by James Blake
A little discomfort is okay if we can start a conversation about additional police training and practices, or necessary protocols, departmental oversight, and checks and balances, to ensure accountability. If a little discomfort leads to improved relations and interactions between the police and the public, then being uncomfortable is worth it, because sometimes the end justifies the means.
I recently spoke with a police chief in Connecticut who also shared the belief that what happened to me in New York was grossly unfair and should never happen. He believed that communication is a big factor that can help change policing. Communication between the police officers and the community as well as communication between the officers on the scene and the person they have in custody. He was also shocked to find out that there was no report written and that the four other officers stood by Frascatore’s statement of what happened until they reviewed the video evidence, after which their report of the incident changed. Despite this, the police chief truly does not believe there is still a “blue wall of silence.” I want to share his optimism, but when it happens to you, your optimism starts to fade. I do share his view that open communication between the officers and the people in the communities they patrol is a step in the right direction. Longer training, along with sensitivity and implicit bias training, are also integral parts of the solution.
Although there are few people in America who do not know about Kaepernick’s protest, he is not the first professional athlete to take a public stand during the anthem. Not many people are familiar with the former Denver Nuggets guard Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, who in 1996 faced severe repercussions for praying during the national anthem. Considered one of the greatest free-throw shooters in the history of the game, Abdul-Rauf lost millions of dollars in endorsement deals, and his nine-year NBA career was thrown into turmoil when he was caught on camera praying during the anthem. This drew the ire of fans and the media.
Abdul-Rauf refused to acknowledge the flag because it conflicted with some of his Islamic beliefs. At first no one noticed, because he either stretched or stayed in the locker room during the anthem, until a reporter asked him about it and his response caused a media frenzy. Abdul-Rauf said he viewed the American flag as “a symbol of oppression and racism,” and that standing for the anthem would conflict with his Muslim faith. “You can’t be for God and for oppression. It’s clear in the Quran, Islam is the only way,” he said at the time. “I don’t criticize those who stand, so don’t criticize me for sitting.”
The NBA suspended him for one game, citing a rule that players must line up in a “dignified posture” for the anthem. “It cost him almost $32,000 of his $2.6 million salary,” the journalist Jesse Washington wrote in the blog The Undefeated.
The players union supported Abdul-Rauf, and he quickly reached a compromise with the league that allowed him to stand and pray with his head down during the anthem. But at the end of the season, the Nuggets traded Abdul-Rauf, who averaged a team-high 19.2 points and 6.8 assists, to the Sacramento Kings. His playing time dropped. He lost his starting spot. After his contract expired in 1998, Abdul-Rauf couldn’t get so much as a tryout with any NBA team. He was just 29 years old. . . .
After the NBA shunned him, he played a season in Turkey, making about half of the $3.3 million he earned in the last year of his NBA contract. Abdul-Rauf caught on with the NBA’s Vancouver Grizzlies in 2000–2001, but played only 12 minutes per game. He never got another NBA opportunity, playing another six seasons in Russia, Italy, Greece, Saudi Arabia and Japan before retiring in 2011.2
Not only was Abdul-Rauf’s career in jeopardy, but he and his family also received death threats. The letters “KKK” were spray painted on a sign near where his new home was being built. Abdul-Rauf decided to put the property up for sale, but while it sat vacant, it was set on fire and burned to the ground. He eventually moved his family to Europe, not only for their safety but also to be able to play professional basketball.
“It’s priceless to know that I can go to sleep knowing that I stood to my principles,” Abdul-Rauf told The Undefeated. “Whether I go broke, whether they take my life, whatever it is, I stood on principles. To me, that is worth more than wealth and fame.”
Abdul-Rauf has not spoken to Kaepernick. But the basketball player supports the quarterback’s protest and message “1,000 percent,” saying that it created a valuable debate. “It’s good to continue to draw people’s attention to what’s going on whether you’re an athlete, a politician, or a garbage man. These discussions are necessary,” he said. “Sometimes it takes people of that stature, athletes and entertainers, because the youth are drawn to them, [more than] teachers and professors, unfortunately.”3
Abdul-Rauf lost prime years of NBA stardom, faced severe financial fallout, received death threats against him and his family, had his home burned down, and had to leave the country to play professionally. Yet Abdul-Rauf still does not stand for the national anthem. In the 1990s, few athletes made public protests about social issues. Abdul-Rauf’s protest was a pivotal moment that completely changed the course of his athletic career, and his life. He was a precursor to athletes like Kaepernick, and today’s resurgence of athlete activists, who are inciting change and taking a stand against what they feel is unjust. As Abdul-Rauf said of the growing movement, “It is beautiful to see, and it’s going to be hard to stop.”
Postracial America?
