Unsportsmanlike Conduct. Jessica Luther
In December 2015, a black student at Florida State wrote a letter to the president of FSU, John Thrasher, after Thrasher’s State of the University address.[58] After a long, detailed list of issues of discrimination and racism at FSU and within the state of Florida more generally, the student wrote, “Acts of racism and intolerance are not, as you claim, ‘isolated acts’ at Florida State; they are the culmination and furtherance of ideals this university has perpetuated for decades.” All of this is probably what Travis Johnson meant when he said that Tallahassee is “still the Jim Crow South.”
As evidence of Meggs’s particular interest in football players, people often point to a 2003 interview he gave to the Sun-Sentinel where he said, “To whom much is given, much should be expected. Sometimes we ought to hold those folks to a little bit higher standard. Thousands of people would give their right arm to play for FSU or Notre Dame or Miami or Georgia, and when somebody messes up doing something stupid, it’s a shame.”[59] The idea that FSU football players are given much is questionable. There is also an implication in the phrase “hold to a higher standard” that the people Meggs is talking about should be brought down a peg. Those can be loaded words in a Southern town in northern Florida, especially when spoken by a white man about mainly black men.
Also, it is not just football players who maintain that race plays a role in how Meggs practices law. In February 2012, Leon County Commissioner Bill Proctor said Meggs “just beats the hell out of black folk day in and day out,” prosecuting them at higher rates. In a press release, Proctor wrote that Meggs “prosecutes black officials with great haste and fervor but is hesitant and indifferent to white public officials who commit crimes.”
Willie Meggs might be racist in how he practices law, as Proctor and Johnson say. He might not. In the end, it ultimately may not matter because Meggs, a white Southern man who is an agent of the state, practices law in a system that many feel is racist in whom it labels as criminal and how it punishes them.
III.
This country has a long history of tying blackness to criminality (and vice versa) in ways that have devastating effects in real life: “African Americans make up 13 percent of the general US population, yet they constitute 28 percent of all arrests, 40 percent of all inmates held in prisons and jails, and 42 percent of the population on death row.”[60] What this means is that we find it easier to talk about crime, especially crime as a problem within our larger society, when we have an African American in the role of perpetrator.
In 2014 I met up with Ben Carrington, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas who specializes in sports and race, at a swanky coffee shop in downtown Austin to talk to him about this. Carrington, a native Londoner with a smooth English accent and himself a former semipro footballer in Europe, told me that often “race is the trigger for society to express their moral outrage about another issue.” (In this case, sexual violence.) In fact, he said, when a crime is perpetrated by black people, that “helps to make us more angry because of what [the alleged perpetrators] look like.” Football, Carrington noted, because it employs so many black men and is so popular, reflects a skewed racialized image of violence back into our society. We care about football a lot, we pay attention to what the players do on and off the field, we critique their behavior on and off the field, and when black players are accused, charged, or convicted of criminal behavior, it slots nicely into our cultural imagination regarding black men.
Other experts echo Carrington’s concerns. In September 2014, while working on a piece about how the NFL was handling a slew of domestic violence accusations and charges against its players, all of whom happened to be black, I spoke to Mariame Kaba on the phone.[61] Based in Chicago, Kaba is an antiviolence organizer who founded the Chicago Taskforce on Violence Against Girls & Young Women. Her work is not about sports but rather about violence. She echoed Carrington’s points, telling me she’s “dubious to the reaction to [these cases] versus the reaction to white [players] who commit violence,” because when it is black men we are discussing, there are implications of these men being “inherently violent,” and that makes for an easy leap to saying “they should be locked up, we need to manage and control them.” This is particularly true when the crime is sexual assault.
I then called up Louis Moore, a professor of history at Grand Valley State University, to talk about a historical phenomenon that he called “black men as the natural rapist.” Moore told me, “If you just look up ‘negro’ and ‘lynched’ in any kind of history database, most of the time [the lynching was justified by] an accusation of rape never founded because there was no due process.” What this means, Moore said, is that in all discussions of rape culture in the US, no matter how far back you go in history, “race is always forefront of the conversation just because of the history of race and alleged rape in America.” A paucity of black men on many campuses feeds into an image that they are outliers in the community. People “think they are on campus for two reasons,” Moore said, “affirmative action or athletics. So there is this sense that they don’t belong, sense that they never belonged, and when the crime happens it becomes, ‘See, I told you so.’”
This is all heightened when we talk about black male athletes in particular. Carrington told me that he traces the outlier status of black athletes within sports, even when they are a numerical majority, to the history of integration of sports in this country. He says that black athletes—ever since Jack Johnson became the first black heavyweight champion in 1908—have been painted as “angry, rebellious, violent, uncontrollable.”
This is further troubled when talking about cases where a black athlete is reported to have raped a white woman. The lynchings that Moore mentioned were often justified under the racialized and paternalistic gendered scare tactic of saying that the women these angry, rebellious, violent, uncontrollable natural rapists attacked were white. That horrific part of US history and the ongoing racial disparities within the criminal justice system mean that accusations of black men sexually assaulting white women carry within them additional cultural baggage that has to, at the least, be acknowledged in these conversations. Fears about powerful black men being punished via false accusation are not irrational or dramatic; they are borne of actual experience.
In cases where people do not know the race of the accuser, it’s often assumed that it is a white woman. (This narrative, it should be noted, erases and ignores black female victims, which is an ongoing issue within these conversations as well as in victim-centered antiviolence campaigns.)
Lisa Lindquist Dorr studied the history of the myth of black men raping white women in White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900–1960.[62] This narrative enforced, Dorr argues, a racist and sexist system of power by reifying “white women’s subordination to white men and the social, economic, and political power of whites over blacks.” In the complicated gendered and racialized postslavery South, white men were in control of everyone else; the appearance of protecting white women from black men helped cement that reality.
The system of power that gave that myth force is still with us. In June 2015, after Dylann Storm Roof reportedly said, “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go,” before murdering nine black people in a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, Jamelle Bouie wrote succinctly, “Make any list of anti-black terrorism in the United States, and you’ll also have a list of attacks justified by the specter of black rape.”[63] From Emmett Till to the Central Park Five, the history of young black men wrongly accused or convicted of harassing or raping white women is ever-present. Till was just fourteen in 1955 when a group of white men in Money, Mississippi, brutally mutilated him before killing him, supposedly because he spoke with a white woman and maybe whistled at her. Decades later, the Central Park Five were four young black men and one young Latino who were arrested and charged with the rape and assault of a white female jogger in Central Park in 1989. After coercive interrogations by the police, they each confessed to some part of the crime and were convicted and sent to jail. Just over a decade later, another man confessed to the crime and DNA evidence supported his account. The convictions for the five were vacated in 2002, though each had already served his sentence.
A 2012 study by Samuel Gross and Michael Shaffer from the University of Michigan School of Law looked