By David Futrelle
Caste Football is an online forum devoted to the premise that white athletes (sorry, White athletes) are terribly discriminated against in professional sports. According to the site’s posting guidelines:
The purpose of Caste Football is to root for White athletes and to see that they receive their due in American society and that they participate in athletic endeavors on a level playing field. We reject the institutionalized discrimination that exists against White athletes in sports, and the belittling and negative stereotyping of White athletes that exists in the media.
In other words, it’s a site filled with white guys who are terrified that black athletes are cuckolding white men in general and them in particular by simply existing and being good at sports. And I’m not jumping to any rash conclusions about their sexual insecurities here. Sometimes Caste Football commenters basically come out and say it.
Consider, for example, the weird worries of one forum regular called Shadowlight. The prolific Caste Football contributor, with more than 2000 comments to his name, apparently finds himself “in such a bleak mood I can’t even breath [sic] properly. I am currently lost in a fog of darkness don’t even ask.”
There’s no need to ask, as Shadowlight is eager to tell us.
The media is very good at playing the sadomasochistic /sadist game where white athletes are pummeled to death and black athletes are elevated into a spiritual realm. The breathless talk about Lamar Jackson today is outright pagan worship.
I’m not sure Shadowlight really understands what pagan worship looks like.
It seems to me there has been a major push for years to turn white athletes into a lesser species.
A lesser species? Oh dear. It’s only going to get weirder from here, isn’t it? (SPOILER: It does.)
Forget the strength factor. That is a 12th century concept that has little bearing on the modern world. Modernity is based on speed and the media is making the average Joe believe that this is only a black domain.
I would ask how exactly Shadowlight thinks the media doing this, but he doesn’t seem very big on providing evidence for his weird claims.
Imagine a future NFL where there really aren’t white wide receivers ( perhaps a few back up types) and maybe say 12 white defensive starters spread throughout the entire league and a few white QBs and TEs. Most white players will be willing white OL and kicker/punters.
The horror!
What do we end up with? A third sex and we are 3/4 of the way there as I post this.
A third what now?
White men will be relegated to a third sex which is pitched between women and black men. Black men will embody the masculine man with all the attendant glory that will afford. White men will be seen ( again we are close now to this in the public sphere) as little booty inferior boys that can’t compete with what society deems as real men and heroes ala black athletes.
“Little Booty Inferior Boys” is the name of my Little Feat tribute band.
Shadowlight’s brand of racist paranoia is hardly new; it’s just a slightly modified version of the “black brute” theories that have filled the overactive imaginations of sexually insecure white racists for centuries (and which I wrote about in some detail here).
As Matthew Hudson pointed out in an essay on Slate, white people viewing blacks as somehow “superhuman” isn’t really a compliment. In one study Hudson discusses, whites were more likely to attribute certain superhuman physical traits — like imperviousness to pain and hunger — to blacks than to whites. Whites also tend to see black men as tougher and more athletic than whites. Meanwhile, the popularity of racialized cuckold porn suggests that the old racist stereotype of black men as exceptionally virile hasn’t gone away either.
The flip side of all this is that many whites tend to think of black people as less intelligent as well — viewing them not so much as superhuman as more animalistic than whites. Indeed, when black people began to enter professional sports in a big way, Hudson quotes sociologist Matthew Hughey as saying,
commentators began to emphasize white cognitive superiority in contrast to the supposedly savage and unbridled physical superiority of blacks. Accordingly, a popular culture narrative of ‘black brawn’ versus ‘white brains’ emerged.
This is how white men with inferiority complexes and deep sexual insecurities manage to turn even their own self-doubts into support for white supremacy. Shadowlight’s exercise in self-flagellation isn’t just weird and a little cringeworthy; it’s a symptom of a deep and ugly racism that, unfortunately, isn’t confined to the virtual pages of the Caste Football forums.
H/T to the Blue Pill subreddit for pointing me to Shadowlight’s comment and r/GamerGhazi, which linked to Hudson’s essay.
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Wait, so if they think white men are becoming a third sex, does that mean they’re finally starting to see gender as more than a binary? I’m almost certain not, but I can dream.
This harkens back to slavery, when slave owners often justified their behavior with claims that black people were stronger and didn’t feel pain the same way as white people. It was also believed by J. Marion Sims, whose early gynecological experiments were on black women without anesthesia because he believed back women did not feel pain like white women.
