The African-American Super Bowl

As you watch the excrutiatingly long pre-game, game, post-game coverage of the Super Bowl today, you could probably make a drinking game out of how many times the various commentators mention the fact that one or both of the head coaches are black. If you did, you'd run a serious threat of alcohol poisoning as that's sure to be a topic of many features and interviews. Joseph Epstein in the Wall Street Journal suggests we forget the ethnic politics and just enjoy the game:

Straightaway after the Chicago Bears defeated the New Orleans Saints and then the Indianapolis Colts defeated the New England Patriots the type was set, the story locked in. Lovie Smith, the Bears coach, and Tony Dungy, the Colts coach, are both African-Americans, and this will mark the first time that an African-American coach has brought his team to a Super Bowl. That there would be two African-American coaches with teams playing against each other was too big a journalistic bonanza to ignore. Far from ignoring it, the fact has been endlessly emphasized. Great vulgar minds think alike.

Yet every time I hear mention of Lovie Smith and Tony Dungy as African-Americans, I wonder if this emphasis on ethnicity is a good thing. The more it goes on the more I feel that on game day Jesse Jackson will be called in to kick extra points, with Al Sharpton holding. Lovie Smith and Tony Dungy are superior men, smart, dignified, cool under fire, and high above the average of ex-jocks who have gone on to coach National Football League teams. Why make such a journalistic meal out of their being African-American? Nothing nearly similar would be taking place if the two coaches were Italian, Jewish, Irish, Ukrainian or Texan....

Tom Brokaw wrote a bestseller about the men in World War II whom he called "The Greatest Generation." My own nominee for the greatest generation would be that of those African-American jazz musicians--Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and others--who practiced their subtle art through decades of ugly racial prejudice while maintaining a high artistic standard and an unruffled elegance of demeanor. Lovie Smith and Tony Dungy strike me as the equivalent, in sports, of those men.

Why, then, emphasize the African-Americanness of these two excellent coaches? Doesn't doing so suggest a patronizing sense of amazement at their accomplishments--as if to say, who'd have thunk not one but two black men could be at the top of their line of work? Doesn't doing so also suggest a note of self-congratulations for Americans--as if to say, look how far we've come in giving these men a chance? Aren't we grand in our virtue?

African-Americans will naturally enough take their own quiet pride in the achievements of Lovie Smith and Tony Dungy as every other ethnic group does when its members produce extraordinary achievements. (There must, somewhere in America, be an Armenian Athletes Hall of Fame.) But won't America more truly have come of age as a tolerant and mature society when men and women of genuine accomplishment can stand apart, on their own, without being weighed down by the heavy freight of their race, religion or ethnicity? Hold the public relations; forget the ethnic pride. Let the game begin!

In this "Black History Month" 2007, we're will a long ways from Dr. King's world in which a man will be judged not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character.