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Writer's pictureRoy Borole

Captain African America: Why Lamar Jackson is the most important player in the NFL

Updated: May 19, 2022





The NFL is one of the last great holdouts for White Supremacy. The sport is a bastion of right wing thinking and organizations. Whether it be the military, church or even the Republican Party, the NFL is the primary and maybe last vehicle of White Supremacist’s in popular culture in the United States of America. With revenues growing every year in a climate when almost American every sport is shrinking in revenues, the NFL is an almost unstoppable force and riding atop of it is White Supremacy in all its glory. One might think that this combination of White Supremacy and the NFL cannot be stopped, but lo and behold in the shadows an enemy lurks. One who has the power to dismantle this relationship and free the NFL from its White Supremacist yolk. He isn’t a politician or an NFL team owner, no this nemesis is Lamar Jackson and his success will be the final death blow to White Supremacy in the NFL.


What is Sports to America?

In the absence of war in the nation building exercise, sport forms the primary surrogate to express national pride. Sport is war without the guns and death. It has nothing to do with playing and games and everything to do with confirmation of your tribe’s superiority and ascendency. Your teams victory is not for a trophy or a championship but for the self-esteem of your nation over another.

Nowhere is this more prevalent than in American Football and it’s incredible ability to create tensions, conflict and emotional outpouring from it’s viewers. The NFL is the colosseum, odyssey and theatre of America’s Rome. Other sports are merely sideshows to this monument of national pride, for you see American Football is not America’s game, American Football is American White Supremacy’s game. And in an era wherein White Supremacy is constantly under attack it is the last vestige of the great American ideology. And why Presidents, Entrepreneurs and even men of the cloth will defend it with their last dying breath.

Now let’s discuss why American Football is truly America’s sport.


It’s in the name, “American Football”. Unlike Basketball and Baseball or even Lacrosse, American Football is so deeply American that the word “America” is even in the name.

Many sports play a critical role in the American Zeitgeist - but none more than American Football.


Not all narratives and sports are born equal

Baseball is America's past time, Basketball is America's fascination, however American Football is very different to the two in one highly specific way.

Basketball and Baseball both have Superstars, Jordan, James, Rodriguez, Bonds, etc.

These players are immense talents that mesmerise us, but these same talents do not guarantee success. Neither sports allow for a phenomenon wherein a team’s success can be down to one player exclusively.

You can have an exceptional player and he can create exceptional results ala Lebron James with the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2018. But these other sports are not reliant on a single player. A single player can have a massive impact, but this is not critical, in American Football it’s literally necessary for success.

In American Football your success is down to one player. You can have the best WR, RB and TE's ever, but if your QB can’t connect with them and move the chains. It's all for nothing. This is most obviously seen with Mr. “White Privilege” 2018 Baker Mayfield and the 2020 Cleveland Browns. Blessed with one of the most devastating receiving corps and back field’s- Beckham, Landry, Njoku and Chubb - in NFL history he could only manage one playoff victory in 4 years.

In American Football a great Quarterback is not a nice to have, it’s critical. Quarterbacks’ are to American Football teams, what water and sanitation are to cities, they’re critical infrastructure. This is why team’s will risk almost everything for a 8/10+ QB. This is most notably seen in the 2022 off-season wherein we’ve seen the Broncos and Browns essentially bet the house on two freakishly talented but somewhat mercurial quarterbacks.


Let’s revise that statement “team’s will risk almost everything for a 8/10 QB” this sounds like something out of a Greek epic.

“….A city would go to war for one man or one woman” and like a Greek epic, this immediately focuses all attention on one individual – the Hero – in this instance the Quarterback. Resulting in this individual immediately by default fulfilling the role of “hero” in our narrative, our nation building narrative. In no other sport is there such a dramatic allocation of responsibility to one person in a team sport. In Basketball you can win a title without a great PG or Centre. In Rugby you can win a World Cup with a mediocre Flyhalf (CC: Springboks 2007), in Soccer you can win with an average focused team (CC: Greece 2004). But in American Football it's almost impossible to win a Super Bowl with a sub-par QB. No more is this more notable than the 2018 LA Rams with Jared Goff at QB.

Not only is the QB the hero by narrative design, but also by technical design.


The QB as the Hero of a Specific Narrative

So now we know why a QB is so important to the American Zeitgeist and White Supremacy. The QB is always the hero and therefore the hero as this is America, needs to be white. Because Baseball is America's sport, but Football is White Supremacy's sport.


