OLD CONTENT
In the news recently, unhinged reactionaries are burning shoes in a protest against those who protest racism, and a certain CEO who is too cheap to pay for basic healthcare for his employees has been ousted from the company he founded after complaining uppity NFL players are costing him profits (although, his outburst probably cost the company more money, considering they are no longer an official sponsor of the NFL).
Although rightists don't want to acknowledge it, it is painfully obvious why these athletes are using their time in the spotlight to protest (and why they have something to protest about in the first place):
As the Guardian’s series on race and sports starts today – and we mark two years since Colin Kaepernick first knelt during the national anthem – I am reminded that whenever an NBA player comes close to shattering one of my dusty old records, eager journalists contact me to ask how I feel. Here’s how I feel: At the time I set those records – most points scored, most blocked shots, most MVP awards, blah, blah, blah – I celebrated them because they confirmed that all my hard work and discipline since childhood was effective in me achieving my goal of becoming the best possible athlete.
But that wasn’t my only goal. The even greater significance those records had to me then, and has to me even more now, is in providing a platform to keep the discussion of social inequalities – whether racial, gender-related, or economic – alive and vibrant so that we may come together as a nation and fix them. Historically, that has been the greatness of the American spirit: we don’t flinch at identifying our own faults and using our moral fortitude and ingenuity to become a better nation. In honoring that spirit, I pay tribute to two of my most important mentors, UCLA coach John Wooden and Muhammad Ali. It is Ali’s voice I often hear in my head: “When you saw me in the boxing ring fighting, it wasn’t just so I could beat my opponent. My fighting had a purpose. I had to be successful in order to get people to listen to the things I had to say.” All sports records will inevitably be broken, but the day after they are, the world won’t have changed. But every day you speak up about injustice, the next day the world may be just a little better for someone.
Sports is the most popular form of entertainment, with Americans spending about $56bn on sports events last year, compared to about $11bn on movies. Seventy-two percent of 18- to 29-year-olds consider themselves sports fans, as do a majority of those older. This level of popularity has made sports more than just entertainment, it’s also part of our national identity, a source of inspiration for personal achievement, and a means to teach our children valuable lessons about teamwork and social ethics. For African Americans, sports has all those values – but it also has some extra implications.
For people of color, professional sports has always been a mirror of America’s attitude toward race: as long as black players were restricted from taking the field, then the rest of black Americans would never truly be considered equal, meaning they would not be given equal educational or employment opportunities. Even after they were permitted to play, sports has been the public face of America, not what we sentimentally profess to believe when waving flags on the Fourth of July, but of our actual daily behavior. That is why whatever happens in sports regarding race, plays out on the national stage. Right now, sports may be the best hope for change regarding racial disparity because it has the best chance of informing white Americans of that disparity and motivating them to act.
The problem is that this is not the message that those who profit from disparity want the public to hear.
Over the years, I have participated in some of these protests. In 1967, when I was only 20, I was the youngest member of the Cleveland Summit, a gathering of black athletes tasked with determining the sincerity of Ali’s claim of being a conscientious objector. In 1968, a few months after the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, I had been invited to play on the Olympic men’s basketball team. I was torn because I knew that joining the team would signal that I supported the way people of color were being treated in America – which I didn’t. But not joining the team could look like I didn’t love America – which I did. Instead, I chose to teach kids in New York City how to play basketball and why they should stay in school. My decision not to play resulted in hate mail calling me, among other things, “an ungrateful ****”. That word, “ungrateful,” is the key to understanding what angers those who are so incensed at players’ protests. They want black athletes to be grateful that they’ve been given a seat at the table and to therefore ignore their brothers and sisters who have little hope of achieving that kind of success.
But I am even more energized and hopeful when I see those same athletes speak out against injustices because I know that in doing so, they are risking the careers that they spent their whole lives working towards. Their willingness to risk everything in order to give voice to the powerless – despite all efforts to silence them – makes me proud as an athlete and as an American. As Mark Twain once said, “[T]rue patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation all the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it.” Athletes who speak out are proclaiming their loyalty to a constitution that demands equality and inclusiveness, not to the government officials who try to undermine those ideals by silencing its critics.
www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/aug/28/notes-from-an-ungrateful-athlete-why-race-and-sports-matter-in-americaIt has been 50 years since another recognizable sports protest, but little has changed.
