The Buffalo Bills-Baltimore Ravens Matchup is proving to be racially charged

There’s a “Two Americas” moment brewing in the NFL’s AFC Divisional playoff game Sunday (Jan. 19) between Lamar Jackson’s Baltimore Ravens and Josh Allen’s Buffalo Bills. And it starts with what should doesn’t seem like a big deal on the surface: a black quarterback versus a white quarterback.

There was a day when we were starving for black quarterbacks in the NFL. We had Warren Moon who was good but (despite what old black men try to tell us) not generationally large. Doug Williams led Washington to the Super Bowl in 1988. He was even named the Most Valuable Player of Super Bowl XXII, but he was injured and lost his starting job the next year. He never started another game for the rest of his career.

It was hard to break through as a black man playing QB, but it’s not like that anymore.

The NFL has changed… a little. Black head coaches are still in short supply (like the Brian Flores lawsuit explains), but we have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to black men throwing the football. Patrick Mahomes, Russell Wilson, CJ Stroud, Jalen Hurt and, perhaps most controversially, a guy who clearly goes to a barbershop with a “z” in place of an “s” in his name and is the QB of a team in one . of The Blackest Cities in America.

Lamar Jackson has been reviled by the sports media although he has been named the Most Valuable Player in the NFL i 2019 and 2023. But the man many have said is a legitimately great QB is, not surprisingly, Allen, a white man who plays for one of the whitest fan bases in the NFL.

Some have called him unstoppable. Others have said that the scheme the Bills are running fools the NFL. Then there’s the ridiculous Colin Cowherd who called him out greatest QB ever. You’d be right if you thought the gushing praise for Allen has to do with him being one of the last truly good and consistent white quarterbacks in the NFL.

The truth is that the football media has always had a thing for QBs lacking melanin.

So what we’re coming up with this weekend is on par with Muhammad Ali vs. Chuck Wepner in 1975, Gerry Cooney vs. Larry Holmes in 1982, Larry Bird versus Magic Johnson in 1985. In each of these matchups, race — and racism — drove the conversation. Each man was there to win their respective matchup, but they were also saddled with fighting for the supremacy of their skinfolk. I shudder to think of the storms they would have had to endure if the internet was a thing back then.

Allen, the great white football hope in a sea of ​​black quarterbacks and Lamar Jackson, arguably, the most unapologetically black QB in the game are going to face off this Sunday. (I know Mahomes is great. But let’s be honest, he likes to hang out Trump-supporting white women, so he loses some points.)

This is a game that has the potential to show us that there are racial fault lines when it comes to sports fandom. Not everyone from Buffalo is white, but no doubt the Bills Mafia wears overwhelming sunscreen in the summer. (And don’t write to us saying there are black people in Buffalo. We’ve heard of Rick James and Benny the Butcher.)

When blacks root for black athletes and whites root for white athletes, racism is not always at play. It could be a coincidence. But when white people mess up against a black athlete, there is a 95.7 percent chance that racism is involved.