Mediocre

by Ijeoma Oluo

  In the 2016 NFL draft, safety Ian Simon—one of the most vocal protestors on the Mizzou team and a well-respected player with good prospects for a professional career—met with several NFL teams but went undrafted and unsigned. Simon, who found work as a custom-suit salesman in Dallas, Texas, told Sports Illustrated that he had no regrets over his part in the protests, even if it might have hurt his chances at an NFL career. The protests were a success in his eyes. “There was no stumble. We had a plan, and it couldn’t have gone any better,” he said.27

  FOOTBALL TAKES A KNEE

  Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say: “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now? Out. He’s fired. He’s fired!”

  —Donald Trump, 2017 28

  On March 11, 2018, as Seattle Seahawks cornerbacks Neiko Thorpe and Mike Tyson left the Virginia Mason Athletic Center in Renton, Washington, they were confronted by an angry white woman. The woman had followed the two Black athletes to work in order to yell at them for protesting police brutality during the national anthem at Seahawks games.

  Thorpe and Tyson recorded the interaction, and when you watch the video you can tell that they found the woman’s profanity- laden tirade hilarious, if a little confusing.

  Thorpe and Tyson had never protested at a Seahawks game.

  Whether or not Thorpe or Tyson had ever taken a knee at a Seahawks game didn’t matter to the woman yelling at them. They were Black, and they were Seahawks, so they were guilty.

  “I don’t care who you are,” she told them while jabbing an angry finger in their direction. “All I care about is that my tax dollars pay for you to play, and go fucking play. And get off your fucking knees.”29

  The controversy that began when Black NFL players started kneeling or sitting during the national anthem before games shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise to league administration. When Roger Goodell first took the job leading the NFL in 2006, he was warned that something like this could happen. At a 49ers preseason game, a sixty-four-year-old Black man named Harry Edwards sat next to him. Edwards was an advisor to the 49ers, a civil rights activist, and a sociology professor at University of California, Berkeley. He had dedicated much of his career to empowering Black athletes and was respected in academia and in football—so much so that he was often referred to as the father of athlete activism.

  Edwards warned Goodell that Black athletes were becoming the preeminent stars of the NFL, and with that stardom would come power. If the NFL didn’t prepare for how it was going to support and work with emboldened and empowered Black athletes, the league would find itself in direct conflict with the most prominent members of its teams.

  Edwards later explained the reasoning behind his advice to Goodell: “These athletes don’t leave the issues that they have in the community at the locker-room door; those come in to the locker room.… He was going to have to deal with some sociopolitical issues that were extrainstitutional that were going to come over the stadium wall.”30

  Edwards didn’t think that Goodell understood what he was saying at the time, and it doesn’t look like the league did anything to address a Black majority of players who may have wanted to use their power to address social issues. It is likely that there were not enough Black people in management meetings to tell the administrators. The disconnect between NFL administration and Black players was plain to see in the numbers. Whatever diversity had reached the NFL team rosters had certainly not reached NFL leadership. In 2006 (when Goodell became commissioner), the NFL had never had a Black team owner (it still doesn’t today) and had only four Black general managers (or equivalent positions; only two Black GMs had been named in the entire NFL history). Seventy-eight percent of its head coaches were white even though 68 percent of the players were Black.31 The league was not prepared for a rise in Black power in its ranks. But ready or not, Goodell was going to see firsthand what Edwards was talking about.

  It all started in August 2016, when San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick decided to sit for the national anthem during a preseason game.

  “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color,” Kaepernick explained to NFL Media. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”32

  Kaepernick was not speaking in hyperbole when he said there were “bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” The last few years had been brutal reminders for Black people across the country of how little, 150 years after the abolition of slavery, their lives mattered to broader society. Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice—these names were making headlines in videos of Black bodies lying in the streets at the hands of those sworn to serve and protect. Twenty-seven percent of people who were killed by cops in 2015 were Black, even though Blacks make up only 12 percent of the overall population. In addition, cops are four times more likely to use force in their encounters with Black people than they are with whites.33

  After sitting for two games, Kaepernick met with a military veteran. The man asked Kaepernick to kneel instead of sitting for the anthem, as a way to protest injustice against Black people in America while still showing respect for US military vets. Kaepernick took the veteran’s advice and began kneeling in protest instead of sitting.34

  After his first kneeling protest in September 2016, Kaepernick vowed to protest the entire upcoming season. He would do more than protest, though; he also pledged to donate $1 million to charitable organizations that helped marginalized communities. He was doing this because he felt it was his patriotic duty to fight injustice.

  “I’m not anti-American,” Kaepernick explained. “I love America. I love people. That’s why I’m doing this. I want to help make America better.”35

  Kaepernick’s words didn’t matter. His conversation with a veteran didn’t matter. It was a photo of Kaepernick kneeling during the anthem that set off the media firestorm.