You see unlike the other sports we’ve discussed here, which started off being White Supremacist sports. Through a combination of competition and financial incentives even the most racist of team owners will gladly forego their White Supremacy fantasy’s for victory and success. Donald Sterling was a full-blown racist, but he was more than happy for a Black male to play the hero of his organization. The same can’t be said of American Football. Teams repeatedly fumble the bag in the hopes of keeping this dream of White Supremacy alive. Here’s looking at you the Browns and Bears. Even when faced with irrefutable evidence that a white player is mediocre, white team owners and managers will still go to their trusted white quarterback, regardless of how awful he actually is and how transcendental and talented the Black quarterbacks are. At this point I’m sure you’d like to point out that there are a number of African American Quarterbacks in the NFL. This is true, I don’t discount this at all. But there’s a problematic and strange difference between an African American Quarterback and a Black Quarterback – I’ll discuss this later, let’s focus on why American Football is the sport of White Supremacy for now.


In the myths purported by White Supremacy none is more important than that of the White Quarterback. The White Quarterback is no ordinary man, he is smarter, less emotional, more technically inclined and has better mental and critical faculties than his Brown and Black deputies. His whiteness affirms this, whilst his Black and Brown deputies are mercurial, he is solid and dependable, unflustered and the archetype of a leader who has no fear.

He is the leader of the troops. If any battle is to be won it is a consequence of this great leader, not his men and their efforts. White Supremacy loves this trope. This is why all war stories told through the lens of White Supremacy always posit that the war was won via a Senior Military figure. Not the men and women on the ground.

Whether it be Dwight D Eisenhower or Robert E. Lee the hero is always a wise, tactical male who overcomes any kind of animalistic nature to use his superior genetics for instinct, strategy and intelligence to win the war or battle. And the QB is that “Hero” to American Football. And Because American Football is a White Supremacist sport, it is critical that role always be played by some kind of White man. These ideas are the bedrock of White Supremacy and are one of the reasons systematic racism scaled so well. The narrative is intuitive to the bigoted mind.


It's a very simple but powerful framework. Whites are rational and intelligent – removed from their animalistic instincts and calculated. But this removal from their instincts means that they don’t have the same absurd physicality as their Black and Brown opponents.

The white man traded his strength and muscles for intelligence in this narrative, this is why he is the slave master and the slaves are the slaves and why the quarterback is white and the receivers are black.

The Non-White’s like a great hunting dog have amazing physical abilities, but they are emotional, unintelligent, unmeasured. However if given direction by a White man - a smart intelligent white man - their amazing abilities can be harnessed to help the team – army – win. But they – The Non-Whites - don’t have the intelligence or emotional maturity to win the game on their own.

White Supremacy is happy to have freakishly gifted African Americans play Football, so long as we can relegate their achievements to genetics and talent not intellect and savvy.


African American Quarterback and a Black Quarterback

Now back to Lamar Jackson.

What Lamar Jackson represents to the NFL and America as a whole is the shattering of this illusion. His success would mean that unathletic but supposedly intellectually gifted White players are no longer the heroes of American Football and are no longer necessary.

The idea that White men are more intelligent and strategically minded would begin to crumble. You see in its onslaught against reality, White Supremacy has reluctantly yielded to African American physical and athletic supremacy, so it’s last stand in this war is the intellect. This is White Supremacy’s Alamo – their last stand in American Football.


Lamar Jackson winning a Super Bowl would mean that there is no justification for players who look and play like Mitch Trubisky, Kirk Cousins, Baker Mayfield to be the hero of any story – and they really shouldn’t be.

It would mean that the entire narrative of the NFL would fall apart and that the hero can be Black and I mean really Black.

Because Lamar isn’t an African American quarterback, Lamar Jackson is a Black Quarterback!

Lamar isn’t just Black in appearance, but in style, play and behaviour.

Lamar Jackson hangs out with Kodak Black, he has tattoos, he doesn’t have an agent and my favourite he keeps his hair all kinds of nappy – at times.

But aesthetic and business decisions aside, the black definer is the fact that he plays like a Black QB, he doesn’t want to be like Peyton Manning or Aaron Rodgers.

