Our Neronian Super Bowl. Part Two Victor Davis Hanson
https://victorhanson.com/our-neronian-super-bowl-part-two/
The game itself was well-played and exciting. But the entire spectacle is heading into a strange and ultimately suicidal territory. Before the National Anthem, there was sung and observed the “Black” national anthem of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” It is a wonderful song, but no substitution for our common, shared National Anthem, if such a thing even still exists in the era of a fragmenting America.
The country is supposedly “one people” with one anthem. There are now as many “Latinos” as there are blacks. So why not a Latino national anthem? Ditto Asians. But is it fair to have just one ethnic anthem and not others? What will be the criteria of segregated anthems?
How strange: If in 1960 Bull Connor had dictated to blacks (and who knows, he may have?), “you sing your own ‘separate but equal’ anthem before the nation’s National Anthem,” he would have been dubbed a racist up north and a segregationist down south. So have we come full circle?
Are we following the universities, those beacons of enlightenment and morality, which boast of multiple graduations, all predicated on race or gender? We could devote 30 minutes of pregame time to various chauvinistic anthems, or simply junk the game altogether and sing dozens of anthems ad nauseam?
The NFL bragged that its Super Bowl won 112 million viewers. But that number still counts as a million short from last year, and one million fewer than 2015, when there were about 15 million fewer Americans than now.
True, the NFL has recovered from its dismal Covid/Kaepernick years. But it seems bent to follow the descending trajectory of the NBA. Last year’s final NBA championship game earned a mere 14 million viewers. That was up from the 8.5 million catastrophe of 2020—but far below the 35 million in 1998. How, a quarter-century ago, could there have been 65 million fewer Americans and yet over 20 million more viewers! Where over the last 25 years did those 20 million viewers go?
I am also confused about the entire conundrum of the NFL and “diversity.”
Blacks compose almost 60-70% of the players, depending how one counts “Black” and what particular span of years one uses to quantify the numbers. They make up about 13 percent of the population (I don’t know how the Left calculates these percentages other than using their own old-Confederate, one-drop rule that makes one with any percentage of black ancestry “black” [cf. the old 1/16th inherited from the antebellum South]).
Whites make up close to 70 percent of the population (and in our topsy turvy world anyone not 100 percent white, at least if part Latino, Asian, or Black, is not counted as white), but only about 24 percent of NFL players.
So here is the paradox:
1) The NFL is entirely meritocratic, as it should be. A preponderance of black players gravitate to the sport in a manner they do to boxing or basketball but commensurately not so to tennis, golf, hockey, or water polo. We are told culture determines this self-selection and thus explains why particular groups favor particular sports. (Did racism preclude Asians from playing basketball in America?—given they certainly do in China and Japan?)
But whereas there is no movement to make the NFL “look like America” (we need more Asian, Latino, and white players?), there are certainly efforts to “diversify” hockey and the other sports mentioned above. Why? No one can or perhaps dares answer.
2) We are told that the NFL is racist because while 60-70 percent of the players are black (“overrepresented”), only 9 percent are coaches (“underrepresented”). Is that number vastly unfair, given the overrepresentation of black players—or roughly fair given blacks are 13 percent of the population? Demographically wise, is it fair that other groups are underrepresented as players, but unfair that blacks are not overrepresented as coaches?
3) Why in terms of hiring faculty, or pilots or aircraft controllers, is it racist if blacks are underrepresented demographically, but not racist if they are overrepresented in the NFL? Why are the military, the FAA, and legions of universities either jettisoning standardized tests and traditional resumes or lowering standards for diversity to ensure similarly desired diversity, and yet the NFL has no such diversity programs? (Note most Americans don’t care about race; but object when those who obsess over it, do not apply their fixations symmetrically and uniformly.)
Is merit more important in football than in air-traffic controlling or physics instruction? Could not white running back applicants have deducted .5 seconds in hundred-meter dash trials? Could not Asians in cases of instant replays be given the benefit of the doubt on controversial plays? Could not Latinos be allowed extra equipment to roughly achieve parity with black linemen?
Or is the NFL disequilibrium seen as reparatory: to make up for exclusion 70 years ago, today that should be overrepresentation? Or it is truly meritocratic, and no one cares what race a player is as long as he achieved his spot through meritocratic criteria?
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