From the Archives: As another college football season begins, an anthropologist explores how Black athletes navigate racism by caring for one another on and off the gridiron.
This article was originally published at Black Perspectives and has been republished with permission.
This is an insightful interview for me as an anthropologist who has spent almost 10 years learning from Black college football players. Waddle’s reaction to Smith being drafted is representative of ways I’ve noted that Black players care for one another. However, understanding the historical and contemporary configurations of the college football system is key to understanding the reason for this response.It’s been quite a year for college football.
Simultaneously, the NCAA managed an antitrust lawsuit in the Supreme Court, calls to amend its “name, image, and likeness” rules, and pressure to allow college athletes to unionize. These matters stem from how the governing body of collegiate athletics defines amateurism and limits financial compensation for athletic labor.
The deeply rooted anti-Black framework of the college football system cannot be addressed with a pithy hashtag or a new logo. These issues didn’t start with the pandemic, and they are not random, individual incidents. Instead, they highlight the actual framework of the sport and point to interconnected systems that inform players’ lives and experiences. In the words of scholar Christina Sharpe, this is a holistic environment, known as “the weather,” that is anti-Black. Both on and off the field, Black players must navigate this atmospheric anti-Blackness.
In research I plan to publish, I argue for the difference between football teammates and football brothers. The latter refers to the racialized and gendered experiences that bond the young Black men who end up on college teams together, particularly given how they must deal with the anti-Black environment that populates their social worlds. Over time, they choose to become brothers as a reaction to the noticeably racist systems that surround them.
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