Michael Vick, the Black Quarterback and the Origins of Black Run America

We know what you are thinking... not another post on football. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and turkey day is synonymous with football, so sit back and give us a second on this one.

Heroes of another era, another country

In editing the SBPDL: Year One book, it became clear that a lot of material has been written on college and professional football that might not excite all readers. It should, because the year 1969 can be pinpointed as the moment Pre-Obama America began its gradual slide into oblivion.

The United States was a nation that existed as a collection of individuals that banded together for the greater good when necessary, who primarily took the concept of America for granted. It was a white nation then - 90 percent white - but the dawning of the Black power era was upon that naive collection of individuals. And had Black power been sufficiently dealt with at its inception, the complete collapse of Pre-Obama America and the erosion of the Black family would never have happened.

White America capitulated in 1969 - ironically the year of some of mankind's greatest accomplishments - and the genesis of the entitlement culture that Black people have preyed upon since (and have had it prey upon them) can be found to have begun in earnest:

At Oregon State in February 1969, a black linebacker named Fred Milton was suspended from the team after an assistant coach spotted him on campus with a moustache and goatee, in violation of the team's ban on facial hair. Black students on campus responded with a boycott of classes, many of them left the university, and both the football team and the institution struggled for years afterward against a reputation for racial intolerance. Two months later, 16 black players at the University of Iowa boycotted a spring practice and were suspended; seven were reinstated in August. That summer, John Underwood wrote a three-part series forSports Illustrated titled "The Desperate Coach," describing the incidents at Oregon State and Iowa, along with dozens of lesser ones in athletic programs throughout the country, as a full-scale assault on coaches' authority. "In the privacy of their offices," Underwood wrote, "over breakfast in strange towns, wherever two or three coaches get together, they talk about The Problem."  

 Then came the season itself. At the University of Wyoming, coach Lloyd Eaton suspended a group—what became known as the "Black 14"—that pushed to wear armbands at a home game against BYU to protest the Mormon Church's racial doctrines. Next, at the University of Washington, Jim Owens suspended four black players for a lack of commitment to him and his program. Finally, at Indiana University, coach John Pont, with considerably more reluctance, suspended 16 black players (eventually reinstating four) after they boycotted a practice.

College football is the opiate of America. Without the positive examples of Black athletes on the playing fields of Predominately White Colleges, Black America would be bereft of its penultimate outlet for generating endearing stories to blind people from the sad reality of Black life in the United States.

This is a fact that no amount of posturing from Disingenuous White Liberals (DWLs) can cover up. 1969 was a year that saw the Southeastern Conference (SEC) field football teams that were all-white. Less than twenty years later, these same teams would be 60 percent Black.

A hero for Black Run America

It is safe to say that no Black player would ever have survived the horrors that awaited Texas A&M's famed "Junction Boy's" in the 1950s, for they would have complained of latent racism behind the demonic drills of Paul "Bear" Bryant. Just read these articles from the late 1960s in Sports Illustrated if you doubt this claim, and you will see shocking examples temperamental Black athletes taxed to the extreme for having to cut their facial hair and fit in on campuses where paternalistic coaches attempted to mold men of character.

DWLs protested and agitated these Black players into rebelling against paternalistic coaches (i.e., Fascist or racist) and it is in these early insurrections that white people began to capitulate into the thinking that the proverbial And Then? would ever cease with the next demand.

It hasn't, and it never will.

With this, let us consider a recent Rick Reilly column from ESPN regarding a blowup in Washington DC over a Black quarterback and his benching in favor of a white quarterback:

Just to recap, Feinstein wants a two-time Super Bowl-winning coach fired after half a season because he pulled McNabb with less than two minutes to go in favor of a white backup, Rex Grossman. Shanahan said McNabb wasn't as familiar with the team's two-minute offense as the backup.
Enter Feinstein.

"The first spin [Shanahan uses] is that [McNabb] doesn't know the terminology for the two-minute offense, i.e., he's stupid," Feinstein opined. "The next day, it's, well, his cardiovascular, he's out of shape, i.e., he's fat." And that's when Feinstein dropped the "racial coding" thing, i.e., Shanahan's a racist
What is Feinstein saying? That's it's not possible Grossman knew the two-minute offense better? That it's not possible for a white guy to be better at something than a black guy? That's it's not possible for a black guy to be out of shape? If that's the logic, what follows is: Black people are never inept. Apparently, according to Feinstein, white people have cornered the market on it. And if you think a black person is inept occasionally -- like McNabb -- go stand in the racist line.