Tommie Smith was once among the fastest men on Earth. During his sprinting career, he held 13 world records (11 of them simultaneously). He set the most famous of these on October 16, 1968, when his 19.83-second 200-meter dash at the Mexico City Olympics earned him a gold medal. His countryman and college teammate John Carlos won the bronze. When the two Americans mounted the podium to receive their medals, “The Star-Spangled Banner” blaring over the stadium speakers, each bowed his head and raised a black-gloved fist—Smith’s right, Carlos’s left. Around the stadium, jaws dropped and cameras flashed. Their protest, which was interpreted by many viewers as a Black Power salute, remains one of the most iconic images in the history of sports.
Smith was born in 1944, the seventh of 12 children. His father was a sharecropper, first in Texas and then in California; Smith grew up picking cotton and grapes when he wasn’t in the classroom. In high school, he played basketball and won a scholarship to San Jose State University, where he contemplated becoming a three-sport athlete before settling on track. San Jose’s team was at the time amassing top talent, earning it the nickname “Speed City.” Smith thrived, tying two world records—the 200-meter dash and the 220-yard straightaway—in his sophomore year.
Immediately after running those races, Smith headed to a protest march he knew about through a student athlete turned activist named Harry Edwards, with whom Smith had bonded over a mutual respect for education (“You can’t eat speed,” Smith recalls Edwards telling him). It was 1965, and the civil-rights movement was in full swing; inspired by Malcolm X, Edwards had decided to organize student athletes to protest racial disparities at San Jose State. Smith was an early and staunch supporter of Edwards’s movement, which quickly grew beyond campus. In 1967, as the Mexico City Olympics approached, Edwards formed the Olympic Project for Human Rights with a handful of athletes. The group threatened an athlete boycott of the Games—though Edwards says its real goal “was to change the total perception and understanding of the role that sports played in black life in this country.”
The athletes ultimately decided to attend the Olympics, clearing the way for Smith and Carlos to win their respective medals and stage their demonstration. The protest was meticulously thought out: The men wore scarves to symbolize lynching; black socks and no shoes to symbolize poverty; and gloves, Smith has said, to represent “freedom and power; equality.” They also had on Olympic Project for Human Rights pins, as did the silver medalist, a white Australian named Peter Norman, in solidarity.
When Smith and Carlos raised their fists, the stadium and the world went quiet. “For a few seconds, you honestly could have heard a frog **** on cotton,” Carlos wrote in his autobiography. “There’s something awful about hearing fifty thousand people go silent, like being in the eye of a hurricane.”
The shunning that followed the silence was even more difficult to bear. Both Smith and Carlos were barred from future international competition, effectively ending their sprinting careers. “I never would know how fast I could have become,” Smith later wrote in his memoir. “I would have just turned 28 by the time of the 1972 Olympics in Munich, and everyone has seen what runners like Carl Lewis and Michael Johnson have done as they matured.” Back home, the men were ostracized not just by white Americans but by many black people who feared being associated with them. Hate mail and death threats piled up. Smith got one letter telling him to “go back to Africa,” complete with a fake plane ticket. “I was knocked verbally and financially,” Smith told me.
After graduating from San Jose State, Smith was able to find only sporadic employment, including a brief stint on the Cincinnati Bengals’ backup squad. Smith says he could barely afford to supply his infant son with formula during this period, and the resulting stress contributed to the dissolution of his first marriage. He eventually was hired as the track coach and an instructor at Santa Monica College—positions he would hold for more than two decades—but he continued to struggle. As his second marriage was falling apart, in the mid-’90s, he was robbed of tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry and memorabilia.
By then, his notoriety seemed to be fading to anonymity. Delois, his wife, told me that when she met Smith, in the late ’90s, she had no idea who he was. (Her daughters had to look him up online.)
Kaino helped arrange for Smith to meet Kaepernick last fall, an encounter that was filmed for a documentary portion of their collaboration. “He knew about the stand in Mexico City,” Smith told me proudly. “He was on his knee and I was on my feet, but we represent the same thing. The brutality, inequality.”
After the 1968 Olympics, Smith was called a militant and his act was labeled an expression of black power—descriptions he’s been trying to shake for decades. He bristles at the mention of the Black Panthers (though Edwards, the San Jose State activist, was a member), and he insists that his protest was about human rights broadly. “I never focused solely on blacks to the extent that everything else was secondary,” he has written. “I did not want my participation to be about only one kind of people.”
