The X-Factor

During week 9 of the 2010 NFL regular season, Washington Redskins head coach Mike Shanahan did the unthinkable.  With 2 minutes left in the game and his team down by 5 points to the Detroit Lions, Shanahan benched his newly-acquired, 6-time Pro Bowl quarterback, Donovan McNabb, for the back-up Rex Grossman.  To say this was a bizarre move would be an understatement of the highest order.  In the NFL, where every regular season game has playoff-type implications, you never bench your starting quarterback unless the game is firmly out of reach for you or your opponent.

What makes this decision even more mind-boggling is the fact that Rex Grossman, who started for the Chicago Bears as recently as 2008, is possibly the worst quarterback ever to hold a starting job in the history of the league.  During his last season as a starter, the discussion going into every one of the Bears’ matchups was “how many interceptions is this guy gonna throw tonight?”  And Grossman rarely disappointed, having racked up a total of total of 36 interceptions with just 33 touchdowns in his career.  Also over his career, he’s averaged a pathetic 169 yards per game with a passer rating of 69.9.

If the decision to bench McNabb for Grossman left viewers in shock, what happened immediately after Grossman got on the field surprised nobody.  True to form, in his first play, Grossman fumbled the ball allowing the Lions’ rookie defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh to scoop it up and run it in for an easy touchdown, sealing the fate of the Redskins in the process.

When asked to explain his decision after the game, Shanahan couldn’t seem to come up with a straight answer.  First he said that he thought Grossman would give the Redskins a better chance to win the game because he had a better grasp of the playbook.  Then he claimed that McNabb had poor fitness and couldn’t go all 4 quarters.  The inconsistency and the implausibility of the explanations made a lot of people wonder if there was a more sinister explanation for Shanahan’s shenanigans.  It’s one thing to bench your starting quarterback for a guy who really belongs in an after-work league, but to then turn around and rationalize your screw-up by insulting McNabb, calling into question his fitness and, implicitly, his intelligence?!?!  That naturally forces people to speculate that there was probably more to the story.

The speculation was further complicated by the fact that McNabb is black and Grossman is white.  Given America’s sordid history concerning race and racism, as well as the history of blacks being systematically shut out of the quarterback position until fairly recently, some commentators wondered whether race might have been a factor.  This of course caused some of the middle-aged, right-wing white men, who comprise the majority of prominent American sports journalists (this is especially true in football), to have a conniption. 

ESPN’s Rick Reilly was particularly incensed at a comment made by Washington Post columnist John Feinstein, who had surmised that Shanahan’s benching of McNabb and the subsequent character attack used to explain it, may have had racial underpinnings.

In an article titled “Being Wrong on Race”, Reilly unloaded on Feinstein for having the audacity to bring race into the discussion.  In the article, Reilly accuses Feinstein of calling the Redskins coach “a racist” (which Feinstein never actually said), and he questions the intelligence of Feinstein and anybody else who would suggest that race could have been a factor.

“Are we really going there? In 2010?” Reilly asks incredulously.

Whenever I enter into a discussion about race, there are two things my interlocutor can do that will tell me right away that frustration will be high and the level of analysis will be low.  Reilly does both.

The first is the use of the word “racist” as a noun.  This used to be one of my grammatical pet peeves.  Although it’s not technically incorrect to use “racist” as a noun, I find this to be a grammatically clumsy use of a word which should really only be used as an adjective.  But what really makes Reilly’s use of the word problematic goes far beyond grammar.

Reilly employs a common tactic used to those who wish to deny the existence of racism wherever possible.  In his world, the mere suggestion that race could have been a factor, automatically gets elevated to accusing someone of being “a racist”.  All of a sudden, you’re not just suggesting that a person, consciously or subconsciously, may have engaged in a discriminatory act, now you’re saying that racism is at the core of that person’s identity.  It’s not just what they do, it’s who they are.

Reilly understands that racism is a serious charge, as it should be.  But what he doesn’t seem to understand (or simply won’t acknowledge) is that racism occurs on a spectrum.  It is possible to say that a person made a decision that privileged members of one race over another without accusing that person of being a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan.  By denying the existence of the vast grey area, Reilly seeks to intimidate and dissuade honest and genuine commentators from even inquiring as to whether race could have been a factor, lest their inquiry be misconstrued as an accusation of Jim Crow racism.

 The other thing Reilly does that really irks me is his reflexive dismissal of the possibility that race was a factor.  Reilly offers several non-racist explanations for Mike Shanahan’s decision to bench McNabb and appears angry that out of all these innocuous possible explanations, some people still choose to entertain the possibility that race may have also played a role.  The problem is that none of Reilly’s alternative explanations make any sense.  And his only evidence that race wasn’t a factor was the fact that it is now 2010.  I suspect he was tempted to also point out that there’s a black president, but he decided against it at the last minute.

I have to question the politics and the integrity of those who automatically deny that race and racism are operating, even before they’ve examined the evidence.  Granted, there are also those who automatically assume that race is the overriding factor whenever misfortune befalls a member of a racialized group, and this is also problematic.  But these two thought processes are not logically equivalent.  Given the history of race in North America, and the fact that each and every one of us, from the time we are born, is socialized to view the world through a raced (and gendered) lens means that there is a significant likelihood that race will play a role, even a small one, in our daily interactions with one another.  Therefore, it’s one thing to point to a specific incident and conclude that race was not a deciding factor (i.e. it didn’t affect the general outcome).  But it’s quite another to look at a trend (such as the general dearth of black quarterbacks in the NFL given blacks’ ubiquity at every other position), and conclude that race isn’t a factor at all.  The latter just doesn’t make logical sense.

I refer to this type of reactionary denial of all racism as exclusionary thinking.  At its core exclusionary thinking is a form of dogma.  It’s a refusal to consider the evidence and the data.  The most illustrative example of collective exclusionary thinking came after the election of Barack Obama to the presidency.  Immediately following the announcement of the results, political pundits concluded that racism was no longer a major issue in America.  And many those who may not have been willing to go that far, were still confident that even if race remained a barrier for some Americans, it wasn’t a factor in the election.

However, a cursory look at the data, specifically exit polls from the various states, reveals that race was absolutely a factor in the election, and that, if it weren’t for racism, Obama would likely have beat both Hillary Clinton and John McCain by wider margins.  It’s also true that Obama gained some votes precisely because he is black, both from fellow African Americans as well as from progressive white voters.  So while race wasn’t the deciding factor, there is certainly no question that race was a factor.  It would be meaningless for me to dig up a single handpicked source from the hundreds (maybe even thousands) of newspaper and academic journal articles that have since been written on the topic.  But one set of data that I found really interesting was the exit polls from the West Virginia Democratic primary.  Hillary Clinton scored one of her biggest victories in this state and the numbers suggest that that was due, at least in part, to her race.  According to this article, 2 out of every 10 white voters polled said that race was a factor in who they voted for.  And that number only accounts for the people who were willing to look a pollster in the eye and admit that they were voting based on race.  One can only imagine what the numbers would have been, had it been in an anonymous poll.

So getting back to Rick Reilly from ESPN…  To answer his question, “Are we really going there?  In 2010?”  Well Mr. Reilly, the evidence suggests, we’re already there.  The real question is, are we going to acknowledge it?