This is to take nothing away from African American Quarterbacks like Patrick Mahomes and Russell Wilson. One cannot question their ethnicity, they are as African American as any other African American. However their playing style is still in the mould of traditional quarterbacks. Both Wilson and Mahomes are wildly talented and super creative and do things that no Quarterback has done before, however they still play a certain style of Football that is more consistent with White Quarterbacks. Throw heavy QB’s that exploit great offensive coordinator strategy and prolific receivers.

Lamar is different though.

Lamar doesn’t play Football, Lamar plays Highlights!

Lamar Jackson even when throwing the Football creates a style of play that you only really see in Black Neighbourhoods and at Black High Schools and Colleges. It’s not American Football, it’s African American Football. Like Ebonics and other parts of African American culture it is distinct to African Americans. A great example or analogy for this would be Kobe Bryant and Allen Iverson. Both were truly great Basketball players, but Allen Iverson played like someone who grew up in the hood where Kobe Bryant plays like someone who had a father who played in the NBA.


This makes Lamar, extremely dangerous to the White Supremacist narrative that pervades the NFL. If Lamar Jackson is the blueprint for success, then there is no need to even bother scouting in White schools and neighbourhoods.

Scouts will know that if they can find extreme black talent and that talent can play at QB, then why bother with a 200 pound 6 foot 5 white boy with a rocket arm when you can get a 205 pound 6 foot 4 black male who can run a sub 11 100m with a rocket arm?

This kind of quarterback means that any young QB without the speed and skill factor gets disregarded, in the same way that basketball scouts only consider white talent legitimate if it’s over 1.95m. Anything sub 1.9m can be outplayed by an African American version of them. It would mean that in the not so distance future the term “Dual-Threat” will no longer be a word that gets used at it will become the minimum requirement.

Scouts will start overlooking White talented throwing QB’s for athletic and speedy QB’s who happen to be Black. This would immediately kill the supply chain for White quarterbacks all the way down to the Pop Warner level. It would mean that the best player on the field would immediately get considered for the QB position not just the White ones.

Scouts and teams alike would begin the already visible gradual clamouring for a Black QB. Fully aware this style of play is more entertaining and marketable which in turn results in higher ROI. Millions of people around the world know who Tom Brady is as a consequence of his success, but even more will know who Lamar Jackson is. Because like Michael Jordan and Usain Bolt and other transcendental athletes, you don’t have to understand their sport to know they’re exceptional.

Lamar Jackson’s success would mean that the narrative of White players being the hero would no longer be valid and would allow for the unthinkable to happen...

The NFL would become the NBA…

A league so dominated by African Americans that the last time a White American male won the MVP award was in 1986 – Larry Bird. The last time a White American player won Rookie of the year was in 2001 – Mike Miller. A game so unashamedly dominated by African Americans that the only white players who get any kind of appreciation are parodies or gimmicks meant to insight humor; CC: Alex Caruso, Birdman, Dellavadova. This isn’t to say there aren’t good white players in the NBA, (CC: Doncic, Jokic etc) but they're always bridesmaids to the Durant’s, Curry’s and James's of the NBA.


Matthew Stafford is a very good QB, and people are putting him in the Hall of Fame conversation. But the Rams above all else were powered to the Super Bowl by an incredible defence and incredible offensive playmakers. Stafford is good but he couldn’t carry a bum team in Detroit. Whereas Lamar Jackson could carry a fridge by himself!

The man carried a dysfunctional team that was gutted by injuries and run by a wildly mediocre offensive coordinator to the best record in the AFC before getting injured. Now imagine what he could accomplish with one of the best WR’s in the league, two of the greatest defensive players of our generation and one of the most gifted coaches in the NFL?


So in summation, it's less about Lamar Jackson and more around what he represents. If he does succeed it will be a whole new era in the NFL and above all else will allow the world to watch the best on show, and not the best in your opinion.

The big difference between Lamar Jackson and other QB's is that the only thing people are willing to accept from him is success. And the reason for that is because Lamar Jackson like Cam Newton in 2015 is not a player but a catalyst for something much greater. Lamar’s success will usher in a new era and a revolution in American Football. I feel on a subconscious level many African American pundits and commentators know this. Therefore their criticism of him is much higher and greater as they know his success is not for himself but for 47 million African Americans.

Thus in the same way that Muhammad Ali played a much bigger role in society than any of his contemporaries, Lamar Jackson’s success will not elevate him to a higher plane but will dismantle one of the last great hold outs of White Supremacy and usher in a new era wherein predeterminations on one’s talent are not predicated on appearances but on ability above all else.


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