When we look at discrimination sixty years ago during the years of integration, we can see that it was accepted, or at the very least it was expected. One of the major challenges then was being openly hated and harassed. Today, for the most part, hatred and harassment are much more behind the scenes. Social media has given people an anonymous voice and a platform from which they are free to speak their mind. Because of this shift, the challenge that athletes who advocate for a cause face is to have to read about, and see, the often vitriolic responses. They are faced day after day, even minute by minute, in the continuous news cycle and on social media, with insults, disparaging comments, and sometimes even threats. We can never know how real those threats are, as opposed to back when they were very real. Abdul-Rauf left the country not only to play professional basketball but also because he feared for his safety and that of his family.
If one of those threats turned physical, there were no social media or video accounts to shed light on what really happened or to prove one person’s word over another. Players were also more isolated and perhaps even more insulated. Sixty years ago, racism was the norm. The Klan was a very real danger and part of everyday life in many parts of the country. Jim Crow laws were still in effect and there were still many people who spoke openly and publicly about segregation. In many parts of the country it was widely accepted that there were genetic differences between blacks and whites and that blacks were inferior. This kind of thinking now seems absurd, but especially considering it was common only sixty years ago, you have to wonder if it ever went away. The considerations of protesting in the South were very different from protesting in the North. In the South, civil rights activists would face openly hostile disagreement and also perhaps deadly repercussions.
These deadly repercussions, or any actions against you, could even be justified in court and the justice system at that time. There was an overriding feeling that blacks had no right to protest anything. Those days, it was not just your money, or your endorsements, sponsors, or your fan base at stake; it could also be your life. There was the possibility that you could be lynched by the Klan, that your home could be burned down, your property destroyed, or even that your family could be in jeopardy. Just twenty years ago, Abdul-Rauf encountered that type of aggression.
Those are some of the dangers you faced in the past if you were advocating for racial equality or against discrimination. The plus side was that it was before social media and you could shut it out. You could far more easily disconnect from the news and not have to be aware of the media all the time. Today it is very difficult to get away from t
he news. It is far too easy to check in with Twitter, or Facebook, or turn on the news, which is available 24/7. Our smartphones are continuously updating us with alerts. In some cases, this easy access to information can be useful, but in others, it can be unrelenting.
For a while back in September, October, and November 2016 it was definitely unrelenting. It seemed like every day there was a new case of an unarmed person of color being shot and killed by the police. Quite often these people weren’t doing anything illegal, like Philando Castile, or Terence Crutcher. This type of constant media information will either empower us to rally together in protest using social media and all the news outlets at our disposal, or it will immobilize us, shock us into catatonia, as we disconnect to get away from it.
I am astonished that so many Americans think that because we had a two-term black president, racism no longer exists. Even when it is right in front of them, as with the many videotaped shootings of black men, they still do not believe it. The general response is that the victims had to have done something wrong. This speaks directly to my incident. I was standing in the middle of the street minding my own business when I was tackled by a police officer for something I was completely innocent of.
It is a sad commentary, because we don’t want to believe the statistics. According to a 2015 Los Angeles Daily News article, “American police kill civilians at a shocking rate compared to other developed countries. . . . While no US government agency is keeping reliable records of how many people die each year during encounters with police, the best estimates suggest the number is no lower than 400 per year, and most likely around 1,000. Police in peer nations like Germany, Denmark, the UK and other liberal democracies—meanwhile—rarely kill civilians. Even accounting for population size, the frequency with which American police kill civilians is shocking. Not twice as often, or three times as often. We’re talking factors of 20 to 70.”
The Washington Post’s police shootings database reports that 991 people were killed by police in 2015, and 963 people were shot and killed by police in 2016, “many of whom were unarmed, mentally ill, and people of color.” That number is much higher, according to the Guardian’s police killings database, Killed by Police, which counts 1,092 people to have died at the hands of police in 2016. Going by the Guardian’s count, Native Americans and black Americans are being killed at the highest rates in the United States. February and March were the deadliest months in 2016, with 100 people killed by police each month.
Michelle Alexander, a law professor at Ohio State, wrote in her bestseller, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, that in 2012, when the book was published, “more Black men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began.” If these statistics do not seem like an inequity in America I think we should ask ourselves why not. America does not want to believe in prison for profit or the mass incarceration of African Americans. We do not want to believe in police brutality or misconduct unless we see it. Then, when we do see videos of it, we still do not want to believe it. Why do we think these incidents have nothing to do with race or discrimination? It is baffling that so many people do not believe that racism still exists when in the last few years there has been a surge in racial violence and instances of police misconduct against minorities.
In today’s “postracial” America there are still practices, like stop and frisk, that are targeted to certain segments of the population. Or stand-your-ground laws, which seem biased toward one part of the population, if we consider the 2012 shooting death of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida. Meanwhile this same law protects others, like George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Martin. It seems inherently dangerous for the use of deadly force to be condoned because someone feels like they are in danger and can shoot to kill even if the person they have shot does not actually pose a threat.
