So this is how Cam Newton is going to handle things, how the “African-American QB who scares people” plans to tackle racism.

The game plan, apparently, is to run from it, ignore it, pretend it doesn’t exist, even as Donald Trump makes a platform of it, as Alton Sterling and Philando Castile die as byproducts of it, as Milwaukee (and a nation) slowly burn because of it.

Just seven months ago, just before Super Bowl 50, Newton had described himself as the “African-American QB that scares people.” But then came Monday and he was the second coming of O.J. Simpson, tone-deaf in his zebra-print Versace pants, blind to the racism that he’d endured during five polarizing NFL seasons.

Blind to racism, period. “I don’t want this to be about race, because it’s not. It’s not,” Newton told GQ in its September cover story. “Like, we’re beyond that. As a nation.”

It was a statement that could only come from the ignorant bubble of megastardom, and now that Newton has ascended there, he suddenly doesn’t want to leave. But worse than that – worse than the silence of Michael Jordan and Derek Jeter a generation ago – the quarterback who once proclaimed HIMSELF “the African-American QB that scares people,” wants to sell an illusion that he (and everyone, really) knows isn’t even true.

“It’s not racism,” Newton told GQ of the public reactions to his play, of the letter a woman wrote criticizing his celebrations and “pelvic thrusts,” of the madness over his post-Super Bowl tantrum. “Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion.”

You don’t understand the illusion, either, because you know that Cam Newton can’t possibly believe it himself. You know it because Newton has Twitter and he’s got to have a television, and he was sitting in the audience at the ESPYs just last month when Carmelo Anthony – flanked by LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Paul – stood before everyone and said that the “system is broken . . . and the racial divide definitely is not new, but the urgency for change is definitely at an all-time high.”

You know Newton doesn’t believe his GQ interview himself because of that moment back in January, when he proclaimed himself the “African-American QB that scares people.” Back then, he was the hero of the African-American community, a community that defended him vehemently days later, after his Super Bowl media standoff.

And yet here he is, so drunk on mega-celebrity that he’s ignoring the deaths livestreamed to his iPad just a month ago, ignoring his own quotes, and running from racism the same way he ran from that late Super Bowl fumble. Here he is, refusing to comment even on Trump, as if he could somehow draw flak for dissing the most twisted presidential candidate of them all.

Here Newton is, reminding us why athletes can be dangerous when they wield their platforms with sloppy, unfinished messages. Newton is doing O.J., heading away from Anthony and James and Wade, just as Simpson once stood apart from Jim Brown and Ali and Abdul-Jabbar. It was a move that brought Simpson celebrity even as it made him a living lie, the go-to example of an athlete “transcending” his blackness, proof of a country past racism.

Decades later, nobody can believe that message, not with people dying and cities rioting and racism a presidential platform.

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