] other benefits—maybe food and clothes and some form of healthcare—so they can stay healthy enough to continue working. That’s basically the system the NCAA has.”

The NCAA system, as well as the NFL, depends on a tacit agreement among athletes, black and white, to ignore the broader implications of their employment and to overlook the influence their acquiescence imposes on society—especially on minority groups. The model for this sort of moral cowardice is NBA great Michael Jordan, who has yet to utter a bleat against against institutional racism. 

The immortal exception to all this meek complicity was, of course, Bill Russell. At every opportunity, Bill Russell scowled, roared and agitated for voting rights. He marched with Dr. King. 

Michal Jordan, on the other hand, sold shoes. 

Money is, of course, Jordan’s excuse. If he protested the bigotry that surrounded him—and dictated his subservience—in every arena in every game he played, he ran the risk of losing his personal car on the gravy train. Likewise, filthy lucre, whether in the form of an NIL royalty or in the prospect of NFL millions, is what keeps all those talented black kids down on the plantation, minding their manners and saying “yassuh” to the Colonel. Sports are a ticket out of poverty for thousands of black kids. The loss of a scholarship or the cancellation of a contract is every bit as devastating as a shattered knee. It sends the athlete spiraling down from stardom to his roots, usually in the ’hood, usually without even a diploma. 

That’s why the struggle for change can’t fall to one player, two, three or a dozen, or even one team or one conference. A black-player strike would have to bring all of them together, all on the same day, in the NCAA, in the NFL, in the NBA, in baseball, boxing and MMA. Acting on the prescient wisdom of Frederick Douglass, and in the spirit of the auto workers, coal miners, steel drivers and ironworkers who’ve gone before, the strikers would issue one demand—the restoration of voting rights—uniformly and permanently, for all Americans. 

Were it to ever occur (and it will not), this uprising would dwarf and mock the corporate pageantry of the Super Bowl halftime show. It would render football suddenly as trivial as it really is. It would send all those old, fat white alumni, in their school-color costumes and luxury suites, into a slough of bewildered despond. ESPN anchors would break out in fights. The gambling industry would tremble to its foundations. Las Vegas would utter a primal scream. Outraged that the minstrels had unexpectedly stood up and cancelled the cakewalk, right-wing media would swallow its dog whistles and start using terms like “uppity nigger.” 

More significantly, our bread-and-circus gladiators—the sideshow of American society—would become more important to the Constitutional order than Congress, governors, state legislators and Clarence Thomas. Black people (and probably, their white teammates on the offensive line) would, for the first time in history, become the arbiters of voting equality for black (Latino, immigrant, elderly, disabled and young) Americans.

We might also witness a curious but felicitous side-effect. Suddenly, thousands of football jocks, with no practices to attend, no games to plan and no point in lifting weights, would see—for the first time in their college careers—the inside of a classroom.