Why Sports Are The Perfect Place For Protest (And It Might Just Save Them, Too)

In elementary school you’re often asked to do reports on historical figures. I can recall a handful of such assignments, and my choice always fell into one of two categories: athletes or civil rights leaders.

Looking back, the content of these reports couldn’t feel more divergent (Martin Luther King Jr. gave the “I Have A Dream” speech and was assassinated for his views; Grant Hill won Rookie Of The Year in 1995 averaging nearly 20 points per game).

But here we are in 2017 and these two disparate fields that have spoken to me since childhood, sports and racial justice, are converging. We are increasingly awakened to intersectionality, but I have to admit surprise that my devotion to social justice would collide with all the hours I poured into playing Madden.

The past few weeks have made me think about sports — maybe the thing I’ve thought about the most in my entire life — in a new way. I was aware of protests from the past, from the 1968 Olympics to Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf protesting the national anthem in the late 90s, but it wasn’t until recently that it dawned on me: not only is sports an acceptable place for protest, it’s an incredible place for protest.

Most college and professional sports in America are flattened into a two-dimensional corporate offering. Tune in, unwind, drink Coke. Everything about the experience conditions our brain to treat it like an entertainment product. Between the sounds, the colors, and the superhuman feats, it hardly even registers as real. And that’s by design.

Because all the while we’re served up commercials and patriotism and commercials about patriotism with our brains numbed into a perfect state of acceptance. It’s a capitalistic ideal. Everything about the spectacle is about drawing in attention and selling, and it’s precisely manufactured by the cabal of leagues, owners, brands, and broadcasters. All of them profit immensely.

The only vulnerability in the system is that the product is people.

Having flattened, packaged, and elevated professional sports into primetime entertainment makes it all the more jarring to spectators when an athlete bursts free from his/her commercial-encased confines to shout “I am a human with views of my own.”

And therein lies the majesty I’ve discovered within this wave of protests. Protest is supposed to be jarring. And what’s more jarring than your toys coming to life or the actor breaking script and addressing the audience?

These protests aren’t complicated or problematic, they are fucking perfect.

But applauding their effectiveness doesn’t address the question of whether they should be allowed. Setting aside the basic constitutional arguments (which seems to be en vogue these days), I feel that protests are more than just excusable within athletics. I think they’re essential for the longterm health of these games we love. Here’s why.

Denying athletes the right to protest perpetuates the culture that they are are soldiers with marching orders, chain of command, and a mandate not to desert. It’s often said they are lucky to have their occupation and the spoils of money and fame that come with it. As if those luxuries are a tradeoff — shreds of their own humanity as the exchange.

But it’s exactly that militaristic chain of command mindset that’s responsible for some of the most reprehensible stories to come out of sports in the past few years. Jerry Sandusky and Joe Paterno were coaches, and those young boys were lucky to have access to them. The athletes or assistants who sensed something was wrong were told the higher ups would take care of it. Stay in your lane, do your job, no need to protest.

The Michigan State and Team USA gymnasts abused by their doctor were given a golden opportunity. Why would they want to risk that opportunity on expressing a basic human sense that something felt very wrong? They were athletes. Older men were in charge of them, their bodies, and ultimately handling their complaints. To protest was to mortgage their future.

Is it a dramatic line to draw between taking a knee and sexual abuse scandals? On first glance maybe, but in my mind they are symptoms of the same public sentiment surrounding the field, or rather industry, of sports. Athletes are athletes not people. They are owned property, and lucky to be so. Property doesn’t protest.

The industry propagates that notion because it’s better for business that Colin Kaepernick is a Nike-wearing, Gatorade-drinking, stadium-filling entertainment product. Not a black-skinned, family-having human whose mindful of the struggles and dangers faced by other humans less fortunate than him. As a spectator and consumer, your stance on these protests is casting a vote for the former or the latter. Do you see a product or a human?

To see an athlete as a human is to see a man or a woman with a platform — a platform they earned. It’s not a gift bestowed to them, and you sure as hell don’t inherit a starting quarterback job the way your daddy passes down ownership of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Athletes are humans who work, and work damn hard, to earn the pedestal they stand upon.

Speaking freely from a place of prominence you worked hard to achieve for yourself… How the hell can we protest that?