We Matter

by Etan Thomas

  Like Darren Wilson and Betty Shelby,

  Daniel Pantaleo, George Zimmerman, Howie Lake II, and Blane Salamoni,

  Cowards hiding behind badges

  Like Rudolph Giuliani,

  Stopping-and-frisking our reality,

  Trying to destroy our souls, diminish our spirits, and subjugate our mentalities.

  But they want to say it’s about the flag,

  Knowing we had a list of Kaepernick’s grievances from the genesis of his taking his stance.

  That’s why they’re taking a knee:

  To protest political corruption, systematic racism, and police brutality.

  They straight hijacked the message into disrespecting the country and the military.

  It’s like they gentrified the entire protest,

  Put up a Starbucks, a dog park, and a tanning salon turning our statement into a watered-down All Lives Matter mess.

  This is bigger than Donald Trump and his foolishness,

  This is about justice.

  They wanna see us

  Fall like it’s autumn,

  Snakes in our garden, but with a scope we spotted them.

  We remain targets that enter your optics,

  Our objects appear bigger in your mirror but it’s clearer to see

  The fear in your eyes when you see

  Us in your view.

  Shoot first, ask questions last.

  That’s how too many of these so-called policemen act.

  But we see you

  Straight denying the truth,

  Putting on a facade of protect-and-serve and a false equivalency to your red, white, and blue.

  But the darkness will come to light

  And our strength will surprise you

  When your walls come tumbling down just like Confederate statues.

  And no matter how many of our heroes you get to follow your nose like Toucan Sam,

  Putting a camera in their face for them to condemn a people you can’t stand,

  Just to get pats on the top of their heads by pale hands,

  You’re not keeping us in your frying pan,

  Purposely burning our idols,

  Straight fricasseeing their minds,

  While they’re holding the mic,

  So they can no longer see the difference between what’s wrong and what’s right.

  Got them saying things potent as a lightning bolt when it strikes.

  It’s a pity,

  Seeing them make statements that drown our energy.

  How many millions

  Did it take for them to break icons and get them to spit what they ain’t feeling,

  Embracing Satan while they’re slithering with pythons?

  But we won’t let their steppin-and-fetchin create dissension within our midst,

  We know Black Face ain’t ever cease to exist,

  Your created illusions ain’t nothing but failed magic tricks.

  Forget happiness,

  Our pursuit is of justice, and we refuse to let go of the clutch

  Until we force you to switch up your style like girls in double dutch.

  We’re weathering your storm

  With the strength of our ancestors.

  Before our courage is born,

  The weight of your hate gives us contractions and births determination into existence.

  You can’t see these.

  You see the fire we spit when we unleash the dragon, call us Khaleesi.

  See, pressure can either bust pipes or produce diamonds,

  And no matter how high the mountain, we keep climbing.

  So that’s why we stay blasting off like rockets,

  And why no matter what you do your arms are STILL too short to box with . . .

  We’ve got God rolled up in our pockets,

  You can’t stop us.

  No matter how much your privatized prisons and mandatory sentencing you use to try to lock us,

  We’re taking your evil and teaching our youth

  That y’all don’t teach them in school cuz y’all don’t want them to know the truth,

  Like how society’s out to get them,

  How they flood the airwaves with music that will land them in the prison system,

  About the school-to-prison pipeline and your plan to get them in them,

  But how they’re purposely not taught and it’s not put in their curriculum.

  See, we’re assisting cats like Westbrook,

  Setting them up for greatness,

  We’re telling them that ain’t no such thing as halfway crooks

  And y’all will go all out with how much y’all hate us.

  You can’t take our heart no matter how much you try to break us down.

  That goes for every person, place, or thing that describes a noun.

  Everyone in Gotham City wants to throw rocks at our dome,

  We’re like Bruce Wayne out the bat cave in his home,

  King of the jungle, we’re a bunch of Mufasas on the throne.

  Can’t none of y’all defeat us,

  Like Muhammad Ali looking at the draft board sayin, Even if you try to punish me, you still can’t beat us,

  We come from brass feet and hair of lamb’s wool,

  The only thing that can bring us down is gravitational pull,

  So keep lying to yourself thinking we’ll ever give up on us.

  We’re still screaming, Black Lives Matter,

  And we’re going to keep pursuing justice.

  Afterword by Dave Zirin

  We Matter was conceived and executed by Etan Thomas as this new athletic revolt was just finding its feet. The resistance started truly in 2012, as Etan writes, when the Miami Heat appeared in their hoodies calling for justice for Trayvon Martin. What makes this book dynamically important is that it lays out a road map for how we got to where we are today: a polarized and politicized sports world, with young athletes answering a generational call to resist police brutality and systemic racism. It also explains why President Trump’s decision to demonize Black athletic protesters has had such explosive results. So far the Trump years have been defined by his desire to distract, deflect, and divide by targeting. Yet he has dramatically underestimated the athletes he targets, and even those he hasn’t targeted.