I’ve never really understood why people get so excited about sports, but this “Caste Football” site is a weird manifestation of sexual insecurity indeed. The thing that really gets me about these kinds of things is how self-defeating white supremacist ideology is. It’s saying “we’re the master race, but these other races are better than us at things, so we need to set them back.” If you believe your race isn’t as good at something and is in danger of being replaced, maybe, just maybe, you’re not the “master race” and this whole thing is BS?
The problem Shadowlight and his ilk run into is that they want athletic prowess to be a sign of superiority when comparing men to women, but a sign of inferiority when comparing blacks to whites. The resulting cognitive dissonance is one of the great self-owns of race/gender politics.
Just off the top of my head, two of the most famous athletes, at least in the US are Tom Brady and Michael Phelps. They’re definitely white.
He’s also forgetting successful Asian athletes and I’m not sure I want to know what this guy would make of fact that the 2019 men’s world figure skating championships podium was all Asian.
I’m pretty sure it’s just this guy’s making him think that only black male athletes are loved.
I guess female athletes just don’t exist?
@WWTH
I have the feeling he’d say that figure skating isn’t a “real” sport or isn’t “manly” enough so it doesn’t affect him. White supremacists generally don’t seem to hate Asians as much as black people or other non white groups anyway.
He probably sees them as existing, but doesn’t care and/or thinks that they’re inferior to male athletes in every way. As Karalora mentioned above, it’s a bit of a contradiction that to them, black athletes outperforming white athletes makes black people inferior but men outperforming women makes men superior.
…This is not the non-binary representation I ordered.
James Marion Sims, often referred to as the “father of modern gynecology,” in the 1840s did perform a series of experimental surgeries on African-American slave women without anesthesia to develop a technique to repair vesicovaginal fistulas; this fistula is a tear between the uterus and bladder, often caused by prolonged childbirth. It is painful and dangerous condition that results in the constant dripping of urine through the vagina. There are issues regarding Sims’ failure to use anesthesia (ether and chloroform were just being introduced into surgical techniques at the time), the fact that some of these women endured multiple operations, and that, being slaves, they could not properly consent to such experiments. However, throughout his medical career Sims continued to experiment on women, both black and white; he was so obsessed with and jealous of his legacy that he ignored medical ethics, would diagnose new maladies in his female patients, and then develop invasive surgical techniques to cure them. When a female patient reported dread regarding her husband touching her genitals, Sims named the condition vaginismus and claimed that it could be cured by cutting deep incisions in the vagina and inserting rods of metal or glass to enlarge it. He asserted that the narrow neck of the cervix resulted in infertility and painful menstruation and would use a multibladed tool to enlarge the cervical opening. He is known to have perform clitoridectomies and removed healthy ovaries from women to treat conditions such as diarrhea and epilepsy. Although Sims claimed a spectacular success rate, he also mutilated or killed many of his patients, leaving some severely scarred and in pain. So while Sims may have begun his career unethically experimenting on slave women, he treated women as a whole as guinea pigs in his obsession to obtain medical fame. https://harpers.org/archive/2017/11/monumental-error/?fbclid=IwAR0GFm8guX7d5ZcK1sHdcOQ_-vO1M9lEKSCGTNa6fMJS-J2q9JHJ-oNEDqE
Fun fact: the white man in that photo with Tommie Smith and John Carlos was an Australian runner named Peter Norman. All three men are wearing the badge of the Olympic Project for Human Rights in the photo. Apparently, Norman found out that Smith and Carlos were planning to wear badges and raise their fists on the podium, and asked if he could wear a badge too, in solidarity. The three became lifelong friends.
I question the math here. Haven’t we been at least 2/3rds of the way there since the beginning of human history? Surely if it’s taken us six thousand years to get only 1/12th of the way further toward a third sex this dipshit has no immediate cause for alarm, right?
/snark
On a more serious note, it’s not like this “emerged” when previously white professional sports franchises started hiring Black employees. White had been talking this way since at least the 1600s. (Probably earlier, but I don’t know about how this trope was used before the late 1600s so I won’t claim anything before that.)
I assume from Shadowlight’s sports terminology that he was referring to the rugby variant (that’s what it is, I checked) known as American football.
As a bonus, house point for naming the source of the following quote:
‘In a country which sets such store by male virility, I’ve never understood why chaps put on thirty pounds of armour just to play rugby.’
Probably slighty scrambled as I encountered the quote a while back.
I wonder what would be the taxonomy for such a specie… album athletarum ?
Somehow I feel like the villains of ‘Get Out’ would be member of this forum. Probably a lot more articulate, but still.
