Victor Davis Hanson
The game itself was well-played and exciting. But the entire spectacle is heading into a strange and ultimately suicidal territory. Before the National Anthem, there was sung and observed the “Black” national anthem of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” It is a wonderful song, but no substitution for our common, shared National Anthem, if such a thing even still exists in the era of a fragmenting America.
The country is supposedly “one people” with one anthem. There are now as many “Latinos” as there are blacks. So why not a Latino national anthem? Ditto Asians. But is it fair to have just one ethnic anthem and not others? What will be the criteria of segregated anthems?
How strange: If in 1960 Bull Connor had dictated to blacks (and who knows, he may have?), “you sing your own ‘separate but equal’ anthem before the nation’s National Anthem,” he would have been dubbed a racist up north and a segregationist down south. So have we come full circle?
Are we following the universities, those beacons of enlightenment and morality, which boast of multiple graduations, all predicated on race or gender? We could devote 30 minutes of pregame time to various chauvinistic anthems, or simply junk the game altogether and sing dozens of anthems ad nauseam?
The NFL bragged that its Super Bowl won 112 million viewers. But that number still counts as a million short from last year, and one million fewer than 2015, when there were about 15 million fewer Americans than now.
True, the NFL has recovered from its dismal Covid/Kaepernick years. But it seems bent to follow the descending trajectory of the NBA. Last year’s final NBA championship game earned a mere 14 million viewers. That was up from the 8.5 million catastrophe of 2020—but far below the 35 million in 1998. How, a quarter-century ago, could there have been 65 million fewer Americans and yet over 20 million more viewers! Where over the last 25 years did those 20 million viewers go?
I am also confused about the entire conundrum of the NFL and “diversity.”
Blacks compose almost 60-70% of the players, depending how one counts “Black” and what particular span of years one uses to quantify the numbers. They make up about 13 percent of the population (I don’t know how the Left calculates these percentages other than using their own old-Confederate, one-drop rule that makes one with any percentage of black ancestry “black” [cf. the old 1/16th inherited from the antebellum South]).
Whites make up close to 70 percent of the population (and in our topsy turvy world anyone not 100 percent white, at least if part Latino, Asian, or Black, is not counted as white), but only about 24 percent of NFL players.
So here is the paradox:
1) The NFL is entirely meritocratic, as it should be. A preponderance of black players gravitate to the sport in a manner they do to boxing or basketball but commensurately not so to tennis, golf, hockey, or water polo. We are told culture determines this self-selection and thus explains why particular groups favor particular sports. (Did racism preclude Asians from playing basketball in America?—given they certainly do in China and Japan?)
But whereas there is no movement to make the NFL “look like America” (we need more Asian, Latino, and white players?), there are certainly efforts to “diversify” hockey and the other sports mentioned above. Why? No one can or perhaps dares answer.
2) We are told that the NFL is racist because while 60-70 percent of the players are black (“overrepresented”), only 9 percent are coaches (“underrepresented”). Is that number vastly unfair, given the overrepresentation of black players—or roughly fair given blacks are 13 percent of the population? Demographically wise, is it fair that other groups are underrepresented as players, but unfair that blacks are not overrepresented as coaches?
3) Why in terms of hiring faculty, or pilots or aircraft controllers, is it racist if blacks are underrepresented demographically, but not racist if they are overrepresented in the NFL? Why are the military, the FAA, and legions of universities either jettisoning standardized tests and traditional resumes or lowering standards for diversity to ensure similarly desired diversity, and yet the NFL has no such diversity programs? (Note most Americans don’t care about race; but object when those who obsess over it, do not apply their fixations symmetrically and uniformly.)
Is merit more important in football than in air-traffic controlling or physics instruction? Could not white running back applicants have deducted .5 seconds in hundred-meter dash trials? Could not Asians in cases of instant replays be given the benefit of the doubt on controversial plays? Could not Latinos be allowed extra equipment to roughly achieve parity with black linemen?
Or is the NFL disequilibrium seen as reparatory: to make up for exclusion 70 years ago, today that should be overrepresentation? Or it is truly meritocratic, and no one cares what race a player is as long as he achieved his spot through meritocratic criteria?
