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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@LollyPop
When did the fairies become Paul Elam?
@galanx
Do you have any evidence to back up this claim? I would be surprised if the demographics of professional sports could be explained by just one thing. It seems a bit reductive to me.
@ Malice W Sunderland:
I have a favorite T-shirt which has that pic of Carlos and Smith, but Gordon is replaced with Colin Kaepernick…
The message is, after 50 years, we’re still having that same discussion… or, more accurately, we’re REFUSING to have that same discussion
Of course, when you get right down to it, there’s a really simple explanation for why minorities get involved in sports at high levels so much.
When you cut off most of the avenues of success, people will take the ones still available to them.
Hence the high percentage of minorities in sports and the military. And it’s been like this for generations, over different ideas of what constituted a minority. Back in the days when the Irish weren’t considered ‘white’, a lot of Irish got into professional boxing. Because that was a place that wasn’t closed off to them.
With regards to women’s sports, I just heard this on the news today, though it’s a couple of days old:
Pay equity comes to curling: Scotties and Brier winners to cash in same amount
Curling isn’t exactly a high-paying sport, but Curling Canada has officially announced that the men’s and women’s championships will receive equal amounts of money starting this year.
This is also the simplest explanation for the reviled “hypergamy” that is supposedly proof of women’s inherent wickedness and shallowness. When there is a centuries-long tradition of women being forbidden to amass wealth of their own, of course they’re going to aim to marry money…and even when the ban on women’s wealth is lifted, there’s a lot of what you might call “romance culture” still promoting the idea that a rich man is a desirable one.
@Viscaria
I decided to look this one up, and in the NBA, 74.4% of the players are black. The NFL is similar, with about 68% of its players being black.
It’s not a conspiracy. The story of people seeing sports as their way out of poverty is an old one. It was the plot of the movie All the Right Moves with Tom Cruise, and it was a major reason for the zealous push for “amateurism” in the 19th and early 20th centuries: the rich people who dominated sports back then felt that cash prizes would bring in the unwashed poor and somehow “cheapen” their favorite sports. Apparently, being in it for the money meant that you somehow weren’t in it for the love of the game. (In the UK, it was one of the big reasons for the split between rugby league and rugby union in 1895.) The guys at Caste Football are the modern-day version of the posh nobs of yesteryear, with added racism thrown in on top of the classism.
@ Kevin
(Puts down Bradford Northern mug)
Oh yeah; the ‘gentlemen versus players’ thing.
It’s all quite fascinating, and the formation of “the northern rugby league” is, as I’m sure you know, all tied up with the foundation of the Labour Party and the Cooperative movement.
But basically, when all games were amateur, you needed a private income to be able to spend enough time to get good at them.
Working class folks couldn’t just take time off for practice unless the clubs compensated them for their lost wages. Hence the birth of professional sport.
I didn’t doubt that black people were disproportionately represented in the NBA or NFL as compared to white people, nor were my googlin’ fingers too tired to check for myself if I really was skeptical. I don’t think there is any conspiracy, and I do think that it makes perfect sense that some young black men, being denied the opportunities available to their white counterparts, would pursue one of the very few avenues available to them.
I just thought Galanx’s comment put a neat little bow on a very big topic, and in the absence of any backing for that claim, I am skeptical that it is just that simple. For one thing, it doesn’t really explain sports that are overwhelmingly white, like hockey.
Like, obviously the extreme whiteness of hockey is a result of racism, but racism hasn’t kept basketball and American football super duper white, and I doubt it’s because there’s just no racism in those sports. So, like… why? I think these things are complicated.
I figure with some sports the lack of access to facilities for most African-Americans is a factor. You don’t find ice rinks in poorer/urban areas.
OT
I’ve decided on my next tattoo that’s for fun. I’m gonna get a black silhouette of a raven on my back. I know I’ve picked a painful place but really there is already one on my inner thigh so I’m pretty good with pain.
Hockey is super expensive, and time-intensive. You’ve got to start young, put in hours of practice time just to learn the basics of skating, stickhandling, and shooting, buy expensive padding/sticks/skates (that get outgrown quickly), be able to drop kids at practice during odd hours (hard to do with work schedules) and have the financial resources to travel to tournaments, stay in hotels, and pay exorbitant amounts of money to participate on a team. Where I live, it’s $800 a season just for the league fee.
If you look at a D1 college hockey roster, most of the players went to expensive prep schools or grew up playing junior hockey in Canada or Europe.