Like Smith, Kaepernick has been vilified and unable to find a job (he’s suing the NFL for colluding against him). Nonetheless, Smith believes that Kaepernick’s actions could prove more impactful than shorter-lived protests by other African American athletes over the past 50 years—among them the basketball players Craig Hodges and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf in the 1990s. “You just keep working, it will happen,” Smith told me. “I’m not broken to a point that I can’t move forward. Colin Kaepernick is going to be the same way.”
Perhaps needless to say, Smith was not invited to the White House in 1968, as many Olympians are. But in 2016 (shortly before Kaepernick first took a knee), President Obama saw fit to belatedly honor Smith by having him visit; Kaino and Delois came along. As a gift, they brought Obama a drawing of Smith passing a baton during a world-record-setting 4x400-meter relay race. On the back, Smith wrote, in part: “Most importantly, the ‘Baton’ was not dropped.”
Smith returned to the White House again later that year with the U.S. Olympic team, but says that he won’t be visiting the current president. The baton has, in his view, been dropped. “But it didn’t roll out of the lane,” he added. “You can pick it up.”
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/tommie-smith-1968-50-years-later/568294/In True Left spirit, protestors like these bravely risk their entire careers in order for their efforts to have as wide of an impact on society as possible. To protest against injustice and ensure the baton of the American Dream is not dropped, an individual cannot just remain silent, be "grateful", and take the money.
Malcolm X used the metaphor of the house slave vs. the field slave to illustrate the divide between oppressed individuals who were "grateful" for the luxury they received (and hence did not desire to 'rock the boat') vs. those who hated oppression to such a degree that they would risk their lives for it to end. As we can see from the current wave of sports protests, both attitudes are alive and well in the US.
"Colin has to make up his mind whether he's truly an activist or he's a football player," Brown said. "Football is commercial. You have owners. You have fans. And you want to honor that if you're making that kind of money. ...
"You have to understand there's intelligence that's involved, OK? I can't be two things at once that contradict each other. If I sign for money, then the people I sign with, they have rules and regulations."
www.thepostgame.com/jim-brown-colin-kaepernick-activist-flag-anthem(Spoiler alert, Kaepernick has decided that he is the only owner of his soul, and that standing up for Americans who do not have a voice is more important than remaining silent to collect a paycheck).
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www.huffpost.com/entry/megan-rapinoe-trump-disgusting-attack-four-congresswomen_n_5d3393b4e4b004b6adb0c63aOutspoken World Cup soccer star Megan Rapinoe blasted President Donald Trump’s comments calling on four progressive congresswomen of color to get out of the U.S. But Rapinoe also said she was energized by the backlash against Trump.
“It’s disgusting, to be honest,” Rapinoe said Saturday on The Van Jones Show on CNN, referring to Trump’s tweets against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.). “To say it’s disappointing ... doesn’t even come close.”
She also called Trump’s “send her back” chant — referring to Omar, the only one of the lawmakers not born in the U.S. — “sad and disgusting and despicable” in an interview published Saturday in The Charlotte Observer.
She added: “I think we’re one step away from just saying a racial slur on national television from the president of the United States. At every step it’s shocking. I hope people don’t stop being shocked by it all, because it’s truly the worst of the worst.”
But the co-captain and star midfielder of the world champion U.S. women’s national soccer team also told Jones that she was heartened by the negative reaction to Trump’s racism. The House voted to condemn his message — and Omar returned to cheers at the airport back home in Minnesota earlier this week.
“The more that we ... are upset about it and don’t accept that kind of behavior from all sides, then the better place we’re going to be,” Rapinoe said on CNN.
...
Asked by The Charlotte Observer if Trump crossed a line telling the congresswomen to get out of the country, Rapinoe responded: “All the lines were crossed forever ago for Donald Trump, dating back to birtherism.”
Rapinoe rocketed into the political arena when she was recorded in an interview before the World Cup saying there was no way she’d visit the “**** White House” if invited. She has called Trump a racist and misogynist, and said he “doesn’t fight for the same things we fight for,” referring to her teammates.
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www.foxnews.com/sports/us-fencer-takes-knee-in-protest-at-pan-am-games“We must call for change,” Imboden said afterward on Twitter. “This week I am honored to represent Team USA at the Pan Am Games, taking home Gold and Bronze.”
“My pride however has been cut short by the multiple shortcomings of the country I hold so dear to my heart,” he said. “Racism, Gun Control, mistreatment of immigrants.”
Firstly, thank you.
Secondly, if racism is a problem (and I agree it is), then victims of racism need to own guns and be willing to use them against racists. If mistreatment of immigrants is a problem (and I agree it is), then immigrants need to own guns and be willing to use them against ICE/CBP.