We have now reached a point where the idea of Black superiority in sports is so widespread and ingrained in the minds of, well, everyone, that the mere benching of a Black player is enough to make people question the racial aspect of the decision and scream racism. The origins of this can be found in 1969, the year white football coaches - long the heroes of white men everywhere - decided to acquiesce to demands from Black players lest they see Black athletes boycott their school.

Black people made a Faustian Pact in the late 1960s so that they could be accepted by white people in sports and this bargain has had both undeniable positive and overwhelming horrendous consequences.


Sports Illustrated wrote to great articles (one in the 1960s here and one in the mid-90s here) that show how sports helped create and craft positive examples of Black people. Without sports, where would these examples have ever come from? Where would the impetus for integration have originated?

Enter Michael Vick. You know Michael Vick, so no need for flowery introductions. A Black quarterback harboring talents that would make Willie Beamen blush, Vick has had a resurgence of late after a year sitting on the bench in Philadelphia and a few years in prison.

Sports Illustrated did an interesting cover story on him and reported this:

With Vick's 30th birthday approaching on June 26, Brenda and Kijafa wanted to celebrate with a private, invitation-only party. Instead Vick decided to back his brother's bid to host an "All White 30th Birthday Bash," at $50 a head, announced through Twitter. "Open to the public," Vick says, "make some money." And Brenda huffed again, "You don't ever listen to me."

Vick and Kijafa, the mother of his two daughters, arrived at the Guadalajara restaurant in Virginia Beach about 12:45 a.m. on June 25. The plan was for them to have a couple of drinks, sing Happy Birthday and leave. But when Kijafa thought it'd be cute to smear cake on Vick's face in front of some 400 people, his temper flared. Then up stepped Quanis Phillips, Vick's codefendant in the dogfighting trial. Phillips grabbed the cake and shoved some into Vick's face too. Bad enough that probation, not to mention Image Management 101, bars the two men from being in each other's company. But to insult him in public?
Vick blew up. "Q, what are you doin'?" he said. Vick says the moment never got physical but entailed plenty of "strong" words. "It was just cake," Vick says. "But still, it was embarrassing for me. And my pride just got in the way. But I kept thinking, I just got to go. I need to go. In my younger days we would've been fighting, but I let it go. It took a lot to let it go, but I did it."

Vick grabbed Kijafa and they drove off. Fifteen minutes later he received a phone call saying that Phillips had been shot in the leg at a nearby parking lot, two minutes after Vick's departure. Kijafa burst into tears, apologizing. Vick called his lawyer. The couple barely slept, Vick sure he'd blown his chance one minute (hadn't Goodell and Lurie vowed he would have no margin for error?) and hoping for reprieve the next (didn't he leave when things went crazy?). Separate league, team and probationary investigations would later back Vick's versions of events, and the police dropped the investigation because of a lack of cooperation from witnesses and Phillips. But at the time Vick's future looked grim.

Cake in the face? Worthy of a fight? Now we know why Black people don't play baseball anymore. Regardless of the potential fight over a cake, the most telling part of the article is this:

Knowing when to slap and when to massage, after all, is a leader's job, and Vick's place in the Eagles' locker room, much less among his peers around the league, is unquestioned. It's striking: You'd be hard put to find many athletes, including his opponents, who aren't rooting for him to succeed, and the fact that many are black men, out of hardscrabble places touched daily by crime and the prison system, is no coincidence. It's too soon to say whether Vick's case will, like the O.J. Simpson verdict, reveal a black-white divide, but Lurie was struck by the scene: In Martha's Vineyard, after endorsing the move, Vernon Jordan then turned to the room filled with, as Lurie puts it, "well-known African-Americans" and said, "What do you guys think? Does Michael Vick deserve a chance to get back in the NFL?" The answer, Lurie says, "was like a rallying cry."

 Let this be known: Stuff Black People Don't Like is not cheering for Michael Vick. He is a sociopath and belongs in jail, an individual who harbors values so debased that one can only wonder when the next story of his illegal behavior will surface. 