  Other Black players across the league began protesting. Not in huge numbers, but enough to alarm media, white fans, team owners, and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. Dozens of players formed the Players Coalition, to support Kaepernick and to work together to advance racial justice issues in and outside the NFL. Discussions of police brutality, free speech, and respect for military veterans dominated news cycles. Opinion was sharply split on racial lines, with 62 percent of whites disapproving of the protests, and 74 percent of Blacks approving.36 Owners began pressuring Goodell to put a stop to the protests.

  “They wanted to make the problem go away real fast,” explained NFL player Michael Bennett when I asked him about NFL leadership’s response to the protests. “The game was the most important thing. It was winning and losing. But for a lot of the dark brothers, it was the game of life. Like, how are we supposed to tell our kids to go out into the world and be safe like our white teammates?”37

  To many Black Americans, including me, the protests were understood and welcome. We had been marching in the streets for Black lives as video after video of the murder of unarmed Black people by police hit the internet. We saw our fathers, our sisters, our babies killed, and their killers almost without exception escaped justice. To see prominent, powerful Black athletes protest for our lives on national television during America’s game—it gave us some hope that people might start paying attention.

  For Donald Trump, who campaigned in 2016 on white male racial anxiety, the NFL protests were a dream come true. There is a segment of the white American population that has always viewed Black dissent as a threat to white safety and security. Since the election of Obama and the increase in protests around the country over the killing of unarmed Black people by police, white anxiety over Black empowerment had increased to a level that many of us had not seen in our lifetimes. Trump gave his angry crowds a prime target a
gainst which to vent their fury and anxiety by painting Black Americans as simply ungrateful for the opportunities they had been granted. He reframed the protests as blatant disrespect for America and American veterans, instead of as protests against police brutality. Here were some of the richest Black men in America—Black men who had been paid millions of dollars to play a game, their game—and they had the nerve to use that privilege to insult the troops?

  Trump would insult and threaten players to raucous cheers. He promised to make sure the protests would stop and the disrespectful players (and their enabling coaches) would pay. Trump, of course, was not the only white person to benefit from stoking anger and hatred toward Black NFL players, or to capitalize on white anger at Kaepernick’s audacity. Sean Hannity called Kaepernick, among other things, “a spoiled brat, out-of-touch, super-rich athlete,” adding, for that special Hannity seasoning, that Kaepernick “might have converted to Islam in the off-season.”38 Equally bonkers and paranoid was Rush Limbaugh, who claimed that the protests were part of a vast left-wing conspiracy to undermine the NFL and, by extension, American manhood: “I do believe that the left wants to cause great damage to the NFL. What does the NFL stand for? Masculinity, strength, toughness. So, what are they doing to it? You go to college campuses now and you’ll find classes on how to take masculinity out of men. It’s actually happening. There are studies and courses in college that do this. It’s patriotic, you’ve got the flag, you’ve got the anthem, you’ve got uniformed military personnel, all the things that the left wants to erase from this country.”39

  One of the more racist Republican congressmembers, Steve King (who once asked an interviewer from the New York Times with genuine confusion why it was considered bad to be a white supremacist), claimed that Kaepernick’s NFL protests were “sympathetic to ISIS.”40

  After a difficult 2016 season with the 49ers, in which it was obvious that he was no longer welcome, Kaepernick opted out of his contract in March 2017 to have a better chance of getting picked up by another team than if he had been released. But by then, no team—even ones that were sympathetic to his protest—was willing to be associated with him. Why? Some were wary of the distraction that Kaepernick would bring. Perhaps others worried that the protest would gain ground with other players. But it is also clear that many refused to look at Kaepernick because they didn’t want to bring the wrath of the man who was now president of the United States down on them. The protests had been a useful tool for Trump to fire up his base whenever he needed a bit of a popularity boost or a distraction from unflattering headlines. That strategy would be much harder if he couldn’t be seen as the victor in the showdown with Black players. Trump absolutely needed to ensure that he could follow up on his promise to angry white voters that he would make Kaepernick pay and would bring order to the NFL. If Kaepernick were to find a happy home with another team, especially when there was every indication that he was staying in top playing shape, it would undermine Trump’s appeal to white voters who wanted him to put uppity Black people in their place.

  Trump’s demands weren’t just communicated from his podium to angry fans; he personally intervened with owners to ensure that they understood that he needed to win this battle against Black protest. President Trump called Dallas Cowboys owner Davey Jones with a message for all the NFL owners: “This is a very winning, strong issue for me,” said Trump, according to Jones’s deposition. “Tell everybody, you can’t win this one. This one lifts me.” Jones relayed Trump’s remarks to the other owners: no team could afford to give Kaepernick a chance. “I thought he changed the dialogue,” said Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross, who had been “totally supportive” of the protest until he’d gotten Trump’s message.41

  Even though far less impressive quarterbacks were picked up by teams in 2017, Kaepernick remained unsigned. Team owners and managers preferred having less effective rosters over having to deal with the backlash of allowing Black protest. In October of that year, still unsigned, Kaepernick filed a grievance with the NFL, accusing it of colluding to keep him out of the league in punishment for his national anthem protests.

