There’s a “Two Americas” moment brewing in the NFL’s AFC Divisional playoff matchup Sunday (Jan. 19) between Lamar Jackson’s Baltimore Ravens and Josh Allen’s Buffalo Bills. And it starts with what should seem like no big deal on the surface: a Black quarterback versus a white quarterback.
There was a day when we were starved for Black quarterbacks in the NFL. We had Warren Moon, who was good but (despite what old Black men try to tell us) not generationally great. Doug Williams led Washington to the Super Bowl in 1988. He was even named Super Bowl XXII’s Most Valuable Player, but he got hurt and lost his starting job the next year. He never started another game for the rest of his career.
It was hard to break through as a Black man who played QB, but that’s not the case anymore.
The NFL has changed…kinda. Black head coaches are still in short supply (as Brian Flores’s lawsuit explains), but we have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to Black men who throw the football. Patrick Mahomes, Russell Wilson, C.J. Stroud, Jalen Hurt, and, perhaps most controversially, a dude who clearly goes to a barbershop with a “z” substituting for an “s” in its name and who is the QB for a team in one of the Blackest cities in America.
Lamar Jackson has been maligned by the sports media even as he’s been named the Most Valuable Player in the NFL in 2019 and 2023. But the man that many have said is a legitimately great QB is, unsurprisingly, Allen, a white man who plays for one of the whitest fan bases in the NFL.
Some have called him unstoppable. Others have said that the scheme the Bills are running is fooling the NFL. Then there is the ridiculous Colin Cowherd who called him the greatest QB of all time. You would probably be right if you thought that the effervescent praise of Allen has to do with him being one of the last genuinely good and consistent white quarterback in the NFL.
The truth is that the football media has always had a thing for QBs who lack melanin.
So what we have coming up this weekend is on par with Muhammad Ali versus Chuck Wepner in 1975, Gerry Cooney vs. Larry Holmes in 1982, Larry Bird versus Magic Johnson in 1985. In each of these matchups, race — and racism — led the conversation. Each man was there to win their respective matchup, but they were also saddled with fighting for the supremacy of their skinfolk. I shudder to think about the shitstorms they would’ve had to endure if the internet was a thing then.
Allen, the great white football hope in a sea of Black quarterbacks and Lamar Jackson, arguably, the most unapologetically Black QB in the game are going to face off this Sunday. (I know that Mahomes is great. But let’s be honest, he likes to associate with Trump-supporting white women, so he loses some points.)
This is a game that has the potential to show us that there are racial fault lines when it comes to sports fandom. Not everyone from Buffalo is white, but, without question, the Bills Mafia overwhelming use suntan lotion in the summer. (And don’t write to us saying that there are Black people in Buffalo. We’ve heard of Rick James and Benny the Butcher.)
When Black people root for a Black athletes and white folks root for white athletes, racism is not always at play. It could be happenstance. But when white folks root against a Black athlete, there is a 95.7 percent chance that racism is involved.