@Naglfar
Interesting how these kind of folk always push that kind of self contradictory chestnut of psudorational bunk.
Looking at baseball, most of the ‘minority’ players are from Central America and the Spanish Caribbean; the issue that has been raised is the shortage of black players.
In basketball, most of the players are black; the white players are mostly European. This is not because there is a shortage of tall white American boys, it’s because black players, rightly or wrongly, think that they have a better chance at getting rich that way- like poor people buying lottery tickets, it may be the only way.
Same for football players- both American and the other kind (in Europe).
So, is it another species or another sex? Those are very different things. Then again, I’ve seen internet misogynists claim that women are a different race than men numerous times, so this little error doesn’t surprise me.
@RoyBoy
He definitely did some awful things to women. I wasn’t defending him, I was merely describing one of the awful things he did that was relevant to this article.
@ Kevin – Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. First or second season, because he’s talking to Jenny Calendar.
The way he talks about white men supposedly being ‘between’ women and black men kind of showcases the fact that he sees women as inferior to men—not that we really needed confirmation of that.
Crip Dyke: IIRC the Chanson de Roland has a fair bit of dehumanizing of the Moors as mindless brutes with dark skin. So that’s 11th century racism in the same style.
Pretty sure I read similar stuff in either Herodotus or Thucydides, but it’s been too long.
Every time I encounter this in the wild, I just substitute “fairies” for “black men” because before white people had people of color to project all their insecurities onto, they invented magical creatures for that purpose.
For example, fairy ladies are well known for their great sexual prowess and the leading astray of mortal men. Fairy gents seduce mortal ladies like all the time in stories. Fairies are just supernaturally endowed with all kinds of advantages, but at the same time they don’t think as human beings do, they follow their own weird fairy logic, and they have no soul, and are otherwise deficient, and their attractiveness is probably all just fairy glamour anyways, why yes these human grapes are sour.
Fairy is historical shorthand for foreigner/other. Gay people are “fairies” now. But give it a bit, it’ll get repurposed again and again. You can swap fairies in for almost any bigotry target with hilarious effect.
In fact, Amazon has made a whole TV series now using this trope.
@dashapants
It can’t be weirder than the logical tangles that white supremacists and misogynists build, can it?
And of course, the idea that black people are stronger, tougher, more resistant to pain, etc. than white people is the whole reason police have to shoot black 12-year-olds dead if they hesitate even a fraction of a second in dropping their toy guns.
All the years of tween and teenage years when I would walk through the woods to relax and slightly hope that some fairy prince would come and take me away. All of that just for me to become the Fairy myself. Oh how the tables have turned.
…incidentally, the NHL is currently dealing with a major racism issue of its own at the moment. Only the latest in a string of them over the years.
And just on the topic of racism, remember in the Mr. Rogers thread how I was reminiscing about shows I watched as a kid and I mentioned that Jeremy/Barnaby/Colargol show? Wellll… let’s just say that it gets a liiiittle racist when Jeremy/Barnaby/Colargol ventures outside of the woods. The arc where he goes around the world is basically every episode contains a different ethnic stereotype. Granted, kids are probably enjoying the madcap slapstick hi-jinks of the magic suitcase that turns into a plane or a car or a boat (or a tank at one point) but watching a whole Mexican village full of caricatures that would make the Frito Bandito blush mistake a hot-air balloon for an alien spacecraft was a little “Yikes!” to say the least.
How TVO greenlit the show to be broadcast on public television is a bit beyond me. I get that France and Poland of the late 60s-early 70s probably were not the most racially enlightened places on earth, but Ontario? Little disappointing.
Maybe the rights were cheap. *shrug* The bear was certainly adorable. Apparently there’s a statue of him in Lodz:
Now, I just realized I’ve been familiar with the kitchen detergent brand “Fairy” for longer than I’ve spoken English, and never thought about its literal meaning in English context. And both my grandmas lived to 88 without ever knowing or caring what it might mean, other than a highly popular brand of dish soap, essentially synonymous with “dish soap”.
@ lumipuna
As a matter of IP law; Fairy Liquid is a generic trademark.
That’s where a brand becomes, as you point out, synonymous with a general item. Like Kleenex, Aspirin, Dumpster etc.
Nerd Mode: Off
@dashapants I always think of the fae being invented to explain the capriciousness of life and turning favour of nature, and respect for these things. Like, “put milk out for the helpful brownie or he will fuck your shit up in weird and seemingly very unfair ways”. Or “keep your eyes on the kids or something from the forest will nick them”