A knee for bigotry

70% of the NFL's players are black men and 98% of the owners are white

The incredible images last week of the owners of National Football League (NFL) teams linking arms in solidarity with their players during the American national anthem attracted widespread attention for the sharp public rebuke they represented by some of US President Donald Trump’s staunchest supporters and financiers for his crude racist rant in Alabama. But look closely at those images and you’ll see another kind of implicit racism before you, and it will make you just a little cynical about the motives for the team owners’ decision to join the protests.
 
Most of the players are African-American. In fact, 70 per cent of the NFL’s players are black men and 98 per cent of the owners are white (one of them was a Muslim of Pakistani origin and also, unusually, a Trump supporter). This significant racial majority made it easy for owners to earn brownie points for ethics at the lowest possible cost by prominently supporting their players’ protests.

 
Remember, too, that this same cohort of owners had declined to offer a job to the man who originated this unique form of protest last year, Colin Kaepernick, whom the president called a “sonofa*****” at an Alabama rally, the spark for last week’s spontaneous serial demonstrations. Mr Kaepernick remains unemployed since 2016 even though statistics suggested he would be an asset to any team. “No above-average quarterback has been employed for nearly as long this off-season,” the statistics website FiveThirtyEight wrote last year and concluded that Mr Kaepernick was being “frozen out for his political opinions”.
 

The extreme irony here is that it was a white teammate — a former Green Beret at that — who suggested the idea of taking the knee to Mr Kaepernick. Apparently, this is how Special Forces soldiers honour their fallen comrades.

 
But put aside the question of whether taking the knee during a national anthem is an appropriate form of protest or not — Mr Kaepernick’s gesture was to highlight police brutality against coloured people, but who remembers that now — and think a little about the demographics of the NFL. Or, indeed, of the National Basketball League — one of whose teams Mr Trump childishly “disinvited” after its star player, Stephen Curry, publicly said he was unlikely to accompany his team to the White House — where 80 per cent of the players are black and 97 per cent of the owners white.

 
Note also that the controversy over taking a knee did not arise in sports where performance requires the players to be relatively well-resourced. In Nascar racing and the national hockey league (ice-hockey that is), the presence of black players is negligible (think Formula 1, too — where are the coloured drivers?).
 
Here are contrasts from some other professions. In June 2017, a survey showed that only 23 per cent of African-Americans occupy senior positions in Fortune 500 companies. More: According to the US Census Bureau, only 28 per cent of African-American men hold jobs in the category called “management, business, science and arts occupations”.

 
The standard explanation for such disparate representation is that African-Americans have an inherent talent for sports just as much as white people have innately superior thinking capabilities — a view based on no credible data. The same explanation obtains for the African players who dominate the European national football teams even as their compatriots can rarely be seen in any of the high-paying white collar jobs in those countries.
 
The truth is more complicated than that, of course. Unlike the opaque world of business, where contacts, social standing and prejudice can flourish with impunity, sports is the ultimate equal-opportunities industry, where talent has to be judged purely on its own terms. It is inevitable, then, that African-American men (and women, for that matter) subtly excluded from the more sophisticated opportunities offered by these developed economies will flock to an industry where ability counts and colour doesn’t.

 
Their predominance in sports makes you wonder how much competition they would offer their white compatriots if the white collar business were as non-discriminatory. In the NBA or the NFL, too, the non-discrimination ends on the playing field. Few African-American players go on to post-playing careers as coaches, managers or even sports administrators. In the NFL, 88 per cent of the head coaches and 72 per cent of the League office staff are white, according to FiveThirtyEight. In the NBA, the figures are a tad more respectable at 53 and 64 per cent respectively.
 
In his habitually confused way, Mr Trump was not entirely wrong when he said the NFL team owners were “afraid” of their players. Afraid maybe overstating the case, but the coordinated gesture of solidarity certainly marked a tacit recognition that without these African-Americans, there would be no NFL. This was majoritarian power being exercised in reverse, and it offers to white Americans and all bigots around the world a small example of what it is like to be in a minority. Every week, Eye Culture features writers with an entertaining critical take on art, music, dance, film and sport