Amateurism rules required by the N.C.A.A. and its predecessors were instituted in college football in the midst of a debate about how to maintain the gentlemanly character of such competitions. An 1897 New York Times editorial decried even the practice of paid ticketing as “not quite nice” and ill-befitting “young gentlemen.” The crisis that precipitated the formation of the N.C.A.A. was partly concern about the danger of football, but also significantly (as Kate Buford put it in her biography of Jim Thorpe) about the pressing question of whether young men “not of a decent sort” should be allowed to compete. Well into the 20th century, fans and sportswriters in the Deep South openly hailed the success of all-white teams like the one at the University of Alabama as vindicating the Confederacy and as a symbolic victory for white Southern-ness more broadly.

And like the Confederate monuments across the South whose construction spiked under Jim Crow, Confederate imagery made its way most fully into Ole Miss fandom, from the Confederate flag to the adoption of “Dixie” as the unofficial fight song — in 1948, as the segregationist Dixiecrat party was ascendant. As if to make their meaning perfectly clear, in 1982, as The New York Times reported, “about 100” white Ole Miss fans walked out of James Meredith’s speech commemorating the 20th anniversary of his integration of the university and performed the “Hotty Toddy” cheer (usually reserved for sporting events) outside. Like the “heritage” lauded by white nationalists and the president, the “we” called upon by these images is quite clearly nostalgic for an era of (even greater) white domination.

Today, the N.C.A.A. defends its amateurism rules as a means to “protect” student-athletes rather than to exclude the wrong sort of people, and open defenses of segregated teams are treated as embarrassing historical footnotes. Philosophers and fans alike have thus suggested that today’s sports fandom — which brings together diverse populations and encourages fans to cheer for athletes who don’t look like themselves — as evidence that we are moving toward colorblindness. If white football fans can cheer for the success of majority-black teams in the once officially segregated South, surely racial equality is not far behind?

Yet we should not be so sure that white fans’ willingness to support black athletes on the gridiron entails a genuine acceptance of racial equality, nor their inclusion of black people more broadly in the “we” that is supposed to be No. 1. Indeed, white acceptance of black entertainers and white exploitation of the physical labor of black persons long predates the civil rights movement and has been perfectly compatible with anti-black racism.

Moreover, many contemporary white fans’ responses to players of color — when those players express political views (like Colin Kaepernick), behave in ways that make them uncomfortable (like Richard Sherman) or make mistakes (as Tyrann Mathieu did when he lost his eligibility at Louisiana State University for testing positive for marijuana) — are telling. Many are content to identify with black football players for as long as they are useful on the field, to imaginatively project themselves into the physical power and hypermasculinity that (fans imagine) they embody, and to discard and denigrate them when they don’t play their parts as expected — to treat them, as Malcolm X put it when describing his own experience as a popular student and athlete in a predominantly white school, like mascots.

Mascots may occasion feelings of affection, but they aren’t part of the community they serve. No one is inviting tigers into their home, no matter how much they like the idea of their ferocity on the field. As Malcolm X explained in his autobiography, no one would tolerate him dating the white girls in his class or becoming a lawyer in his childhood community, regardless of how loudly they cheered for him on the basketball court. Too often, many white fans’ treatment of black athletes suggests that the most accurate first-person plural for their relation is not “we” so much as “ours” — a relation of commodity rather than community.