Want Some Championship Football with Your Race Discussion?

A day before Sunday’s Super Bowl, the New York Post’s Phil Mushnick predicted the NFL season would end with “reminders that we’re all racists who need to change our ways.”

Mushnick was pretty much on target. There was just no way CBS would ignore the subject of race in its several hours of pregame programming leading up to the game.  

Almost an hour before kickoff, players from both teams stood at attention for the showing of a video displaying social justice statements and featuring multiple people making social justice remarks like “We have to end racism,” “if we could come together as a people and understand what where our history continues to teach us is that love will overcome all the fear” and more. This was followed by the singing of the so-called Black anthem “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” by Alicia Keys.

As the song was ending, an unidentified male voice stated, “There are forces that want to take us to another place. We don’t wanna go back. We wanna move forward.” Those forces were not made known.      

Following that, CBS’s James Brown praised the powerful medium of television as a tool to consistently deliver messages of “unity as opposed to divisiveness” this season – overlooking continued fan opposition to the NFL’s social justice activism. His colleague Phil Simms added: “We’ve been through a lot this year in our country, from the pandemic to the social justice to trying to play through football seasons, always trying to send a positive message. I think football has done that, I think football brings people together and hopefully this Super Bowl Sunday we have brought everybody together all across this country.” CBS’s Phil Simms called it “really a great moment.”

Earlier in the four-hour-long program, Academy Award-winning actress Viola Davis (in above photo) narrated a feature on the early years of the NFL when Blacks were not allowed to play until Kenny Washington integrated the league in 1946. The timing of a segment on segregation in pro sports fit conveniently into the Left’s obsession with “systemic racism” and media genuflecting to Black Lives Matter.

Before that, a report by The Daily Show’s Roy Wood, Jr. assured viewers that Black quarterbacks in the NFL have repeatedly been the victims of unfairness, starting with Denver’s Marlin Briscoe in 1968. Briscoe was “the first Black quarterback (who) also became the first Black quarterback to be told he couldn’t be a quarterback.”

Briscoe was a college quarterback drafted in the 14^th round of the 1968 draft by Denver, and the Broncos planned to play him at cornerback. When the season began, the starting QB got injured, and the backup was not a suitable replacement. So Briscoe got his shot at quarterback and went on to set an NFL rookie record with 14 touchdown passes. To Wood, though, he was a victim of unfairness which exists to this day:

“This isn’t just ancient history. This is very recent. (Baltimore’s) Lamar Jackson was told to consider he should move to wide receiver when he came to the NFL. He wasn’t even drafted yet, and they was already trying to move him! Do I look like Marlin Briscoe to you?”

Wood sarcastically says: “Too short? Tell Kyler (Murray) and Russ (Wilson) that. Too athletic? Come on, bro, you’ve seen Lamar (Jackson). Too political? Well now we’re getting’ up to the moment.” At this point of the diatribe, Colin Kaepernick is shown kneeling down on one knee.

“To be a black quarterback is to be black in America. It’s to face unfairness at every turn. Yet somehow, you push forward and you tell your story. From Marlin Brisco to Doug Williams, from Colin Kaepernick to Patrick Mahomes, the experience of being a black quarterback, at times it’s unjust, but when it’s at its best it’s exhilarating. So just like there’s no such thing as being too athletic there’s also no such thing as too black.”

Though Kaepernick is the symbol of disrespecting the national anthem and dividing America, CBS subsequently featured the phenomenal 1991 Super Bowl performance of the national anthem by the late Whitney Houston that “brought the nation together.”