Funny though: in the year a white running back is dominating the NFL (Peyton Hillis), the continued lack of Black quarterbacks is cause for concern: 

Has anyone else noticed all the drama surrounding black quarterbacks during this NFL season?

• Jason Campbell, who has been fighting for his job all season in Oakland, was benched for the second time this year against Pittsburgh on Sunday. 

• Six-time Pro Bowler Donovan McNabb was replaced by Rex Grossman during the final 1:50 of a close game against the Detroit Lions earlier this month because Redskins coach Mike Shanahan claimed Grossman was better suited to run the team's two-minute offense. Shanahan questioned McNabb's "cardiovascular endurance."

• And on Sunday, Titans coach Jeff Fisher demoted Vince Young to benchwarmer after Young threw a tantrum following Tennessee's 19-16 loss to Washington. Although thumb surgery is the official reason Young's season is over, Fisher made it clear before he knew the severity of Young's injury that his 27-year-old quarterback was being removed as the starter.

In 2007, McNabb told HBO's "Real Sports" that black quarterbacks in the NFL face more pressure and tougher criticism than white quarterbacks do. The responses were predictable.

Racism is not an issue in the NFL.

Stop pulling the race card.

Quit whining....

The first time Campbell was benched this season was during halftime of the second game of the season.
The impatience the Raiders have shown with Campbell is stunning. They gave up a fourth-round pick to get him, and were convinced he was the answer after things went south with draft bust JaMarcus Russell, another black quarterback.

Campbell will start on Sunday against Miami, but it's baffling that he's still fighting with Bruce Gradkowski -- whose career record as a starter is 5-11 -- for the No. 1 job.

I know race doesn't completely explain the Raiders' treatment of Campbell or why he didn't work out for the Redskins. But Campbell's shortcomings are rarely clarified with the same perspective as some white quarterbacks. 

You hear about his 25-35 record as a starter, but you don't hear that he's played for a different offensive coordinator in every season since the Redskins drafted him in the first round in 2005. 

Most African-Americans are familiar with the notion that we have to be twice as good just to be considered equal with whites. And considering that there are only six black starting quarterbacks in the NFL, there isn't a lot of room for error.

 The NFL is 70 percent Black - check here for actual stats -  with white players stacked at certain positions (quarterback, offensive line and tight end primarily). The great hope has been that Michael Vick would become the new prototype for the NFL quarterback (a run first/ pass second QB), but his run-in with the law momentarily stopped this from transpiring.

Jason Campbell's inability to learn an offense over six seasons is laughable, when contrasted with  rookie QBs like Sam Bradford and Colt McCoy having learned complex offenses in but a few months. We'll just say one word: Wonderlic. Strange, Toby Gerhart did so well on it?

That word helps put into focus Vince Young's continued personality breakdowns and highlights Michael Vick's consternation over cake in the face.

A lot of you reading this article don't care about sports, but sports are the reason the United States is in the situation we currently face. The origins can be found in 1969 when white coaches found recalcitrant Black players forming coalitions to challenge their dogmatic rule.

1969: man walked on the moon and back on earth white America bought into Black demands on the collegiate football fields across the nation.

Players of the moral quality of Michael Vick, Antonio Cromartie and Ray Lewis are the result of this capitulation.

There's a reason Tim Tebow was so hated after all.

So what have we learned? Simply this: 1969 is the year future Chinese historians will look upon with bemusement, as the moment that white America tapped out to the notion of Black Run America (BRA).

Sports are the key to understanding the current predicament of America, as it also helps put into the focus why South Africa is now on the verge of collapse (hint: white South Africans wanted to play international rugby again).

The NFL might go on strike in 2011, but that won't change anything. The damage of the events of 1969 has been done and there is no going back now.

Just sit back and enjoy the exploits of Michael Vick and other Black players in the NFL and college football. Never mind the off-field problems that originate with these talents and just stay mesmerized by the on-field accomplishments.

We're reminded of the end of Revenge of the Nerds, when an all-Black fraternity comes to the aid of the nerds in intimidating the all-white fraternity/football team. Instead of backing down, sometimes a simple display of courage is enough to win.

Never forget that.