Myo Thiha 

Opinions Editor 

Image courtesy of People 

In the aftermath of this year’s Super Bowl, tackling how the NFL portrays race helps us understand the ethos of marketing football. The NFL sells football as a force that brings people together and breaks down the barriers that separate us as individuals. A common trope is that everyone is equal on the football field, race doesn’t matter, and players and coaches are judged solely on merit. The NFL promotes this message in its commercials, player activism, and helmet slogans.  

However, the issue with this messaging is that the NFL handles issues of race inconsistently. Perhaps the most visible example is how the league handled Colin Kaepernick protesting police brutality. It’s also evident in the league’s hiring practices and how some fans responded to the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. One of the biggest culprits highlighting the inconsistencies of race relations in football is the 2009 film The Blind Side.   

Feel-good stories about race are nothing new and are crucial in portraying the imagined colorblind, meritocratic that many perceive as America’s reality. The Blind Side, like many white savior narratives before it, promotes an altruistic white family “saving” an underprivileged black youth from inner-city Memphis and a negligent mother with substance abuse problems. The movie presents Michael Oher as a gifted athlete, a struggling student, and a lovable oaf. In this allegedly true story, the affluent Tuohy family adopts Oher and helps him live up to his potential. I say “allegedly” because Oher refutes much of the film’s narrative. In an ongoing lawsuit, Oher states the family took advantage of him for money, tricked him into signing a conservatorship, and never truly adopted him.   

The film depicts Oher as a gifted athlete who cannot reach his potential until Leigh Anne Tuohy, the family matriarch, figures out how to motivate him. He demolishes every high school player on his way to a Division I scholarship. The story in the movie is that he always possessed the latent ability; he just needed a white person to tell him how to utilize it.   

White savior narratives like The Blind Side suggest that minoritized people can succeed by following white Americans’ example. Failure lies with the individual, not the system. Like so many other examples, the movie ignores the systemic inequalities that left Oher without the resources to succeed.  

The movie is disingenuous in avoiding these real, systemic issues of Oher’s community, which remains one of the most segregated cities in the U.S. Individual success is the cure to those ills. Rather than making a case for necessary and significant change, stories such as Oher’s, which saw him use football to climb the economic ladder, cover the real issues. Until the NFL reckons with the realities of ongoing racial disparities in our society, in which the league is undoubtedly complicit, their rhetoric of unity rings hollow.