Fans of college football know the scenario all too well.
A preseason depth chart that looks impressive, stacked with four- and five-star recruits, but quietly packed with contingency plans.
Everyone knows that not all those players will stay. By season’s end, the ones who realize they won’t be starting right away, or that they’ll have to wait behind someone better to earn the number one spot, enter the transfer portal. Rather than improve, compete, or develop, they look for a new situation that promises immediate opportunity.
The transfer portal isn’t just a rule change. It reflects a deeper cultural shift in how we understand success, entitlement, and merit.
At its core, the portal functions like a participation trophy. It rewards dissatisfaction more than development. Instead of earning a position through growth, resilience, and competition, players are increasingly encouraged to interpret discomfort as injustice and delay as oppression. The system validates the belief that opportunity should follow identity or expectation, not performance.
That logic maps uncomfortably well onto how American society often treats race, especially whiteness, under the false banner of “meritocracy.”
White supremacy rarely presents itself today as explicit domination. Indeed, most people cringe when they hear the phrase white supremacy.
So instead, that supremacy disguises itself as fairness. As neutral rules. As “the best person for the job.” Sounds so good to our ears. But much like the transfer portal, it quietly adjusts the system to protect comfort rather than reward excellence.
When white individuals encounter competition, delay, or displacement, the system often bends to accommodate them. Through new pathways, exceptions, second and third chances, and reframed standards appear. Meanwhile, others are told to wait, endure, or prove themselves again. Lift yourselves up, they say.
In theory, meritocracy means the best performer rises. In practice, our systems ensure that whiteness itself is treated as a form of merit. Just as certain recruits arrive on campus already assumed to be future starters, whiteness often enters social, academic, and professional spaces with the benefit of the doubt built in. Struggle becomes evidence of unfairness rather than a normal part of competition.
Most of us know darn well when more Black people are actually given the chance to compete fairly at anything, they excel as a group. And I mean really excel. If we allow DEI and more opportunity, they’ll come take our jobs, many people say. And that’s precisely why nobody wants to change that system. Scared that they’ll have to up their game. Compete harder. Try harder. Not rest on historical privilege. Not rest on their pre-set five star rating.
Instead of just riding out the benefits of a system designed for white folks, people will have to strive for excellence.
The transfer portal doesn’t promote excellence. What it actually does is manage expectations. It ensures that those accustomed to being prioritized are rarely forced to sit with the discomfort of not being first. And when that discomfort arises, the system offers escape rather than accountability.
Real meritocracy, on the football field or in society, requires patience, development, and the humility to accept that someone else may currently be better. White supremacy rejects that premise. It insists that status should feel earned even when it isn’t, and that delay is an injury rather than an invitation to grow.
The lesson of the transfer portal isn’t that mobility is wrong. It’s that a culture obsessed with immediate validation will always undermine true competition. When systems prioritize comfort over growth, and privileged status over effort, they don’t elevate excellence, they just redistribute privilege.
And like college football rosters filled with players who never quite learned how to compete through adversity, societies built this way eventually find themselves asking the same question.
If everyone keeps transferring, who’s actually getting better?