Athletes could end wars if they wanted to

So Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the American national anthem was pretty brave. There’s a range of acceptable stands a black athlete can make, and one about America ain’t one of them.

America has an uneasy history about black people taking a stand. Black athletes can raise money for Africa, or for literacy in inner cities, or for “acting right” now infamously having been championed by Mr. Wholesome himself, Bill Cosby. But racism? Police brutality? Ending wars?

Even Martin Luther King, who went through hell to fight against racism was considered to have gone “too far” protesting the war in Vietnam and fighting for economic equality like he did for the strikers in Memphis where he was killed.

Being a fan of comics, I have a few black comedians who point out some of the absurdities we have in celebrity culture and society’s underlying attitude towards black activists.

Dave Chappelle talking about the Dixie Chicks:

Chris Rock: “Did Al Qaeda blow up the building in Oklahoma? No. Did Al Qaeda put anthrax in your mail? No. Did Al Qaeda drag James Byrd down the street until his eyeballs popped out his fucking head? No. I ain’t scared of Al Qaeda, I’m afraid of Al Cracka.”

Kaepernick said, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” and he won’t stop until “there’s significant change, and I feel like that flag represents what it’s supposed to represent and this country is representing people the way that it’s supposed to, I’ll stand.”

I’m reminded of the television cartoon The Boondocks, adapted from the popular comic, and it had MLK, Jr. survive the assassination attempt and wake up from his coma. After his stirring speech about the trivialities of black pop culture, black people revolted, protesting outside the White House, and later, and this is the part most relevant, black members of the NBA sitting out of games until troops are withdrawn.

The fact is, we have a wilfully ignorant mass culture that believes in the platitudes of patriotism and occupies their headspace with entertainment over the hard-learned answers to critical self-imposed questions on history and politics. This is why athletes are in such a prime position because they occupy so much of the space people fill their time with.

Yeah people could learn about politics, learn about how history affects the present and learn about attitudes, bias, and prejudices in both individuals and systems, but like, the game is on, Berkeley, so shut the fuck up about what’s wrong with stuff.

That’s the tepid response. The right wing response has been blacks have no business confronting white America to look into the mirror. That is the explicit response to black athletes like Lebron James or Dwyane Wade who called for professional athletes to work hard in their communities to be agents of change and wore shirts with the tragic and powerful last words of Eric Garner when he was choked to death by police for the crime of stopping a fight: “I can’t breathe”.

The president of the police union in Cleveland, after one such display, said “It’s pretty pathetic when athletes think they know the law. They should stick to what they know best on the field.”

And yet it is black athletes in particular, who make up over 70% of the NFL rosters, that live the racist legacy imposed on their communities. As Rolling Stone points out, the NFL fanbase is 83% white and 64% male.

It is because these athletes have so much visibility that they have so much power, but also why the backlash can be so severe when the majority of viewers are, let’s be real, rather happily ignorant white folk. Gabby Douglas didn’t cover her chest during the national anthem, here was the response:

Apart from the double-standard that Gabby faced compared to man-bimbo Ryan Lochte’s lies about being mugged at gunpoint, how mouth-breathingly stupid is all this?

Does a lapel pin indicate to you how much patriotism one shows? Well, you say, it doesn’t take much to put one on so why wouldn’t you? But it doesn’t mean much to not have one either. That’s the definition of pointless, and yet these empty platitudes are so strongly held to.

Rather than focusing on why black athletes ought to protest, or any athletes really, let’s focus on the fact that if they did, tens of billions of dollars in business would be disrupted, and more importantly, how people spend their time watching sports would be disrupted.

I can’t be the only one who thinks there’s an opportunity there. Civic education is a joke in North America, in most democracies actually, but central to that education is systems-thinking, and for black athletes to make these stands and confront people to do a bit of systems-thinking, that can be a good thing. Not without its backlash, but progress isn’t inevitable, and the conversation can still be upgraded and advanced by having so many visible powerful people make that conversation a forced reality for a population so content to watch entertainment and pretend they don’t need to be more thoughtful.

Can you imagine if NHL players sat out games until real commitments and meaningful progress was made on for First Nations and Aboriginal peoples? The Tragically Hip ended their farewell tour with a call for just that!

Can you imagine if NBA players went on strike until mandatory minimum sentences in the War on Drugs were repealed?

Entertainment takes up a very large part of North Americans lives, US adults spend 5 and half hours in front a screen each day. 64% of Americans watch NFL football, with six in ten saying they spend roughly five hours a week watching it.

If entertainment goes on strike, or concerns itself with serious topics, yes there’d be a backlash, but there would also force a conversation worth having. That’s why I say athletes could end wars, if they want to.