Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder had a good run as CBS’s lead sports prognosticator. And then 30 years ago, on the Friday afternoon before Martin Luther King Day, the gruff 70-year-old sat down to lunch with a black Washington DC television reporter and told America what he really thought about the players he covered every week. Snyder characterized the black athlete as superior “because of his high thighs that go up into his back”. He sourced this opinion in antebellum times, “when during the slave trading, the slave owner would breed his big black to his big woman so that he would have a big black kid”. And he made plain his reservations about black athletes taking roles of greater intellect and authority in sports. “They’ve [blacks] got everything,” he said. “If they take over coaching like everybody wants them to, there’s not going to be anything left for white people.”

Snyder expressed some regret for his remarks shortly after they aired (“I thought I was being instructive, when in fact, I was destructive,” he told the Washington Post), but by then a firestorm of outrage had already gathered. “Some of his explanations as to why blacks have emerged to a point of near dominance in sports make it clear the man is abysmally ignorant,” Harry Edwards, the eminent sociologist, said at the time. “How he could sit there for 12 years with the network not knowing of his views is beyond me.” The incident was enough to embarrass CBS into cutting ties with Snyder. Moreover, it pressured competing outlets to not only choose their words more carefully, but also the people who get to say them. In the wake of that controversy was born a new era of diversity in sports media that brought with it a heightened degree of cultural sensitivity.

Still, for as much as sports talk has evolved in the decades since Snyder put his foot in his mouth, his ideas remain. The open and direct language of athlete stereotyping has taken on more subtle and nuanced forms. Often it’s being trafficked by observers who style themselves as egalitarian and unprejudiced. Sports imitate life and all its tribalism, in other words. The problem has only become more pronounced in today’s minute-to-minute sports news cycle. “It’s really hard to get sports journalists to consider the words, the framing and the context that their stories are put in,” says Dr Cynthia Frisby, a professor at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism.

Two years ago Frisby published a study examining the media depictions of black male athletes. What she found, after analyzing a decade’s worth of news clippings, was that black male athletes receive “significantly more negative coverage” in the form of hard news stories about domestic and sexual violence; all the while their white counterparts are the hero protagonists of feature and profile stories that lay bare the shades of their humanity. The separate but equal reporting doesn’t just reinforce false notions about black athletes being more “naturally talented” than their “gritty” white peers. It lends credence to a spurious concept known as stacking, in which athletes are viewed as being particularly well suited to play certain positions based on race or ethnicity. Hispanic baseball players experience this when they are typecast as shortstops and second basemen.

A pair of 2017 studies out of the University of Colorado showed just how insidious that kind of thinking can be. In the first, researchers asked black and white college students to rate paragraphs and photos of pro quarterbacks based on parameters like physical strength and leadership, and the black participants wound up stereotyping both races of quarterbacks more strongly. In the second, Colorado researchers restricted the survey sample to white participants across a wide range of ages and education levels; those participants wound up assigning negative stereotypes to the black quarterbacks, while assigning positive attributes such as leadership to white ones. The findings go a long way toward explaining why NFL fans are so quick to call for the benching of Cam Newton (a league MVP-winning quarterback who led his team to the Super Bowl), and why pro football scouts could feel so comfortable asking Louisville’s Lamar Jackson (who won the Heisman Trophy, awarded to the country’s best college football player) to try out at receiver in the run-up to this year’s NFL draft. These quarterbacks are competing against more than 400 years of accepted logic, after all.

Athlete stereotyping might be even more engrained than it was in the time of Snyder or even the great Howard Cosell, who immolated his gilded announcing career the moment he called Washington receiver Alvin Garrett “that little monkey” during a 1983 broadcast of Monday Night Football. These days, people say more and hold back their true feelings even less. They engage more readily thanks to social media, where misinformation spreads far more easily. They hide behind their keyboards and let fly with their trolling in the comments section of news articles or on their anonymous social media feeds and shape perception. It’s how former Dallas Cowboys receiver Dez Bryant gets written off as an unemployable malcontent while Richie Incognito, a man with a history of throwing around racist slurs, is deemed worthy of second chances. It’s how Donald Trump gets to belittle LeBron James’s intelligence from the highest office in the land (and as the NBA superstar was opening a school, no less). It’s how Tim Tebow can be seen as reverent for kneeling on a football field, while Colin Kaepernick gets branded a traitor for doing the same.

The more that people assert Jeremy Lin’s Taiwanese-American heritage disqualifies him for an NBA career or insist that the mostly poor, mostly black college athletes who rake in millions for their schools and coaches shouldn’t be paid is the more athlete stereotyping seems like a feature of sports conversation and not a bug. And somehow these beliefs persist even as sports are mythologized as safe playgrounds for fairness and inclusion. “I feel like we’re a boiling pot right now,” says Frisby, who only sees the problem getting worse as athletes speak out more. “People really don’t want to hear another side.”

Even more troubling: athlete stereotyping has increasingly tangible effects and emboldens some truly disturbing behavior. According to research from the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics and Sport, acts of racism in American sports – such as the racial slurs hurled at the Baltimore Orioles outfielder Adam Jones during a game at the Boston Red Sox – soared from 11 in 2015 to 41 in 2018. Likely, that’s just the tip of the iceberg: there were 104 reported incidents of racism in sports internationally in 2016.

Clearly, words matter. Words hurt. And yet there are few, if any, consequences for bigoted language – coded or otherwise. When the conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh moonlighted as an NFL analyst on ESPN 15 years ago and, as part of a barbed critique of Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, said “the media has been very desirous that black quarterback do well,” it touched off a national controversy. But Limbaugh wasn’t fired from ESPN or blackballed in the industry or shamed into oblivion; he quit while he was ahead and resumed his work as America’s foremost right-wing agitator. “It saddens me to see how many media professionals are actually fueling the fire and proud to do it,” Frisby says. “It’s up to journalists to make sure that stops.”

Given the fraught state of sports discourse, it’s no wonder that so many athletes are retreating to their Instagram and Twitter feeds, or the sanitized world of the Players’ Tribune. There at least, they’re free to define themselves on their own terms; they can push back against the ugly tribalism in the arena or play past it. The more they post, the less they have need for the middle men in the press box. And while that’s an unfortunate development for ink-stained wretches like me, ultimately it may be for the best. The surest way for athletes to change the conversation around them is by leading it themselves.