White math and the NFL By Peter Burrows elburropete@gmail.com 2/21/22
My wife and I stopped watching professional football when they began playing a "black" national anthem before the games. That didn't last long. Having spent many years in Wisconsin, we both suffer from Packerism, which is incurable, and we were soon watching the games again.
I'm glad we did. The playoffs were terrific and an added bonus was seeing all those Covid-conscious fans wearing one or even two Fauci mandated masks. (Sarcasm, libs, sarcasm.) Also, the NFL is proof that all the rhetoric about "white privilege" and "systemic racism" against black Americans is just nonsense.
I'm excluding the systemic reverse racism inherent in programs such as affirmative action and, especially, the dumbing down of academics so that more black kids can get "passing" grades. All the kids, black and white, know just what that means, and if that would have been tried in my high school, the black kids would have kicked your honkey ass. Of course, back then I don't think 'honkey' was a word. It would have been your "white trash" ass that would have been kicked.
Unfortunately, the current dumbing down efforts, e.g., teaching that the correct answer to a math problem is a "white" thing, are misguided attempts to address a real problem, one that didn't exist when I graduated from high school in 1957. Back then, the black kids did just as well, on average, as the white kids. Now they don't. What has changed?
The black intellectuals I respect, e.g., Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Star Parker and others, lay much of the lame on the welfare programs that started in the mid 1960s, which led to the destruction of the two-parent black family. The rise of the single parent, teen-mom 'family' was NOT a good way to raise a child, and many of those children did poorly in school.
I would add that affirmative action also set up black kids who DIDN'T do poorly in secondary school to fail in colleges. When Thomas Sowell taught at Cornell back in the late 1960s, he saw black kids in his class who scored, on average, at the 75th percentile of SAT scores vs. Cornell's white kids who averaged in the 99th percentile. The 75th percentile, by the way, is pretty damn good, way above the median score (50th.) Still, most of those black kids flunked out, and many were embittered, blamed racism etc. And they were RIGHT to blame racism, only it was reverse racism that did them in!
This happened all over America as the elite schools sought to fill self-imposed quotas of black students, often at the expense of qualified Asian students. Most of those black kids didn't have a chance. They paid the price for white liberal virtue signaling. Most of them would have done very well with white kids like me at Michigan State. (Harvard, Yale, Duke, Princeton, Cornell, MIT etc., and ME? You've got to be kidding.)
One of the tragic consequences of this reverse racism was the resegregation of college campuses, a resegregation imposed by the BLACK students. What an irony. When I went to MSU, black kids didn't sit by themselves, nor was there a separate black graduation ceremony or any other such BS. Affirmative action changed all that. (At the end of this article, I've appended an excerpt from a Thomas Sowell interview back in 1990 in which he describes this phenomenon. It's a good read.)
The tragedy of the welfare system soon corrupted the high schools. As more and more black kids found that they couldn't compete academically, those that COULD compete found themselves under peer pressure NOT to compete, which was denigrated as "acting white." Of course, acting white by doing homework, etc., would make the struggling black kids look even worse. What a mess.
A key part of this understandable defense mechanism was the flip side of "acting white," which was acting black, aka being a "bad ass MF"er." This added to the mess. Glen Loury and John Mcwhorter talk about this in a 10 minute You Tube video I've linked at the end.
About now, some of you are thinking, "OK, Burro, this is all very boring, but what does it have to do with the NFL?" Elementary, my dear Lombardi: To excel in the NFL you can't just be a big, tough bad ass MFer, you have to be able to THINK. NFL playbooks, for both defense and offense, are complex and require hours of study.
It's sort of a chess match, the quarterback and/or the offensive staff call plays that vary with the circumstances, e.g., score, time on the clock, etc., etc. Ditto the defense. It's fun to watch as offense and defense dance around each other. Having knowledgeable announcers in the booth helps.
On more than one occasion, I have watched games where every player on the defense was a black player. The opposing quarterback, who is sometimes also black, looks them over and tries to outsmart them; sometimes he does, and sometimes they outsmart him. Hours of preparation and study are being put to test, and mental screwups are going to be noticed, especially by the players themselves.
Now here's my question: If black players were, on average, dumber than white players, don't you think we would know about that after 60+ years of professional football? Of course we would, and we wouldn't be hearing about it from the white players. It would be the black players who would be weeding out the blacks who couldn't hack it. I can hear it now: "Learn the playbook, n-----, or get out of my locker room."
These guys want to WIN. No room for kiss-ass racism in a meritocracy. The black football player must meet the high expectations and standards of both his coaches and his peers. Many blacks would also do well if they were in secondary schools with the same sort of high ACADEMIC expectations.
Here's where school choice would be a big help. Many parents want to send their children to that sort of school, which is rarely the public school. Ironically, the traditional opposition to school choice from liberals may change in the face of growing parental opposition to gender studies and critical race theory.
Parents who want their kids to learn about gender fluidity, CRT, or any other topics that are (hopefully) being removed from public schools, should have the option to send their kids to private schools. So, too, should parents who have learned from the covid school closings that their kids can get a better education with home schooling.
Last year, 22 states expanded or established school choice initiatives such as vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, and education savings accounts. Very few Democrats supported those efforts. Wouldn't it be ironic if the woke crowd began to push for vouchers? Stranger things have happened. Stay tuned.
Sources:
Playbook complexity/necessity: https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2076186-welcome-to-the-nflheres-your-first-playbook
Sowell at Cornell: https://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/moneymag_archive/1990/09/10/86090/index.htm
Bad ass MFers: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOKiKZeYZbU
Two blogs from El Burro: www,silvercityburro.com/2021/03/27/white-math-and-black-math/ silvercityburro.com/2021/03/30/thoughts-on-white-math-and-other-absurdities/
https://thepostmillennial.com/californias-new-educational-guidelines-say-math-is-racist
https://www.currentargus.com/story/news/education/2021/07/22/what-black-education-act/7916007002/
Thomas Sowell, from a 1990 interview, Money Magazine, URL above: Sowell at Cornell.
Sowell: Racial relations on the nation's campuses today are worse than they have been at any time in the past 30 years.
MONEY: What do you think accounts for that?
Sowell: If you're going to have double standards for admission, grading, behavior and faculty hiring and, on top of that, engage in a great hypocritical pretense that this isn't going on, it will only be a matter of time before the people who are not getting special treatment become resentful. Moreover, when you bring minority students in under a double standard, they themselves have a serious problem. They can accept the standards of the institution and lose all self-respect when they fail to meet them. Or they can seek to regain their self-respect through political activity -- by putting pressure on the school administration to change the standards. When you give people those choices -- meeting tough standards or lobbying to have the standards lowered -- it's not surprising they choose the second option. When you have the racial polarization created by this political uproar, blacks and whites are likely to be more hostile.
MONEY: How do you detect racial tension on campus before you enroll?
Sowell: In places where race relations are really bad, it doesn't take long to find out. A campus visit will tell you. I always suggest you go to the dining room at lunchtime and see whether all the blacks are congregated over here, all the Hispanics over there or whether people are mixed around the room. ###
Addendum: Here in New Mexico, it was only last year that our lawmakers finally got around to making sure our black kids would also suffer from being helped by liberal educators. The Black Education Act was unanimously passed by the NM Legislature in March of 2021 and went into effect last July 1. One of the bill's sponsors said the act will, among other things, "recommend methods and practices that will improve education outcomes for Black students."
Why single out black students? Won't that be terribly humiliating for the black kids? Do you think the recommended "methods and practices" will entail extra homework, after hours or weekend tutoring, getting parents to turn off the TV, and maybe special summer classes, or will standards just be lowered?