I suspect there’s a bit of white flight going on in sports among suburban parents. Around here, white kids get steered into sports like gymnastics, skiing, swimming, and club soccer, and away from sports where black athletes have been successful (football, track, basketball). I suspect it’s not a coincidence. Whenever a space opens up to blacks (and women) and they’re successful at it, whites devalue it and move on.
I’m just going to leave this here. (It’s about black people and hockey)
https://youtu.be/2pvrohqdI9U
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants
The same thing happened when I was growing up (a different location than where I live now, early 2000s). I never played sports, but I had friends that did. Even at young ages, white kids (the neighborhood where I lived at the time was very white, with only a couple families that weren’t white) were encouraged to play the sports you suggested. Sure, there were a few that went into football or basketball, but most were pressured by their parents into the more expensive and white dominated sports. The boys tended to do soccer and swim team, while the girls mostly did gymnastics and dance (including my sister, who did dance when she was younger and gymnastics when she was a bit older).
David Futrelle,
Well at least this Caste Football website claims to be “against discrimination.” How much you wanna bet through that a much larger than average percentage of the people there wouldn’t mind the return of Jim Crow?
re: why so many minority players in sportsball?
I’ll admit I don’t have papers, but…you know how in football (USA-style) at least, players tend to have a lot of concussions?
(Which actually ties into @Kevin ‘s comment about rugby and armor. In USA football, you get a lot of cumulative blunt-force trauma while still being able to move on the field, which adds up. With rugby, you know when you need to stop.)
And how in general, sports players tend to have a lot of injuries, due to working in a very direct physical capacity?
Yyyyyyyeah…
@Naglfar
Yeah, sports feed directly into college and class aspirations for white middle-class Americans. Some of it is bragging rights (for the parents), but also there’s the sense that being outstanding at the “right” sport will help with admission into the “right” college. Ivy League colleges tend to prize sports that rely more on finesse and specialized training than raw strength, the more arcane the better (crew, squash, fencing). Just another form of gatekeeping.
In my town, soccer in particular is something of a cult. If your child doesn’t join club soccer by age nine or so, they have no chance to make the varsity team in high school. The pay-to-play system discourages creativity and shuts out truly talented players who can’t afford it. We have a large population of Somali immigrants who play pickup soccer at the city fields every Sunday, and any one of those kids could run rings around the wealthy club kids. Club soccer doesn’t create world-class players, as evidenced by the American men’s team’s dismal World Cup performances. What it’s good at is breeding modestly talented players who then go on to become coaches and establish their own clubs. IOW, it’s a pyramid scheme. Instead of hoping for a college scholarship, the parents would be much better off taking the tens of thousands of dollars they spend on soccer expenses and just applying that directly to college tuition.
The parents I’ve talked to flat-out refuse to let their kids play football because of all the concerns about concussions and CTE. Football is now regarded more as a weekend television spectacle than as a sport that a white kid would play seriously (other than as a quarterback or punter). It’s just another way in which black bodies are sacrificed for entertainment.
OT: I am withdrawing an earlier endorsement I had posted here, months ago, of a mobile game, “Diggy’s Adventure”.
Recent updates to the game have rendered it quite unstable, and introduced a particularly nasty problem: the game will sometimes brick itself, i.e. put itself into a state where it won’t work even after exiting and restarting the app or even rebooting the mobile device. Once this happens, the game will hang during its splash screen startup and the only recourse is to email their support and wait for them to remotely do … something to get your copy working again.
And they take their sweet time doing so, typically several hours from initial email until you can get up and running again.
I have emailed them repeatedly asking them to instruct me on how to unfuck it on my own, and they never have answered such inquiries. Their only advice was to avoid leaving the game running in the background between sessions and instead exit it and restart it every time (despite it having one of the slowest startups of any mobile game). Following that advice proved worthless, as the game can still brick itself if you follow that advice: apparently you can exit it normally after a session of playing and it might mis-write its state to disk on exit and hang during startup the next time you go to play.
Not only is their preventative advice worthless, they have also taken no action to remedy the underlying bug that makes the thing brick itself, even though the update that introduced the bricking problem has now been in circulation for several days.
The new bug is striking my copy daily, with no way to fix it but email them and wait for them to remotely do whatever it is that they remotely do, and one assumes if I’m running into it every 24 hours now, that so are the other users, and they are being inundated 24/7 with requests from various users to unfuck their copies, so it’s no wonder it’s so slow for them to get around to unfucking any particular one.
