Getting at the heart of why southern whites are now so rare in college football, especially when they once had such a rich heritage of football excellence, there are multiple factors, but the most important, I think, are as follows, and
growing up in Mobile, Alabama in the 1950s and 60s gave me a front row seat in a deeply southern town.
In 1954, the Supreme Court decision in "Brown v Board of Education" mandated the racial integration of public schools in America. But it was the iron fist of the U.S. government that would have to enforce this unpopular mandate. And the full power of the Feds was brought down most heavily on a region they'd grown to resent most: the old Confederate states. So the fist came down early (1956 or 57) on Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Eisenhower approved the use of Federal troops to crush any signs of white defiance in order to desegregate Central High. And the citizens of Little Rock were, of course, helpless against Federal troops.
From there on Ike, followed by Kennedy, followed by LBJ, let it be known that no resistance to school integration would be tolerated. Agitators from the north streamed into southern towns and cities to "encourage" the process, knowing they had the full complicity of the Feds to enforce massive integration throughout the South, and it was the Deep South - the most resistant states of all - that they aimed to punish first and most forcefully: Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, and northern Florida. They attacked the U of Mississippi in the early 60s and then the U of Alabama soon after. Resistance crumbled rapidly before this onslaught and before the threat of armed enforcement against peaceful southern citizens. I belonged to the last all-white class in Mobile in 1967, my graduation year. Everything changed in Mobile after that year as the last apartheid barriers were destroyed. And the entire city began to deteriorate from that point on.
Soon federally mandated bussing of students changed the nature of every public school in Alabama and in the rest of the southern states. This plague was followed by increasingly strident waves of political correctness, demanding that all southern states genuflect before the god of diversity and correctness. By the early 1970s Mobile street names and school names were changed to honor black "heroes": old-time names were dropped in favor of "Martin Luther King Boulevard"; "Frederick Douglass Avenue"; "Booker T. Washington School," etc. And this was happening all over the South. Public schools were required to faithfully observe "Black History Month," and an endless variety of diversity programs were mandated. It was a massive brainwashing and propaganda campaign specifically targeted first and foremost at southern states. Parents soon feared to speak honestly about any political or racial issues for fear of being fired or rebuked. And they transferred this fear to their kids.
I witnessed a perfect example of this hidden fear while teaching school in the 1980s. I sent a boy (6th grader) to the school library to check out a book in my name. He came back and told me that the library was not open for checkouts at that time.
I asked, "Who told you this?"
He said, "The lady who sits at the checkout desk."
I said, "Do you mean the librarian?" (a white woman)
He said, "No. That other lady."
Knowing whom he meant, I replied, "Do you mean the BLACK lady?"
He said, "The lady in the green dress."
I said, "You mean, Mrs. Joyner, the black lady who checks out books."
He said, "Yeah, I guess so."
This kind of hesitation - even reluctance - to mention the word "black," shows the kind of freezing effect intimidating political correctness and diversity training for so many years has had on the white children of the South. Consequently, boys routinely defer to blacks on a wide range of things, fearing "to get in trouble or to get their parents in trouble" if they don't show deference to the diversity agenda. Black boys down here know this and they take full advantage of it. And it leaves many, if not most, white boys hesitant to go one-on-one with blacks, especially on the athletic fields. And, of course, it engenders feelings of inadequacy among many white boys. This is a primary reason so few whites play college football in the south now, a region whose schools are frequently swamped with large numbers of blacks anyway.
Then there is one more reason. Because there are so many blacks in southern public schools, they have come to dominate much of the school culture down here. And white parents often fear for the safety of their kids. Accounts of black football players ganging up to rape a single white kid in the football locker room are especially frightening. Though this has been very rare, it has occurred, and even if it's only happened once, it's enough to cause white parents to say to their boys, "You're not playing football. Why don't you play baseball [a majority white sport here] or soccer?" And white parents often don't want their kids picking up the black lingo, or dances, or other black culture there. Additionally, of course, many coaches now are brainwashed into assuming white boys can't run or move like blacks, so the white kid seldom gets a chance at running back or receiver positions, another strong discouragement in a region with large black populations.
These reasons alone count for a large number of white dropouts in southern football, perhaps the primary reasons of all.
