When it comes to how the Black athlete is portrayed to the public, there’s an obviously ugly history, and it hasn’t changed nearly as much as it needs to over time. The words used are different and the codes are more highly enforced in a more supposedly evolved age, but the effect is sadly similar.
If we wanted to show how things used to be, we could go back to Braven Dyer of the Los Angeles Times, who was trying to be “cute” in this November 5, 1937 article that mentioned UCLA star running back Kenny Washington:
The lad’s a wow in boldface caps, but it’s mostly what he doesn’t do on the football field that impresses me. He doesn’t overwork, he doesn’t get excited, he doesn’t get those black steel muscles busy until it counts. In short, Kenny has the complete relaxation of his race. You never saw a member of his race eat a po’k chop and then go into a heavy campaign of worrying about where his next one is coming from. No, sah, he may bear down on the po’k chop, but when it’s gone, he just unlaxes until the next po’k chop comes along. Well, K. Washington plays football like that, if you know what I mean.
Unfortunately, we know exactly what you mean.
Back then, you could get away with this garbage. Dyer’s “work” had to go past an editor or two. It had to be typeset. It went out to however many subscribers the Times had at the time, and on that day, for those who had never seen Kenny Washington play, that was the picture. There was no internet. There were no Kenny Washington GIFs. There was a loose language in how Black athletes were perceived and described, and the pushback was minimal. If you wrote this now, you’d have people coming for your head, and rightly so.