Discussion (12)
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This one viewer is still alive and kicking! I went to the shop and started building furniture and cutting my grass. I guess I have become the old guy yelling "get off my grass!" Given what you guys in California are dealing with regarding illegal dumping (from previous essays) there may be some value in that! LOL
I appreciate many of the comments to this post, particular are the ones that mention how our values have deteriorated over those of previous generations. I stopped following pro sports 5 years or so ago as 'take a knee' during the anthem and "hands up don't shoot' came out of the tunnels. My friends told me about the "Black National Anthem" and the negative responses first encountered so much so that CBS decided not to air it in years past. IMO all that these actions do is divide us along political lines. It is not racial as many blacks protest the airing and many whites promote it. Much the same with Disney and the "Slaves built America" promotion. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans have opportunities that many in other nations do not have, including Africans in Africa, Hispanics in Central and Southern America and Asians in China, and Southeast Asian nations. This nation is absolutely a melting pot of historical proportions. We must not go back to being split along racial/skin color lines.
"How ironic, how blatantly inconsistent, what a ludicrously narrative-driven blind eye." In what way? Can you provide examples to back up your comment? Wait-osu.edu? A Buckeye? Is this Hugh Hewitt?
I watched the Super Bowl with a friend. After one particularly questionable call by the officials, he commented, "NFL football is entertainment. Once you understand that, everything you see makes sense." While I have no idea whether officials are encouraged to shade their calls to make the game more entertaining, I'm beginning to think we should view professional sports as entertainment and not read more into it. I suppose that includes the tradition of playing the National Anthem before games. (Not my original idea, by the way. I must have read this in an editorial somewhere a few years back.) After all, do people sing the National Anthem before watching a movie in a theater? Or before a Taylor Swift concert? Maybe this is a quaint custom that should die out, leaving one less opportunity to highlight identity-driven divisions in our society.
Well, here's a thought: what on earth is a Super Bowl, actually? It's smoke and mirrors from start to finish. A bunch of overpaid prima donnas playing a child's game with more commercial hyperbole than content. The ratio of time that the ball is actually in play to the time spent on superfluous nonsense is risible. How any sane person could countenance this obscene soap opera and faux drama is a mystery. Only the infantilization of the culture can explain it. If this represents the apogee of American culture, we are in free fall. And before you label me some sort of effete snob, please know that I played football through high school. I played for the sport. I took my hits. That kind of sporting event hardly exists anymore. The Superfluous Bowl is an embarrassment on par with the Academy Awards and professional wrestling.
Merit is another name for ability whether it be natural and innate or acquired. If an individual can run 100 meters in under ten second we attribute that accomplishment mostly to innate ability and and slightly to acquired (or taught) ability. To give an individual a head start over others may be seen as laudable when attempting to address equity but the end result is that all others know winning such a race is due not to ability but to 'fixing' the race to achieve a certain outcome. To compound this error is to ascribe some 'moral' platitude to the event furthering the fictional nature of the outcome. These games that used to be play more for the love of the sport now become the subject of financial gain. Of course the public is the 'recipient' of civic pride in their local sports teams to the point where the tax dollars supplement the coffers of both owners and players. Imagine if the team owners had to finance and pay for their sporting venues, would player salaries be so astronomical? Cheap seats at a baseball game were, when I was a youth, a dollar and a beer (8oz) a quarter a cup. Does the entertainment value really merit the expense of $100 today? It ain't like the old days in Rome when bread and circuses were free.
There is no guarantee that the people supposedly benefiting from the changes going on in society today will continue to benefit in the future. The beauty of the American paradigm isn't that it enables individuals to prosper in a monetary manner unlike any other time or place in human history which it most certainly does. It's greatest attribute is that it has allowed a larger amount of people than ever before the freedom to be objectively virtuous. Shows like 'Leave it to Beaver' and 'The Real McCoys' were simultaneously a reflection of American society and a projection of what it ought to be. We now view ugly unedifying spectacles like the Super Bowl halftime show that reflect our current society and point to where it is heading.
How odd to use one's federally subsidized university system email to make such a comment. Egads!
How ironic, how blatantly inconsistent, what a ludicrously narrative-driven blind eye.
" How, a quarter-century ago, could there have been 65 million fewer Americans and yet over 20 million more viewers! Where over the last 25 years did those 20 million viewers go?" Where did they go? They died natural deaths. And with them went the American values of the "Greatest Generation." Values that "included" heroes like Jackie Robinson, Cassius Clay (Muhammed Ali), and so many other great athletes over the decades. The obviously real question is: "Where did all the great American values go?" They've been substituted with shallow, cheap and so-often corrupt and mindless values that are the real threat to our democratic, Constitutional Republic. The challenge now and ahead is to answer the question: "Do we return to those values, or do we carve a different path forward?" Going forward must include the principles upon which our great nation was founded. The language and actions may be new and different than the "Great Generation's," yet the survival of the true soul of our nation demands that they be re-discovered and instituted.