Athletes and black rage.

• Author: Zirin, Dave
• Position: Edge of Sports

Unless it's commodified, laid out over a beat, and marketed to suburban white teens getting their ghetto fix, there is no freedom to be angry in black America.

From Jim Crow to the New Jim Crow to Fox News fulminations about the New Black Panthers, there lurks an existential fear to, in the words of Ronald Reagan, "hold back the jungle."

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Nowhere on the cultural landscape is black anger policed more vigorously than in the world of sports. Ask Roddy White and Victor Cruz.

After George Zimmerman was found not guilty of gunning down seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, the two responses that garnered the most attention were from

Cruz, a New York Giants wide receiver, and Atlanta Falcons wideout Roddy White.

Cruz tweeted, "Zimmerman doesn't last a year before the hood catches up to him."

White's response was, "Ali them jurors should go home tonight and kill themselves for letting a grown man get away with killing a kid."

Both were pilloried by the press, piled on by their Twitter "followers," and hectored into apologizing. Cruz had to go on The Dan Patrick Show, where he said, "In the moment, when it happened, I'm not going to lie, I was a little angry. As a father, you think about if that was your son, if that was your kid."

It's tempting to make this a story about social media and impulse control, but the roots of this run far deeper.

Poor people of color rarely get a cultural platform, a megaphone, and something that approximates a public voice. The owners in sports want black athletes, who tend to come from poor backgrounds, to be famous so as to sell tickets and jerseys. They don't want them to use that platform to actually speak about racism or poverty.

This story of controlling the black voice in sports is as old as sports itself.

In the 1930s, Joe Louis wasn't told to "be loud and larger than life like Babe Ruth." He was told, "Don't open your mouth like Jack Johnson."

Jackie Robinson was told by management to turn the other cheek.

The white...