Nate Boyer doesn't consider himself an overt racist.
The former Green Beret, who tried out as a long-snapper for the Seattle Seahawks and later advised former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick to kneel rather than sit during the national anthem, grew up in the East Bay and said on this week's episode of NBC Sports Bay Area's "Race In America: A Candid Conversation" that he has always had a diverse friend group.
But Boyer added that, as a white man in the United States, racist thinking is "ingrained" in him. Before Tiger Woods rose to prominence as golf's first Black superstar, Boyer said his instinct as a white man would've been to question why someone who looked like Woods was on the course in the first place.
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"I might be like, ‘Oh, you know, he must be an athlete,’ or ‘He was invited by somebody. There’s no way he’s a member.’ " Boyer told Logan Murdock, Monte Poole and former Raiders star Charles Woodson in an episode that airs Friday at 5 p.m. PT. "And that’s horrible to feel that or think that. But that’s just like an initial, just an ingrained response before I think. Just like if I see ... a white teenage boy driving a nice car, [then] I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah his parents bought him that car.’ I see a teenage boy, a Black teenage boy, driving a nice Mercedes, one of my initial responses or thought would be like, ‘I wonder how he got that?’ And that’s disgusting."
[RACE IN AMERICA: Listen to the latest episode]
Countless studies have demonstrated that implicit bias, or what Ohio State University's Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity defines as "the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner," is pervasive among humans. Jenée Desmond-Harris, writing for Vox in 2016, summarized that implicit bias tends to reflect society at large and said that "among other things, there's a widespread preference for light-skinned over dark-skinned and white over Black" in the United States.
Americans nationwide are grappling with examinations of institutional racism in the wake of George Floyd's death in Minneapolis police custody last month, and confronting implicit bias is a critical part of the wider conversation stemming from protests that have occurred since then. That's, at least in part, why prominent Black athletes like Evander Kane and Richard Sherman have called on their white peers to speak out against racism.
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“I’m impressed with the white QBs speaking up because those are voices that carry different weight than the black voices for some people,” Sherman said earlier this month of white quarterbacks making public statements after Floyd's death. “Which means the people who refuse to listen to a black athlete’s perspective will hear the same thing said from a white athlete, but receive the message much differently."
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Research has shown the effects that implicit bias can have on, for instance, education, housing, medicine and policing, to name but a few areas of day-to-day life. As a result, Boyer said it's important for white people to confront their own biases.
"[That's] what we've got to continue to attack," Boyer continued. "Because that is the ugliness that will maintain through these generations if we don’t find creative ways to change that (thinking), you know what I mean? And it’s across the board.”