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Fair warning: this post is going to go a lot of places – and I think, I know it has to in order to get where I’m coming from. A lot of the issues of the past two weeks in the NFL – draftees with questions, deflated footballs and this article on Shady and his comments on Chip Kelly – bring us (me) out of the sports world and into the “real” one. So this’ll be part FMJ, part history and hopefully a little more insight into the machinations that may have led to Shady’s commentary.
TLDR: The ‘race card’ needs to be retired as a phrase. Sports are a reflection of the culture/history of the people that play it. Life is an onion.
When anything you do for fun enters the real world – the layers return. And for me, layers are my life. I was the idiot that chuckled at most of Dennis Miller’s Monday Night Football jokes. I think too much about too many things and sometimes that can be a problem. However, when it comes to writing articles on here, it’s usually a great help. Stats, formations, game theory, that stuff is the bees knees to me.
However, I can’t talk about LeSean’s stats running for this article because they don’t matter, except for in the context that statistically he has been an NFL ‘superstar’. When you’re a superstar, you get the commercials. You get all the cool highlights when an NFL partner is showing the best of the NFL. And you get to talk – A LOT. Because if it’s not a benign NFL network interview, it’s an ESPN radio spot or your local media asking you how your foundation’s event is doing or it’s getting quotes on another player on your team’s behavior/actions…the list is endless. And people care because you made them 500 dollars the year before on their fantasy team. Do we see any people trying to interview Shaud Williams ad nauseum? Nope.
So when you’re an NFL superstar and you’re asked…constantly…by your new team’s media why you don’t like the coach that traded you, you’re going to answer. It’s a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ scenario: if you answer it and give your real opinion, it’s sour grapes (or what we see now with Shady). If you don’t – you get the ‘Marshawn treatment’ in which all of the luxuries afforded to you by your talent are thrown in your face as evidence you won’t “play ball” with the media – and in doing so allow some in MSM to paint you as an enemy of the fan for not letting them hear your voice – despite that silence speaking volumes. Shady’s answer, shown below needs to be examined outside of just sports and in a lens of a person of color. Since I happen to be just that person, and since ‘optics’ is the new ‘at the end of the day’ catch phrase du jour, let me take you on a journey on how Kelly’s actions can lead to ‘bad optics’ for a black player. If you decide to hop off, remember my TLDR at the top and we’re cool. Let’s boogie.
You told The Philadelphia Inquirer in April that Chip doesn’t “like or respect stars.” What was the problem with you and Chip, and how did that relationship end?
The relationship was never really great. I feel like I always respected him as a coach. I think that’s the way he runs his team. He wants the full control. You see how fast he got rid of all the good players. Especially all the good black players. He got rid of them the fastest. That’s the truth. There’s a reason. … It’s hard to explain with him. But there’s a reason he got rid of all the black players — the good ones — like that. [The Eagles declined to comment on McCoy’s statements.] – Mike Rodak Interview, ESPN the Magazine
A few things right off the bat: with the quote’s formation, there are things missing prior to Shady’s answer of “it’s hard to explain with him”. Editorially I haven’t heard anything in the media from LeSean or his people saying he’s misquoted or things were taken out of context, so I assume it wasn’t something mission-critical that was cut. Rodak goes on to ask an important question for the purpose of this discussion:
How many other players have shared that thought with you?
Oh, man. People have heard it. I mean … Stephen A. Smith has talked about it. Other players have talked about it. But that’s one of the things where you don’t even care no more. I’m on a new team, ready to play. So it’s nothing to do with Chip. I have no hatred toward him, nothing to say negative about him. When he got [to Philadelphia], I didn’t know what to expect. When he let DeSean go last year, I was like: “C’mon. DeSean Jackson?” So it is what it is.
I can see the mention of Stephen A sending folks into an automatic invalidation of McCoy’s theory. However, peel it back. I’ve used the phrasing McCoy has in terms of no hatred and ‘you don’t even care no more’, but instead of it being a head coach, it was some of the insanity of the last few months playing out on CNN and in the media as a whole. You can’t care – because if you care about every slight, every micro-aggression, every illustration that at times the deck (more on that) may be ever so slightly not in your favor you’ll go nuts.
Let me give you a Bills example that I hope helps. I was beyond excited when the Bills drafted Cyrus Kouandjio to the team. I thought he was a mauler and a pretty good piece to add to the line. Little did I know he would ride the pine for the year, but hey, whatever – FOCUS! When Bills fans began to talk about him, some began to, in an effort to save their spell checker some grief shorted his name to ‘Kujo’. As a black man, seeing another man being equated with a fictional dog wasn’t exactly something I enjoyed, so I made mention that since as fans we can spell Roethlisberger or Polamalu or Krzyzewski, so why is it so hard to just spell, Kouandjio?
[The response: “stop playing the race card, not everything is about race”. Hmm.]And when you look at the Eagles through McCoy’s eyes you see a team whose most outspoken stars were black and no longer on the team. Some will point to the cap and some will point to them not being “team players”. Were they not team players under Andy Reid? Were they not successful cogs in the Philadelphia machine prior to their trades?