You’d think they’d realize that telling people how to manually fix their own copies (how to get at their phone’s filesystem, what file to change, what changes to make) would reduce the backlog as at least the more tech-savvy portion of their user base would be able to workaround the bug when it hit them without adding to their email load, but noooo … You’d think they’d roll back the recent update that made it start scrogging its own disk files every 24 hours (and, seemingly, like clockwork — the last two incidents to affect my copy both happened right around 11:30 PM), but noooo.
Their support is terrible and their product, which was a bit unstable before, is now unusable for a sizable chunk out of every day because of the combination of new bugs and their support being terrible. Which is probably in a feedback loop, as their support email gets overwhelmed by requests to unfuck copies bitten by the bug and they end up too busy to unfuck copies in a timely fashion or find and fix the underlying bug.
In short, they’ve painted themselves into a corner and seem unwilling, or unable, to fix the problems they’ve created in their product. On that basis, I withdraw my previous endorsement. Stay away from “Diggy’s Adventure”. The current version of the product is unstable and buggy and often gets itself into a state that causes it to hang on next startup and that the user is unable to fix without remote assistance from their support, and their support is slow as molasses and as minimally helpful as possible, providing no information in their response emails that can be used either to avoid triggering the bug or to fix the consequences and get back into the game on one’s own.
If your idea of fantastic game mechanics is sitting around waiting for hours for tech support to discover that you’ve emailed them and respond, then this is the game for you. Otherwise …
@Naglfar Thinking about it Paul Elam does have something of the malevolent sprite about him, if in the most boring way possible.
Viscarla said:”I just thought Galanx’s comment put a neat little bow on a very big topic, and in the absence of any backing for that claim, I am skeptical that it is just that simple. For one thing, it doesn’t really explain sports that are overwhelmingly white, like hockey.”
Hockey is overwhelmingly white because it developed on the frozen ponds of Canada, a notably white country (and the northern states). Years ago it was disproportionately French-Canadian, a home-grown minority group. Most of the players were stereotypically from small towns where it was a choice of that or the farm, lumber mill, or logging camp. It spread in cold countries in Europe, largely among people of the same socioeconomic background. It was slightly different in the U.S. because it became a college sport.
Some explanations of the popularity of a sport are historical . Caribbean islands that were British colonies became centres of cricket. Former Spanish colonies identical in geography and climate play baseball . It’s not because Hispanics have any natural propensity for that sport. It’s just because they came under U.S. influence, and that popularised it.
@CriticalDragon1177
Well, that’s an interesting choice of words for them to use. I’m guessing they mean they’re opposed to (imaginary) discrimination against white people.
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants
For some of these there could be an ulterior motive *cough* admissions scandal *cough*.
Another popular sport among white kids that I forgot to mention is martial arts. I took karate for a couple years as a kid, and I think parents do it for a couple reasons:
1. They think it will help their child with self defense even if their children are not well trained.
2. There were a lot of McDojos with false advertising
3. Like you said, it requires specialized training in some way.
@LollyPop
I see what you mean. It’s just that when I picture fairies I think of small, delicate woodland creatures, not violent and angry 6’8” men. His image rather contrasts with that of a fairy or sprite.
@Naglfar Ogres and trolls are of the faerie-folk too.
I’m quite fascinated by that idea that we, humans, are Fae to the animals.
I was going to type out what I meant; but someone has already done that here…
https://philosopherking1887.music.blog/tag/humans-are-fae-to-animals/
Aww, the Colargol statue didn’t show. Here’s another try:
Wiki should work. I love that he has the magic suitcase with him.
@Karalora
Fair enough. I wasn’t really thinking of them at the time. Though there are no shortage of the latter on the Internet.
@Katamount
Is Colargol the same as Jeremy the Bear? He looks familiar.
O/T, but how’s guitar coming? Out of curiosity, which style of music are you learning to play? I might be able to steer you towards some useful resources.
@galanx, I am not trying to pick on you, but, with respect, my objection was not that you were incapable of thinking of plausible reasons for the whiteness of hockey. My objection was that you initially offered what seemed to me to be a very pat explanation for why racial demographics are the way they are in sports and you did so without any kind of support.
I also brought up some data that did not fit with your initial explanation, which maybe I’ll call X. Your response to that was that my data could be explained by Y. If that’s true, then the overall picture of why sports demographics are like they are is at least X plus Y and more likely X plus Y plus a bunch of other things, which was my point in the first place. X plus Y is not the same as X.
Now, it’s possible that this all stems from a misunderstanding on my part. Perhaps you meant that one reason is X, and I read the only reason is X. If that is the case, I’m sorry for misinterpreting.