Until about twenty years ago, Jackson State University regularly produced more professional athletes every year than the rest of Mississippi combined. This sort of leveling-out is often attributed to the University of Mississippi removing “racially-divisive” symbols from their program, attracting more star black athletes, but again, the issue of black athletes vs white athletes comes up.
From the beginning, the NCAA supported racial segregation in sports. Starting in the thirties, this racial division in sports is why there is an SEC and a SWAC. Even today, the difference between the two is predominantly racial.
The most common justification for segregation in sports was that, having been bred to work in the fields over many generations, Blacks had a natural advantage in sports. This theory led to the creation of a “Great White Hope” fantasy. The last Great White Hope was Rocky Balboa.
Although I loved the characters and the performances in the first Rocky film, it didn’t escape my notice that this was essentially the fantasy of a Great White Hope being played out on the screen.
On the occasion of Martin Luther King’s birthday in 1988, Jimmy the Greek (who worked for CBS) was asked by an NBC reporter what he thought about the success of black athletes. Real name Jimmy Snyder said
“ The black is a better athlete to begin with, because he's been bred to be that way. Because of his high thighs and big thighs that goes up into his back. And they can jump higher and run faster because of their bigger thighs. And he's bred to be the better athlete because this goes back all the way to the Civil War, when, during the slave trading, the big, the owner, the slave owner would breed his big black to his big woman so that he could have uh big black kid, see. That's where it all started!”
In the uproar that followed, Snyder lost his job at CBS and his entire credibility in the sports world. The question became, were black athletes “naturally superior” or did they work harder?
Twelve years older than me, Walter Payton was from Columbia, Mississippi. He preferred playing drums in the band. His brother was the standout in football. When Jefferson School merged with Columbia High School, on the order of Nixon's Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Payton went with them.
When his brother graduated, the coach at Columbia High School asked Payton if he would like to play football. Payton agreed, so long as he didn’t have to give up his position in the band. He became the top-scoring high school player in Mississippi.
Graduating in 1973, Payton didn’t receive a single bid to play at an SEC team in Mississippi. He did get one from Kansas State, but enrolled at Jackson State University to be near his mother. Considered small for a college athlete, Payton began a campaign to put on weight and score like crazy. He was remarkably successful at both.
We used to watch Payton train, running up and down the Pearl River Levee. I had not started taking steroids yet. Questions of whether or not black athletes had a “natural superiority” came up as we watched. He certainly seemed superior. I learned from my uncle, who lived in Colombia, that Payton’s mother still worked as a maid. Naturally superior or not, he had the motivation to work harder.
Arguments that success in sports was the only way out of the ghetto for some people rose to the forefront of the naturally superior black athlete argument. Columbia, Mississippi, wasn’t a ghetto, but he had motivations to get himself and his family out of there.
I was very unsure that Payton had a natural advantage, but he sure as hell worked harder. I saw it.
After graduating from Jackson State and starting his professional career, Payton put on even more weight. He was one hell of a man. Renting a tuxedo for a family wedding, the tuxedo rental guy said, “The only people I ever rent this suit to are you and Walter Payton.” I don’t know about Payton, but I was taking steroids like PEZ candy and self-injecting.
People are seriously annoyed with my position on trans athletes. “How the hell can you argue that they don’t have a natural advantage?” They shout. “Here we go again,” I whisper to myself. I’d rather not conflate transgender rights with black rights, but here we are again. Do they have a natural advantage, or do they work harder?
So far, of the nine transgender athletes in the NCAA, only one has excelled, and they tied for second. In the most talked-about case, Riley Gaines tied with a transgender athlete for fifth place. If transgender athletes do have a natural advantage, they must not work very hard, because they are not excelling.
People with different sexualities often struggle to convince themselves and others that they are good enough. That might be why transgender people, both male and female, are motivated to participate in sports. Sports have a way of leveling the playing field. In Mississippi, Walter Payton wasn’t deemed worthy of attending the University of Mississippi, Mississippi State, or the University of Southern Mississippi; however, with a great deal of hard work, he proved himself at Jackson State.
There’s a black high school woman in Mississippi who is breaking every record held by men in my sport when I was her age. Taylor Smith is somebody to watch, even if you have no interest in weight lifting. I hear all the time that her testosterone must be high or her estrogen must be low. I don’t know about all that. She looks pretty feminine to me.
I don’t have the power to control these issues, or even convince other people to see something different. What I can do is reflect on the past.
Anthropologist Stephen Jay Gould once wrote a book called “The Mismeasure of Man.” In it, he discusses how scientists through the ages have used inaccurate measurements of the human body to explain the difference in cultural behaviors based on race. Using rice to measure the capacity of the braincase in human skulls, scientists declared Africans had the smallest brains.
Gould, using some of the same skulls from the original study, demonstrated that most of the difference came from how tightly the scientist pressed in the grains of rice. More densely packed for whites, less densely packed for blacks. Pouring the rice back out to measure it, they found more rice fit in the white skulls than in the black ones, so they must have bigger brains. The tester’s prejudice tainted his findings.
When it comes to issues of natural advantage, I have to wonder how much of that is happening.
