A protest walkout by NBA players about the shooting of Jacob Blake captured the world’s attention. Photo: GETTY IMAGES
For years I’ve said it, loudly, to anyone who’d listen.
If we as African-Americans wanted to stop America dead in its tracks; if we wanted it to hear, then force it to meaningfully act on our angst and outrage against police and vigilante brutality and murder that has roiled our collective souls since our 1865 emancipation from slavery; then our professional athletes, watched and worshipped by millions of white Americans, would have to strike.
So it was with tremendous pride that I watched last week as members of the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks and their opponents, the Orlando Magic, exited the court and announced they wouldn’t battle — in a playoff game, no less — as a protest against Kenosha, Wisconsin police officers shooting black resident Jacob Blake seven times in the back during an arrest attempt.
In the three months since Minneapolis police officers killed unarmed black motorist George Floyd, and the resultant, worldwide anti-police brutality and anti-racism movement has surged, police brutality has worsened.
But African-American professional athletes’ fully — finally — utilizing their considerable influence to advocate for social change has grown.
When other mostly-black NBA and WNBA teams took their unprecedented steps off the court, the snowball effect of black Major League Baseball players, and individual athletes such as female tennis star Naomi Osaka following suit was palpable.
But when other teams from competitions with far less black representation, such as Major League Soccer (25 per cent) and National Hockey League (5 per cent) rallied to the cause, the entire world took notice.
It gave me chills, yet warmed my heart seeing black baseballers Dominic Smith and Billy Hamilton lead their New York Mets — the team I’ve wholeheartedly supported since my conception; the team for which my father passed on to me his love – lead their team’s walkout at their Citi Field home, covering home plate with a t-shirt bearing the phrase encapsulating our demand for equity: “Black Lives Matter.”
A few days later, I was disappointed to read that the Bucks and other NBA teams had decided to resume their playoff season. But reading on, I felt a great sense of hope for social change I haven’t felt in years.
The NBA players agreed to return — with conditions they brilliantly demanded and extracted from NBA owners, including a huge one: that the league open NBA arenas opening for in-person voting on Election Day, Tuesday November 3.
That masterstroke significantly increases the odds for forcing desperately needed regime change.
The players’ bold move to get their corporate employers’ commitment to expand democracy — in the face of the Republican Party, “doing its darnedest,” as former President Barack Obama recently said, to execute voter suppression — may very well affect election results in key swing states with NBA teams: Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
The players’ initiative further emboldens tens of millions of black and brown Americans and their white allies to excise from the American body politic the malignant White House pestilence that for four years has attempted to completely poison inter-ethnic relations.
The response from some corners of white America to black athletes flexing their messaging muscle has been galling.
Some commentators have whinged that professional sports are “an escape” from everyday life’s hardships and that “millionaire” black athletes shouldn’t use their platform for “politics.”
What is it blinding them to reality — wilful ignorance or unchecked arrogance?
There’s never an escape from racism for people of colour in America — or in any other economically developed country in which we are ethnic minorities.
Whatever lofty athletic prowess, celebrity status, elite education, political office, or economic status any of us hold; whether we live in fashionable suburbs or impoverished housing projects, nothing insulates or inoculates us against the racism of legions of over-aggressive police officers, overtly racist vigilantes, or the coven of overly-entitled young and middle-aged “Karens” weaponizing their white privilege.
Their message these last four years has become amplified; they want us only in one of three places: on their TVs or radios, entertaining them in sports and the arts; in state and corporate prisons, rotting; or in cemeteries, dead, as a punishment for challenging the power structure.
In other social media corners, white conservatives quickly condemned Blake — rendered paralysed from the waist down by police officers’ bullets and later handcuffed to his hospital bed — as a violent criminal.
They accepted as gospel, unchallenged, the Kenosha Police Union statement that Blake effectively brought the hail of bullets on himself.
The union’s statement alleged Blake put an officer in a headlock and then went for a knife inside his car.
An eyewitness who recorded video of the events told a Milwaukee police station he heard police yell: “Drop the knife!” but never saw Blake with one. A woman Blake knew had called Kenosha police, claiming he was trying to steal her car.
Officers discovered Blake had an open warrant on felony sexual assault charges. But charges are accusations, not facts. The American justice system says suspects are innocent until proven guilty and guarantees them fair trials. Conservatives rushing to judge Blake before his day in court only reinforce persistent, anti-black stereotypes.
Some white media commentators have simplistically said if Blake hadn’t defiantly walked away from officers and allowed them to handcuff him, he wouldn’t have been harmed.
In their experience? Very likely.
But new viral video from Sacramento, California, showing two white sheriff’s deputies brutalising a compliant, unarmed, and stationary black man with his hands on his head, suggests otherwise.
In the Kenosha video, as Los Angeles Lakers’ icon LeBron James recently noted, the three officers appear to have had ample time and opportunity to subdue Blake, instead of shooting him in the back near his car, with three of his children watching from inside.
Even the complainant told local media the officers’ force was excessive. While conservative talking heads disparage as “lawless” violent opportunists at protests, they never scold police for abusing peaceful protesters.
With black athletes leading calls to action, we urgently need our sporting white brothers and sisters to bravely stand with us now, like Australian runner Peter Norman did in 1968 in front of a worldwide TV audience at the Mexico City Olympic Games as African-American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised black-gloved fists to protest racism.
Pete Carroll, head coach of the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks, helped with his recent, impassioned and heartfelt words at a presser.
“Black people know the truth, they know exactly what’s going on,” Carroll said. “It’s white people who don’t know. It’s not that [blacks] are not telling us; they’ve been telling us the stories.
“We’ve been taught a false history of what happened in this country, we’ve been basing things on false premises, and it has not been about equality for all, it has not been about freedom for all, it has not been opportunity for all, and it needs to be. This is a humanity issue we’re dealing with.”
Today’s anti-racism movement is about human rights, not politics. Black athletes, too many of whom four years ago balked at kneeling with brother Colin Kaepernick to take a stand, are now “woke.” They’ve accepted their responsibility to agitate for social change, using their visibility, voice and vigour.
