Sports has long absorbed its share of elbows and late hits and cheap shots from this column, mostly for looking so comfortable in that ludicrous cloak of societal importance; it was just this week, for example, that my Twitter feed boiled with outrage that a mid-level athletic operative at Wake Forest University had apparently conspired to help the school's opponents, but as to the story of Russian state actors likely sabotaging the American election, it offered little more than a collective shrug.
Ain't that America, you and me? Ain't that America something to see boy.
But at many a difficult moment in American history, many an explosive, frightening moment, sports has led the way toward progress and enlightenment, and sports will accomplish that noble purpose again, even as it walks cautiously along a darkening horizon of approaching thunderheads.
Loud dispatches of unvanquished hope, validation, and righteousness crackled across the sportscape this week in response to eruptions of hatred that threaten to become more common.
But Brandon Marshall is hopeful.
The linebacker for the Denver Broncos says he's heard from hundreds of supporters who share his disgust with the letter he posted on Instagram, the one with the return address of Miss Jackson's 6th grade class. Marshall didn't have to read two sentences before he realized that sixth grade would have been beyond the intellectual potential of whoever wrote what followed.
It wasn't enough to unload on Marshall an unabridged glossary of the most vile racial slurs. The letter explicitly threatened to put him a wheelchair if he didn't "go back to the jungle."
"That wasn't human, whoever sent that," said Steelers guard Ramon Foster inside 3400 Water Street, which is only where such iconic progressive cornerstones as the Rooney Rule were forged. "You can't correct some people. It's shameful. As a nation, we have to be better than that."
In New Jersey, Nikita Whitlock is hopeful.
The New York Giants fullback returned to his New Jersey residence Dec. 6 to find it burglarized and vandalized by graffiti scrawlers steeped in Nazi symbolism, racist acronyms, and by still more fledging travel agents.
"Go back to Africa!"
"I don't believe by any means the community is racist, maliciously racist," Whitlock said. "I just think there's some bad people here."
Here, there, and everywhere _ as the Southern Poverty Law Center has cataloged nearly 900 similar incidents nationally since the election _ political upheaval threatens to cast its prominent minority athletes back into the historical backwoods out of which people like Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali had to hack a path to freedom.
"I suspect if you were to go back and look at the abuse that Muhammad Ali encountered in the late '60s, and at the vitriol that was being directed against black athletes on campus in that period who were making statements, it would be apparent there's always been a nasty racial edge that in that sense is not new," said Rob Ruck, the esteemed Pitt history prof whose revered multi-media works are a virtual time line of the profound impact made by minority athletes on American culture. "What's new is how willing so many people are to express this sort of hatred. For awhile people were shamed into silence about that, except for the really far right, neo-Nazi type sites. People were embarrassed to express racist sentiments. (But) there's been a general coarsening of how we talk, treat each other, and I think the election really just injected a huge dose of steroids into that."
Victor Cruz, one of Whitlock's most prominent Giants teammates, is hopeful, too. But he looked really hard at the thunderheads after Whitlock's experience.
"I think there's a specific mindset that comes with supporting a guy like Donald Trump and supporting what he stands for, and there's a certain type of person that comes with that, and I'm not sure that person is always a positive-minded person," Cruz said. "As a minority you have to be careful. As a person of influence you have to be careful and make sure your family's safe and give them the knowledge to stay safe in this world."
Trump, the self-described "least racist person that you have ever met," remains far more likely to Tweet out celebrity trivia than formally denounce anything resembling a hate crime, and has thus helped solidify impressions like those expressed by Cruz.
"I think there's a lot of truth to (what Cruz said), and you can quote me on that," Ruck said. "(Trump's) empowered and legitimized people on the far right who are racist, anti-semitic, homophobic, and you can go down the list. They're really much more empowered now."
But Ruck, too, remains hopeful.
"I don't think it's a majority of Americans," Ruck said. "A lot of people are really disgusted by this. I never remember a time when it was acceptable to be neo-Nazi and not to have both major parties angrily denouncing it. Our norms of civility have been weakened.
"I want to say one thing though _ I'm around a lot of young people. I'm teaching kids at Pitt. And I probably have a better chance to talk about race with them because I'm talking about it in the context of sport. I would say that this is the least racist, least sexist, least homophobic generation of Americans that I've ever known. Much less so than our generations."
This is what Foster wants people to remember even as the focus turns still again to what he and his Steelers teammates will accomplish this afternoon in Cincinnati, that hatred is an outlier, an anachronism, a losing proposition.
"There's so much good in this world," Foster said. "Stuff that goes on, racial tension, it's the same thing that goes down in history. Most people are really good. It's that 10 percent of each race, class, religion, whatever, that ruins it for everybody else. I know people of all races and not many I've run across have been like that. To be honest, it's never been to my face, and I thank God for that.
"It's kind of disheartening that it gets that much press. It's a shame that that goes on in 2016, almost 2017. We as people need to be good to one another, that's my motto. I don't care what you do, how you pray, what race you are, who you vote for, just be good to one another."
Some people who work toward that goal every day have withstood a miserable month, it's true.
Then last Monday, outgoing Attorney General Loretta Lynch delivered a speech worthy of Dr. King himself.
"All of us have seen the flurry of recent news about alleged hate crimes and harassment ... These incidents ... should be of the deepest concern to every American. They tear at the fabric of our communities, and they also stain our dearest ideals and our nation's very soul.
"(But) hope is still alive in our country. You and I know what the Declaration means when it says, 'All men are created equal.' You and I know what the Constitution means when it says, 'We the people,' so let us leave here with a renewed commitment to demanding nothing less than a country that is true to its founding promises. And let us leave here in hope _ the hope that has brought the United States so far in 240 years; the hope that I am confident will carry us even further in the days to come.
"Will this work be hard? It has always been hard.
"Will there be challenges ahead? We have always know that "the price of freedom is constant vigilance."
"Will we persevere? We always do."
When a leader emerges as the ultimate facilitator for that commitment, don't be surprised if it's an athlete.