  The central politics of the new resistance were laid out with utter clarity by Colin Kaepernick when he 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. 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.”

  As Etan has detailed in this book, several dozen NFL players subsequently took a knee or raised a fist in the wake of the “kneel heard ’round the world.” Throughout the league, a remarkably invigorating and inspiring energy could be found, causing the locus of NFL power to shudder. This newfound activism also reached spheres of influence within other sports leagues, including NBA circles, where the best basketball player on the planet, LeBron James, as well as stars like Steph Curry, John Wall, and Draymond Green, and coaches like Steve Kerr and Gregg Popovich, pledged solidarity with Kaepernick.

  Demolishing competition for the most “woke” league right now has to be the WNBA, led by former star Swin Cash and the New York Liberty, with their orchestrated media blackout in which they discussed only Black Lives Matter and police killings in postgame interviews. In September 2016, in her final game as a pro, Tamika Catchings and the entire Indiana Fever team took a knee during the national anthem before a playoff game. Black women have historically been a lynchpin of social movements, so it’s no surprise that the WNBA, with its 69 percent Black majority, would lead the way on these critical issues. Etan’s interview with Allysza Castile, the sister of Philando Castile (who was killed by police in July 2016), captures just how deep the real-life impact has been from the activism of the courageous women of the WNBA.

 
It’s important to remember that so much of the athlete activism that Etan explores started as a response to police killings. Patrick Harmon, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Sandra Bland, Samuel DuBose, Brendon Glenn, Freddie Gray, Natasha McKenna, Terence Crutcher, Walter Scott, Christian Taylor, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice, Yvette Smith, seven-year-old Aiyana Mo’Nay Stanley-Jones, Rekia Boyd, Shereese Francis, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Trayvon Martin . . . the list doesn’t start or end here; these are just some of the victims who Black athletes have been mourning, remembering, honoring.

  What Etan does so effectively is to reveal how police brutality invades the lives of not just poor Black people, but all Black people, including world-famous athletes and celebrities. And it is not simply Etan’s love for his kids that has them playing a prominent role in this volume; concern for the safety of children undergirds the Black Lives Matter movement, despite all the obfuscation surrounding it.

  One of the first battles waged by Trump upon assuming the presidency involved the now-infamous travel ban—a round of restrictions on admission into the United States from seven countries, all of which are predominantly Muslim, along with various limits on refugee travel—mere days after his inauguration. The policy was hardly surprising given Trump’s blatant appeals to Islamophobia during the 2016 campaign, but what came next would almost certainly count as unforeseen. Thousands of people all over the country packed terminals and airport lobbies in cities like New York, Atlanta, and San Francisco to resist a president bent on demonizing Muslims. As airports became spaces of resistance in the wake of the travel ban, one of the most visible athletes at this new ground zero of protest was Seattle Storm star Breanna Stewart. Stewart, who had never been to a protest in her life at that point, did not think twice about heading to nearby Los Angeles International Airport, joining hundreds demonstrating against the new administration’s vindictive policies. Talking to reporters about her decision to stand in solidarity with refugees and folks affected by the ban, Stewart said: “I play for Team USA. My dad wears an American flag tank top. I feel deeply patriotic, but I also recognize how privileged I have been, and this ban just goes against everything that makes me proud to be an American.” At the same time, we must remember that Islamophobia is not a new phenomenon, as Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf reminds us in Etan’s interview with him.

  When World Cup soccer champion Megan Rapinoe followed Colin Kaepernick’s lead and took a knee in a National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) game in September 2016, to say that her action was poorly received by the powers-that-be would be quite an understatement. In fact, days after Rapinoe courageously kneeled, NWSL opponent Washington Spirit decided to play the national anthem before the players took the field, denying Rapinoe and others the opportunity to make a political statement. “We decided to play the anthem in our stadium ahead of schedule rather than subject our fans and friends to the disrespect we feel such an act would represent,” the Washington Spirit said in a statement. Months later, the US Soccer Federation would pass Policy 604-1, mandating that all players and staff stand for the anthem. Undeterred, Rapinoe has continued to speak out against inequality and oppression, calling the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) “old, male, and stale”; she has also advocated on behalf of gay women of color, and she defied 604-1 when she joined teammates in staying in the locker room as the anthem was being played before a game in September 2017. And who can forget the across-the-pond solidarity from members of the Hertha Berlin men’s soccer squad, who the following month all took a knee in solidarity with the NFL protests?