The problem lay with their outspoken nature and some of the weird racial undertones associated with them.
For some fans, having outspoken players is akin to the scarlet letter – any player who is willing to speak his mind freely is an outlier; someone that needs to fall in line and “learn their place”. Many of the key parts in this play in addition to being an easy quote for the media are typically also play “this not that” with players. For a player like McCoy or Jackson, being outspoken both on and off the field is at times the quickest way to be seen as “uppity” or “selfish”. Consider the current Patriots imbroglio. With the NFL releasing the Wells report shots have been fired far and wide towards Tom Brady individually and the Patriots as a collective. What was Rob Gronkowski’s (Gronk) response? “DEEZ NUTS” and flexing. Most have written it off as ‘Gronk being Gronk’ and moved on. However, if that were Lynch, or Jackson or McCoy – would the response be as tepid? I think not. In fact, situations like Manziel being told to act “less black” in terms of his negative behaviors are easy to point out – they aren’t verbal masters of the dog-whistle statement like say, a Sully.
So, given that – what else could McCoy see as a reasoning? RILEY COOPER IS STILL ON THAT TEAM. That is a fact that cannot, that should not be ignored. To see the most outspoken (and talented) players on the team not only get jettisoned, but to have an overpaid receiver (given his stats) with his caught-on-tape outburst remain is curious. That word, forever used as THE pejorative carries a power and a pain to it that few other words can. You can say “words hurt you if you let it” but, as blessed as I feel to have been born and bred in the USA, this is also the country in which an ex-slave who was the intellectual of his day (Frederick Douglass – as well as others) had to write “written by himself” because so few whites believed he was capable of doing so.
We are in the shadow of Doug Williams, who was believed to lack the smarts to quarterback a team. We are in the time as Bills fans of a black general manager, the first in the team’s history, which is awesome. But we are also in the time of crazy school segregation in Buffalo (heck, country-wide) and constant visuals of the long-term effects of ignoring historical context, disenfranchised populations and race daily. These things cannot be ignored in society and like the NFL likes to mention with domestic violence and other crimes the league (for good or ill) is a reflection of the society in which is resides, perhaps with a little more progression. So to jump to the “well it’s just a game” defense, to me falls on deaf ears.
Then we jump to the reactions:
Sully’s was by far the most fun to read. “I used to think I was racist then I realize I praise black players too” is the new “some of my best friends are _____” defense. That doesn’t float, never have and never will. And his theorem that because Kelly signed/drafted black players is ignoring (again this is going to get deep) historically we’ve had that play out with not-so-good results (see Jefferson, Thomas). My favorite line was this:
Kelly released star receiver DeSean Jackson two years ago and let wideout Jeremy Maclin flee as a free agent. But teams often decide not to overpay for players. The Bills didn’t re-sign such black stars as Antoine Winfield, Nate Clements and London Fletcher. At times, it seemed they were more willing to overpay a white face like Chris Kelsay. – Jerry Sullivan, Buffalo News
If I were to take the MSM approach to this, I would have asked Joe to change my title to “Are the Bills as Racist as Sully thinks?”. But that’s not the thing that drove the article, merely a salacious piece to attract clicks. In the case of McCoy – look past the jilted player and see how the arithmetic adds up.
I also read an article from Buffalo Rumblings, a fellow Buffalo Bills blog that I visit often from SBNation. I typically enjoy the dialogue and commentary, however, the “race card” usage as if it were the nuclear option disappointed.
If you want to say a “race card” has been played, I’ll show the deck of history that made that “card” exist.
And furthermore, what other forms of discrimination are so routinely diminished and delegitimized in this way — cast as a game, a tactic or a stratagem?
The truth is that the people who accuse others — without a shred of evidence — of “playing the race card,” claiming that the accusations of racism are so exaggerated as to dull the meaning of the term, are themselves playing a card. It is a privileged attempt at dismissal. – Charles Blow, New York Times Op-ED
Finally, the collection of Philly tweets/reports that denigrate McCoy are expected and really would be a waste of mental energy to chronicle, so I’ll leave that to you, the reader.
Is Chip Kelly racist? I don’t know, personally, since I haven’t been around him. But I can prove to you the founder of the Washington team was – and no one league wise bats an eye, because it’s “the name of a team, how can it be racist?” as the commissioner himself has stated. Those micro-aggressions across time and across teams add up. These historical biases and lack of resolution add up. So when LeSean McCoy, as the (now former) star player see things play out the way his end in Philadelphia did, the question begged is not borne of malice, just one assumed, consumed and moved on from.
I wish we lived in a world where these things didn’t happen. But we do and the layers of our sports/country onion need to get pulled apart and examined – and we as a society, sporting or no have to try to course correct as much as possible. LeSean McCoy might not have been right about Kelly, but the issues that lead to those optics are there and have to be acknowledged. Should McCoy get over his trade? Sure. But I think the media needs to stop asking about it if they really “don’t want to hear any more about it”. And we have to challenge that, as fans and consumers of the sport.
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