Open-carry laws also seem more partial to one segment of the population while at times being a death sentence for others, like Philando Castile. This law protects armed militia groups like the Ammon Bundy ranchers in Oregon, who took over government land in January and February in 2016, and literally threatened the police with an arsenal of weapons unless their demands were met. The militia will serve no prison time. Meanwhile in Cleveland, Ohio, Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old black boy playing in a park with a BB gun, was immediately shot and killed by police. This case in particular is made all the more confounding because Ohio is an open-carry state. If the gun was a real gun and not a plastic one, Rice would not have been breaking a law to have it, and his having it should not have warranted such a police response.
Today, with President Trump making it okay to advance racist ideology, by condemning an entire religion for the acts of minority extremists, I do not see policy becoming more fair toward minorities. Rather, I see the opposite. Even the phrase that won Trump the election, “Make America Great Again,” appears to want to invoke a time in America that was never “great” for minorities. It reads like a claim to take America back to the days of Jim Crow segregation and open discrimination, some of which we have already seen postelection with hate crimes against minorities and Muslims. “Make America Great Again” sounds like a rally cry to go back to the days when it was okay to be openly racist and discriminatory, as with his Muslim bans, proposed walls separating America from Mexico, xenophobia, rolling back women’s rights, voter disenfranchisement, and voter suppression. It is a slippery slope to be hostile and inflammatory to a segment of the population or want to punish an entire religion, and it should remind America of the dark days of its past.
Societal Expectations of Sports Stars
When athletes take a stand, we can jeopardize our earning potential and our financial security. It can be detrimental financially, societally, emotionally, and even physically to advocate for a cause or to publicly voice our opinion. Certainly for Abdul-Rauf and Kaepernick there have been repercussions. They have gotten vicious vocal backlash from the media, and have affected their careers and their ability to play in terms of endorsements and marketing dollars. These selfless acts are reason enough to be impressed by athlete activists who are gambling far more than fan appeal. These are considerations every professional athlete who decides to speak out for a cause takes into account.
It is one thing to take a stand, but for Kaepernick to donate a million dollars of his own money or to donate the money that he’s made from his jersey sales to community organizations is another. This tells me that he is willing to make sacrifices for what he believes in. It also tells me that his protest is not only a symbolic gesture but also a very tangible act.
More so than just a personal backlash, Kaepernick is also making monetary sacrifices at the same time. People may say, “Well, he makes twelve million dollars, so how does donating one million dollars really affect him?” But what the public does not realize is that an athlete’s career, depending on the sport, tends to be short. In the NFL the average career is three years. Right now, Kaepernick is already playing on borrowed time.
Professional athletes retire a lot earlier than age sixty-five. A football player still going hard at forty is rare. Most athletes either retire or leave the game in their thirties. I retired from playing professional tennis at thirty-three. When we retire so early in our career, we need enough money to take care of our family. Sadly, it has become common to vilify the athlete as pampered. Fans read about big salaries and think we should just be grateful for our salaries for playing a game, and that part of our job is to entertain them and not to have an opinion while doing it. Many of these fans also believe they have a right to this opinion because they pay our salary by buying tickets to our games, or merchandise.
But athletes’ ability to make a considerable amount of money in contracts or endorsements is not a reason for fans, the media, or even our franchises or sponsors to think it allows them to have control over what we think, do, or feel passionate about. Why should athletes, because we make a certain amo
unt of money, not feel we can express our opinion and concentrate only on sports?
Why are we criticized for feeling strongly about an issue and wanting to do something about it? Why can’t we question what is going on in the world or want to see change? That is what I am doing when I speak out publicly about more accountability and oversight for law enforcement. This is what LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, and several of their Miami Heat teammates were doing when they wore hoodies before a game to protest the killing of Trayvon Martin and police brutality. That is what Chris Kluwe, Scott Fujita, and Brendon Ayanbadejo are doing when they lobby for LGBT rights and marriage equality. That is what Venus Williams, Maria Sharapova, and Kim Clijsters are doing when they rally for equal prize money for female tennis players, and what Serena Williams is doing when she speaks out for equal endorsement deals and equal recognition for female tennis players.
This is what Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf did when he was true to his beliefs, even to the detriment of his career and even if it placed him in harm’s way. This is what Colin Kaepernick is doing when he takes a knee during the national anthem to support Black Lives Matter. Sadly, what is lost in all the media outrage, and what we should understand, is that what Kaepernick is doing is not denigrating or disrespecting the flag or the country. He is exercising his inalienable right to respond to the anthem in a way that feels genuine and authentic to him. That distinction has also been lost.
What activist athletes are saying is, Why can’t this be better? How can we draw attention to issues that are important to us, that we are passionate about? Why should we not be able to express our position on it? Why are we not allowed to have an opinion outside sports? Where did the notion that we are only there to entertain the fans come from? The idea that we are not allowed to publicly voice our opinion because of how much money we make is oppressive, and undercuts our rights as Americans. Ultimately, the amount of money someone makes should not disqualify him or her from having an opinion and expressing it, especially if it can create a positive change.