Illustration by Grace Schafer-Perry
What makes sports great is that a star can come from anywhere. José Altuve, a 5’6,” 165-pound second baseman from Venezuela for the World Champion Houston Astros, can win an MVP award, while the runner up (Aaron Judge) is a brooding 6’7,” 280-pound giant from Southern California. Two completely different players from two completely different parts of the world, but step between the white lines and one is treated by opponents as an equally dangerous threat as the other. Yet, while between the lines this can be true, outside of them it’s a whole different world.
Sports are a glistening utopia for many around the world, a place where the cruel and belligerent prejudice of everyday life cannot touch them. Sports broadcasters, fans, and writers try very hard to extend this utopia past the playing field, but a utopia is in essence, unrealistic, and when stretched beyond the limits of something like sports, it becomes impossible to maintain.
The media has firmly and successfully implanted the fake notion in many people’s heads that sports offer this equal and fair pedestal for all athletes. The media likes to pretend that, because the National Football League (NFL) and National Basketball Association (NBA) are predominantly black, these sports can be extremely progressive things, which in a lot of ways they can; there’s no denying that.
But sit down and watch an NFL game sometime, for example, and listen to the way that great black athletes are praised as “athletic freaks,” while white athletes continue to be praised for their intellect and their “knowledge of the game,” as if a black athlete couldn’t be both an incredible athlete and a student of the game. Then all of a sudden the facade that the NFL and many other major sports use to depict their white athletes and athletes of color as equals is broken down, and sitting behind it is an ugly truth; while sports often can seem like a way for athletes of color to be empowered, the media continues to belittle and degrade them.
Media and fans alike continue to fail almost comically at their attempts to hide their preconceived biases of how athletes will perform due to their race.
Back in 2014, after a NFL wild card game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Indianapolis Colts, NFL draft analyst Mike Mayock described then Chiefs quarterback, Alex Smith, as “sneaky athletic,” as if to say it was shocking that a white player could have that level of athletic ability. While the notion that a player has limited athletic ability is far less degrading than the common stereotype of black athletes having less intellectual prowess, it does show how these limiting and unrealistic stereotypes exist in all facets of sports. Alex Smith isn’t sneaky athletic, he’s just a good athlete, with over one thousand rushing yards as a quarterback at University of Utah.
On the other side of the spectrum, after a controversial post-game Super Bowl interview in 2014 with Richard Sherman, cornerback for the Seattle Seahawks, many people took to twitter to label him a thug. Forget that he graduated High School with a 4.2 GPA and went to Stanford — the minute he has an over-the-top interview, fans who praised him are suddenly labeling him. It seems that to many people, a black athlete is one of two things: a freak athlete that everyone praises for their “natural athletic ability,” as if to say that they somehow were able to attain success at the highest level of sports without putting in as much work as the white, intellectual, sneaky athletic, “gym rats,” as announcers love to call them. Or, they’re villainized and called thugs in response to one decision. We act as if sports are empowering for black athletes, but continue to justify these outdated and unrealistic notions.
This type of degrading culture is not new, nor is it limited to the NFL. There have been multiple instances of fans throwing bananas at black players in National Hockey League (NHL) games, and after one incident of this in London, Ontario in 2011, the NHL commissioner fired back with, “The obviously stupid and ignorant action by one individual is in no way representative of our fans or the people of London, Ontario,” but this is the problem right at the source.
Instead of recognizing the action for what it was, he needed to defend it, isolate it, and make it foreign to him and the rest of the NHL. He needed to pretend as if this “stupid and ignorant action” was an outlier in his “unbiased league.” But it isn’t an outlier, and this behavior will continue to be accepted as long as we turn the other cheek while the fans, media, and sports industries subtly as well as blatantly degrade athletes of color.
We all want to believe that the sports that we play are as equal and as pure at the professional level. But they never have been and never will be until people are willing to break down the facade and recognize the injustices that athletes of color face.