Cam Newton, Citizen
Claudia Rankine, Serena Williams, and Cam Newton getting hit
Watching the NFL’s season opener last Thursday— a Super Bowl rematch between the Broncos and Panthers — one couldn’t ignore the beating that Cam Newton was taking from the Broncos’ defense. At least three times, the Broncos targeted Newton’s head, and Newton twice lay on the ground in pain. The blame can be spread far and wide: the Broncos shouldn’t have played dirty; the Panthers could’ve pulled him out to get a concussion test; the NFL’s supposedly revamped concussion plan, which gives off the field spotters the ability to pull a player from a game at any time, was exposed as ineffective and toothless; and the referees penalized the Broncos for roughing the passer only once, on the last hit — a penalty that was negated by an intentional grounding penalty — and hypothetically could’ve stopped the hits with an earlier penalty call.
Plenty of smart people have already written about the failure of the NFL’s concussion policy, chalking it up to the league’s reluctance to pull a star player from an exciting game. The Panthers’ actions can be explained similarly — they wanted to win, and since Newton indicated he could keep playing, they kept him in the game. In the NFL, the moral option — the right choice for the player’s long term future — will always lose out to the competitive option. Similarly, The Broncos were playing dirty football, the kind of football that we are somewhat inured to but can still shock us, and got away with it, to their competitive advantage. But it’s the referees’ decisions that most interest me; the NFL is supposedly overprotective of its quarterbacks, the most marketable players they have, so it was bewildering to see one of the league’s biggest stars get hit so hard without seeing the attendant yellow flag that always seems to come with a hard hit on the quarterback. Anecdotally, the Tom Bradys and Drew Breeses of the NFL seem to get calls for lesser hits than what Newton faced on Thursday, and according to Business Insider, Carolina was the beneficiary of 0 roughing the passer calls during all of Newton’s 2015 MVP season, while the Drew Brees led Saints, for example, received 8. For last season and for Thursday night, the question is, why?
It has something to do with Newton’s mobility and his forays out of the pocket, his status as a big (Newton is 6'5'’), mobile, quarterback which, according to some strange NFL logic, allows defenders to hit him harder. That was the explanation that Newton’s coach, Ron Rivera, came to, alongside a number of talking heads — that Newton’s size and playing style create a double standard for officiating. Crucially, though, his treatment seems to have something to do with race; Newton is black, a relative anomaly among NFL quarterbacks (in Week 1, 6 of the 32 NFL starting quarterbacks in the league were black), and it is his blackness that informs this perception of him as big and ‘mobile’, an athlete at the position instead of the traditional, cerebral and supposedly less athletically gifted white quarterback. (Deadspin’s Big Book of Black Quarterbacks is required reading for more on this.)
Watching the reaction to Newton’s night, I was reminded of a piece in Claudia Rankine’s book Citizen that focuses on Serena Williams as a black body in the overwhelmingly white tennis world. Rankine writes that the Serena’s treatment over her career exemplifies Zora Hurston Neale’s statement that “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background,” and that this sentiment is “ad copy for some aspect of life for all black bodies.” Serena, despite all her success, has never been shielded “from people who felt her black body didn’t belong on their court, in their world.”
While NFL rosters are largely filled with nonwhite players, the league office and the 32 teams’ management groups are mostly made up of white men, and there is something stodgy and white ingrained in the NFL’s hierarchy, in its ludicrous self-seriousness and its disregard for black bodies. You can see the whiteness in things as benign as the NFL penalizing certain touchdown celebrations, in the everyday fact of short playing careers and lack of long term medical support for most NFL players, and in things as symbolically big as NFL executives blanching and frothing at a player protesting police brutality and racial injustice during the National Anthem. It is a league that wants its predominantly black players to stand in line, unquestioning, and sacrifice their bodies week after week, and also one that will cut a player as soon as he’s no longer useful.
Newton’s treatment by the refs — something he complained about last year — has a link to the white background of the NFL. His treatment wasn’t the cause of some cartoonish version of racism where the refs say to each other, we won’t call the penalties because he’s black, but something more hidden, more subconscious. Describing a 2004 match in which Williams was defeated by Jennifer Capriati partially because of bad calls by the chair umpire, Mariana Alves, Rankine writes that “though no one was saying anything explicitly about Serena’s black body, you are not the only viewer who thought it was getting in the way of Alves’s sight line.” And that’s what seems to have happened to the NFL’s refs; Newton’s black body —and how it informs the perception of his strength, his size, and his mobility — was in the way, and the rules were enforced differently. Rankine later writes, in the context of Williams blowing up at an official in 2009 after a bad foot fault call, and being fined for it, “Perhaps this is how racism feels no matter the context — randomly the rules everyone else gets to play by no longer apply to you.” What better way to describe Thursday? Everyone else’s rules didn’t apply to Newton.
Rankine writes that “Serena’s frustrations, her disappointments, exist within a system you understand not to try to understand in any fair-minded way because to do so is to understand the erasure of the self as systemic, as ordinary. For Serena, the daily diminishment is a low flame, a constant drip. Every look, every comment, every bad call blossoms out of history, through her, onto you. To understand is to see Serena hemmed in as any other black body thrown against our American background.” And this is how we ought to see Newton, hemmed in, at once celebrated for his athleticism but also made a target for it. Barring any major changes in officiating, it seems that Newton, despite all his exceptional play and widespread popularity, will have to keep facing something extra, week after week, a constant drip.
