SI story: The White Cornerback

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All 64 starting cornerbacks in the NFL are black. So are their backups. One hundred-sixty black cornerbacks, give or take. Not a single white one. It’s been this way for more than 10 years.

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To be fair, though, calling Sehorn the last of the white cornerbacks means ignoring the dozen or so snaps Dustin Fox played for the Eagles and the Bills in 2006 and ’07. It means overlooking Ethan Kilmer’s single magnificent snap as a corner for the Bengals in ’06, and it completely neglects another member of the Cincinnati secondary that season, the real Sehorn—the last white player to start a regular-season NFL game at the position. (For the record, the tight-knit cornerback fraternity seems to respect Patriots receiver Julian Edelman for the spot duty he pulled over 13 regular season games in ’11—“I remember that,” says 14-year NFL cornerback Terence Newman, of the Vikings, “he played his arse off”—but none among them consider Edelman a real corner, especially since he has betrayed them by catching 377 passes over the last five seasons, each thrown by a man wearing the same color jersey.)

Over the past 20 years, only seven white men have played cornerback in a regular-season NFL game, including receiver Mike Furrey, who was thrown Edelman-like into the Browns’ rotation in 2009. Yes, it can get mighty awkward anytime a white man raises his hand and points out what might be a touch of racial discrimination against him, especially in America in 2017. But even if we take issue with the white cornerback’s right to feel frustrated, given the horrors inflicted by white men on non-white men on this soil over the last four centuries, there’s no denying that during the last 20 years the new hires in his line of work have had one thing glaringly in common—with very rare exceptions.

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On second-and-short, Drew Brees tried to dump a pass to a running back out in the flat, but the former Penn State walk-on intercepted Brees with nothing but green turf in front of him. A diving Brees almost caught Kilmer at the 20, which would have heaped shame on the tiny fraternity he didn’t realize he had just joined, but Kilmer scooted by and thus turned his first snap as an NFL cornerback into a 52-yard touchdown.

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