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In Intruder in the Dust, William Faulkner’s classic meditation on what white southerners owe black southerners, a whiggish white lawyer spends a lot of time talking about “Sambo,” his generic name for black men. This passage leaps out:
“We—he and us—should confederate: swap him the rest of the economic and political and cultural privileges which are his right, for the reversion of his capacity to wait and endure and survive. Then we would prevail; together we would dominate the United States.”
And so America’s greatest white novelist predicted the modern SEC. The results prove Faulkner right. Southern black players (and a few coaches) + southern white coaches (and a few players) + (mostly) white money = dominating the United States.
Look at the post segregation era, at the record of the SEC and the Florida teams. Look at all the southern black players on northern and western teams. Look at the SEC network. Ohio State’s extraordinary run to the title in 2014 is the exception that proves this rule.
Now let’s be clear, white interests created the concentration of blackness that we call college football as surely as they created the ghetto and mass incarceration. And from Twitter to excessive celebration penalties to the New York Times crawling down FSU’s throat, American society does point some heavy weaponry at the young mostly black men playing this sport that will hasten their death. In some cases, they deserve it. (The scrutiny, not the death.)
But putting on a college football uniform does something to Jacksonian America’s thug-colored glasses. It turns a young black man into an asset and a person. It removes him from the great closet where America stores the other young men that look like him. It is the only institutional concentration of blackness that American white people will defend or invest in with regularity or intensity.
College football splits electrons from their natural tribal nuclei like no other social force in our country. Playing football for Florida State University — or Oregon or Auburn or Ohio State — earns a sort of moral due process. At least among his own fan base, a young black college football player earns the right to have a story, not a tangle of pathologies.
In the South, this makes major college football, in its corrupt and violent way, the single most potent force for racial and cultural unity we have ever seen in this section. Doubt me?
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Look at the aftermath of the 2013 Iron Bowl. What else has this community power? What else regularly gives classes and races the chance to celebrate something they feel like they accomplished together? In Alabama? Or Florida? Name one civil rights leader as respected in Alabama as Bo Jackson. White Mississippians cherish their reaction to the accidental death of Chucky Lee Mullins; not the prickly, single-minded bravery of James Meredith.
School integration made college football’s moral power possible. I’m part of the only generation to live through school integration that was neither an historical novelty nor under attack by the “choice” movement. I consider myself incredibly lucky. It was better than what we have now. I’m a better person, writer, and citizen for it.
But most people — of all groups — want voluntary segregation. They don’t call it that. And they may not even realize it. But the parental instinct to send a child to a place that gives the parent comfort is incredibly powerful. It overwhelms the government’s ability to integrate. As I’ve said before, you can have choice or you can have integration. You can’t have both.
The ongoing collapse of school integration as a priority or value leaves us with college football. It’s the one common space through which an egalitarian swath of southerners chooses to experience life in our country together. Don’t judge. I’m not sure the rest of America has one at all. If it does; it’s the NFL. But the NFL is a mercenary version of college football. It doesn’t have the same twisted, immoral love at its heart.
Major college football is the South’s most socially and historically consequential institution that doesn’t involve prison or bondage. It’s the only institution in the South—and probably America as a whole—where black and white can really be said to confederate. In the South, this makes major college football, in its corrupt and violent way, the single most potent force for racial and cultural unity we have ever seen. Ask the University of Missouri.
It’s hard to imagine any fact says more about America.