White Fans/Black Athletes

Via Matthew

Caste Football.us (CF) is one of the best kept secrets on the Internet. The website is certainly not the only one dedicated to race and sports. But it is the only one sympathetic to White athletes who, they maintain, are systematically discriminated against in the U.S. due to notions of Black athletic supremacy. The site often documents these cases of naïve White kids being passed over for scholarships year-after-year, most likely because it assumed they can't play running back, corner back, and other glory positions reserved for Black athletes.

CF actually tires to help young White athletes is to let them know which schools will and will not consider Whites for key positions. They do this through pre-season rankings of all 120 Football Bowl System (FBS) football programs.

One thing is clear from the 2011 rankings: Whites (and indeed all non-Blacks) should abandon any hope of playing in the Southeastern Conference (SEC). Indeed, the SEC is worse than the almost 70 percent Black NFL when it comes to allowing non-Blacks to start.

This is important for a number of reasons, not least of which is that that the SEC has been the marquee confence in college football for the last decade. SEC teams are featured in the most prominent games and the most high profile (and lucrative) bowl games. Success in the SEC often translates into a ticket to the NFL.

But it also is important from a cultural point of view. This Black dominance is happening in the region of the country most closely identified with White consciousness. Indeed, the SEC was the last conference in college sports to integrate and even had all-White football teams into the 1970s. Whites in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina and so on vote as a racial block, send their kids to segregated schools, live in segregated neighborhoods, join segregated churches, fraternities and country clubs, marry other Whites and still honor their ancestors who died during the Civil War. The overwhelming majority supports the Confederate flag and has no time for the racist hucksters of the NAACP.

Yet almost all the donors, fundraisers, boosters, ticket buyers, and, a strong majority of the fans, of the SEC schools are White.

So what does this phenomenon—White fans, Black players—say about White Southerners?

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