  Seattle Seahawks defensive end Michael Bennett decided to take a knee during the 2017 preseason. Bennett had long been vocal on racial justice issues and watched with dismay as Kaepernick was villainized and then blacklisted. That summer, Bennett was in Seattle to witness and participate in the grief and outrage after Charleena Lyles was killed by Seattle police officers in her home.

  Then in late summer, a group of white supremacists held a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that they dubbed “Unite the Right.” As swastika-wearing, angry white men marched through the city carrying torches while shouting racist and antisemitic slogans, counterprotesters arrived to fight the hate. On August 12, self-avowed white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. plowed his car into the counterprotesters, killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring nineteen others. As the nation reeled in shock at the violent protest and brutal killing of Heyer, President Trump refused to condemn the white supremacists, instead denouncing “this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.”42

  Trump didn’t give a full response for two days. When he did, he still refused to condemn the white supremacists. This shocked Bennett and helped galvanize him into action.

  “I couldn’t believe it took Trump forty-eight hours to respond, and then I couldn’t believe when he said ‘very fine people’ were marching in an army of hate and violence,” Bennett wrote in his book, Things That Make White People Uncomfortable. “There was no way I could stand for the national anthem, and there was no way I would, until I saw this country take steps toward common decency.”43

  Bennett reiterated that he wasn’t just trying to make a political point; he was fighting for his life: “We aren’t machines. We are human beings, and we aren’t paid to stand for an anthem. We are paid to play football—this is our ‘real world.’ Maybe some people figure that being a professional athlete somehow graduates us from racism. They think we’re not ‘that Black.’ We’re in another category. But if I’m someplace where people don’t know me as Michael Bennett, I am a Black man, judged by the color of my skin.”44

  Bennett knew all too well how dangerous it could be to walk around as a Black man in America. In August 2017, Bennett was leaving the Floyd Mayweather–Conor McGregor fight in Las Vegas when shots rang out. The crowd started running in every direction, and Bennett ran too. Suddenly, Bennett found himself being ordered to the ground by Las Vegas police officers with their guns drawn. As Bennett struggled to understand what was happening while getting to the ground, an officer put a gun to his head and threatened to “blow his fucking head off”; another officer jammed his knee into Bennett’s back.

  Las Vegas police were looking for a shooter, and Bennett had, like so many Black men before him, fit the description.

  Bennett was handcuffed and put in the back of a police car. Officers soon realized that Bennett was not the shooter, and that he was in fact an NFL player. He was released without charge.45

  “The fact is unequivocally, without question why before every game, I sit during the national anthem,” Bennett said in a statement posted to Twitter, “because equality doesn’t live in this country and no matter how much money you make, what job title you have, or how much you give, when you are seen as a ‘Nigger,’ you will be treated that way.”46

  When Bennett spoke publicly about the incident, he was met with a swift denial by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department that the altercation had anything to do with his race. “Many of the folks today have called this an incident of bias-based policing, police officers focusing solely on the race of an individual that they’re going to stop,” said LVMPD undersheriff Kevin McMahill in a news conference addressing the events. “I can tell you as I stand here today, I see no evidence of that. I see no evidence that race played any role in this incident.”47

  Although the LVMPD tried to downplay the situation, pictures of Be
nnett on the floor with a gun to his head were soon published all over the internet. Seahawks coach Pete Carroll and NFL commissioner Goodell spoke in support of Bennett. “What happened with Michael is a classic illustration of the reality of inequalities that are demonstrated daily,” said Carroll. “May this incident inspire all of us to respond with compassion when inequalities are brought to light and allow us to have the courage to stand for change. We can do better than this.”

  Goodell issued a statement saying, “The issues Michael has been raising deserve serious attention from all of our leaders in every community. We will support Michael and all NFL players in promoting mutual respect between law enforcement and the communities they loyally serve and fair and equal treatment under law.”48

  Although NFL leadership showed support for Bennett in their statements, he did not receive empathy from all of his fellow teammates. “There were some players who reached out and had a sense of compassion and empathy,” Bennett told me when we talked over the phone about the events in Vegas, “and there were other sides saying, like, ‘What did you expect? You were asking for it.’ … ‘Why were you there? What did you expect?’”

  The realization that the camaraderie the NFL had worked so hard to instill in players stopped at the color line was a painful one for Bennett: “It was shocking, because you have the idea where you are a brotherhood. When you have an issue outside of football and you’re looking for your brothers to be there for you, and when you find out they aren’t, that hurts a little bit.”

  A few days after LVMPD cops held a gun to his head, Bennett said he planned to file a civil rights lawsuit against the department for racial profiling and excessive force. Months later, three weeks after it was announced that Bennett was going to be traded to the Philadelphia Eagles and right as he was about to launch his book tour for Things That Make White People Uncomfortable, police in Harris County, Texas, issued a warrant for Bennett’s arrest on a felony charge of causing injury to the elderly.