[SirClintonPortis]

Originally Posted by 12thMan

I think it's a natural reaction to compare black quarterbacks with one another. For instance, last season I would hear commentators compare RGIII to Cam Newton frequently instead of, say, Matt Barkley who was/is still in college.

What's funny is that the reverse never happens. Football analysts don't compare white QBs to, say, Donovan McNabb or even Vince Young. It's usually Vince Young, McNabb, David Gerrard, Cam Newton -- they lump them together. Not always, but more often than not. But if you look at the top all-time leading rushing quarterbacks, off the top of my head, I would say it's Michael Vick, Randall Cunningham, Steve McNair, Steve Young in there somewhere, and Fran Tarkenton. John Elway has to be in the top ten, too. So it's actually pretty even once you remove race and look at statistics.

I guess my point is, in all of my rambling, there's a tendency to attribute athletic prowess first when analyzing black quarterbacks over football acumen and mechanics, which are typically attributed to white quarterbacks. When a white QB scrambles well we hear words like, "he's mobile". When a black guy moves well outside the pocket, we here "he's athletic". Not that any of this is racist or people are willfully ignorant, I think we've sub-consciously absorbed a lot of "old thinking" when comparing certain positions.

Rant over. I hope you guys didn't take any of this the wrong way.

Astute post. The behaviors you describe can be explained by schemas, and we don't like to have our schemas change. Info follows.

Schema - What Is a Schema

A schema is a cognitive framework or concept that helps organize and interpret information. Schemas can be useful, because they allow us to take shortcuts in interpreting a vast amount of information. However, these mental frameworks also cause us to exclude pertinent information in favor of information that confirms our pre-existing beliefs and ideas. Schemas can contribute to stereotypes and make it difficult to retain new information that does not conform to our established schemas.

Schema (psychology) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The original concept of schemata is linked with that of reconstructive memory as proposed and demonstrated in a series of experiments by Bartlett (1932). By presenting participants with information that was unfamiliar to their cultural backgrounds and expectations and then monitoring how they recalled these different items of information (stories, etc.), Bartlett was able to establish that individuals' existing schemata and stereotypes influence not only how they interpret "schema-foreign" new information but also how they recall the information over time. One of his most famous investigations involved asking participants to read a Native American folk tale, "The War of the Ghosts", and recall it several times up to a year later. All the participants transformed the details of the story in such a way that it reflected their cultural norms and expectations, i.e. in line with their schemata. The factors that influenced their recall were:

Omission of information that was considered irrelevant to a participant;

Transformation of some of the details, or of the order in which events, etc., were recalled; a shift of focus and emphasis in terms of what was considered the most important aspects of the tale;

Rationalization: details and aspects of the tale that would not make sense would be "padded out" and explained in an attempt to render them comprehensible to the individual in question;

Cultural shifts: the content and the style of the story were altered in order to appear more coherent and appropriate in terms of the cultural background of the participant.