  The search for white male symbols of solidarity can at times feel like seeking out Sasquatch, and yet there is a tradition of white men in the world of sports standing with their marginalized brothers away from the playing arena. Perhaps the best example of this in our current political moment is Philadelphia Eagles defensive end Chris Long. Long has been outspoken in his support of Colin Kaepernick, was a leading figure in standing against white supremacists in his native Charlottesville, Virginia, and refused to go to the Trump White House after the New England Patriots (his team at that time) won the Super Bowl.

  Long’s willingness to speak out on these issues echoes fellow white sports figures like Australian track star Peter Norman, who stood in solidarity with the famous 1968 Olympic podium protests led by John Carlos and Tommie Smith; 1960s NFLer Dave Meggyesy, a civil rights and antiwar activist; and football Hall of Famer Ron Mix, who chose to support a boycott of the 1965 AFL All-Star Game because of racism experienced by Black players in the host city of New Orleans. These were all white men who made the decision to sidestep their privilege in an effort to speak up for their brothers on the field. However, there is still plenty of work to be done here, as Long pointed out in August 2017: “I think it’s a good time for people that look like me to be here for people that are fighting for equality.”

  If you want to see struggles for justice influenced by Kaepernick outside the pros, the high school and college ranks have provided a trove of resistance. There’s Southern Methodist University’s marching band in lockstep with students at the school, kneeling before their game against Texas Christian in September 2016. There were football players at the University of Michigan and Michigan State raising their fists in the air as the anthem played. There was the entire Evanston Township High School girls varsity and junior varsity volleyball teams that kneeled during the anthem before their game in September 2017. There’s also the members of the Bethesda Academy School soccer team becoming activated and protesting outside the Department of Homeland Security headquarters in Washington, DC, when their fellow teammate was detained by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, which has been given carte blanche to do whatever the hell it wants under our current president. Not to mention the cheerleaders at Howard University also taking a knee before a football game in October 2017.

  And who can forget the Beaumont Bulls, a football team comprising eleven- and twelve-year-olds down in Texas that saw fourteen of its twenty-two members take a knee à la Kaepernick in the fall of 2016. After all this, Coach Rah-Rah Barber, who supported the protest, was fired for creating a “hostile mood” at a team meeting, and a supportive parent was banned from practices and games. The Bulls would go on to have their season canceled for their act of resistance, but NFL players Anquan Boldin, Malcolm Jenkins, Torrey Smith, and Devin McCourty then stepped up and donated twenty thousand dollars to a spin-off team, the Southeast Texas Oilers, and Rah-Rah Barber was named coach. The new team made the bold decision to not play “The Star-Spangled Banner” before home games. According to Coach Barber: “It’s not a song that we will be playing . . . We might play ‘God Bless America’ [or] ‘America the Beautiful.’ As an organization, as a board, we all agreed it’s not an appropriate song. It’s a degrading song.”

  This is new territory: professional sports is now officially a contested space, a site of resistance. Where this goes from here is a great unknown, but the distance it has traveled during these dark days is more than inspiring—it’s revolutionary. And who better to shine a light on this phenomenon than Etan Thomas, himself a revolutionary NBA star who was in fact the first American professional athlete to publicly oppose George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq? While Etan humbly highlights the voices and great work of these other role models included in this volume, he himself has often been leading the charge, risking his career and his reputation, for a very long time.

  ————————————————————

  Dave Zirin is the sports editor for the Nation magazine, host of SiriusXM Radio’s popular weekly show Edge of Sports Radio, and curator of the Edge of Sports imprint of Akashic Books. He also cohosts the radio program The Collision: Where Sports and Politics Collide, alongside Etan Thomas. Zirin is the author of eight books on the politics of sports and is the recipient of a 2015 New York Press Club Award for Journalism in sportswriting.

  ETAN THOMAS, a former eleven-ye
ar NBA player, was born in Harlem and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He has published three books: a collection of poems titled More Than an Athlete, the motivational book Fatherhood: Rising to the Ultimate Challenge, and Voices of the Future, a collection of poems and essays by young writers from around the country on topics such as racism, Trayvon Martin, President Obama, gun violence, and AIDS. Thomas was honored for social justice advocacy as the recipient of the 2010 National Basketball Players Association Community Contribution Award, as well as the 2009 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Foundation Legacy Award. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, CNN, and ESPN. He can be frequently seen on MSNBC as a special correspondent and he cohosts a weekly local radio show, The Collision, on WPFW in Washington, DC, about the place where sports and politics collide.

  We Matter: Athletes and Activismis the fourth title in Dave Zirin’s Edge of Sports imprint. Addressing issues across many different sports at both the professional and nonprofessional/collegiate level, Edge of Sports aims to provide an even deeper articulation about the daily collision between sports and politics, giving cutting-edge writers the opportunity to fully explore their areas of expertise in book form.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher.

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2018 Etan Thomas

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-61775-594-1

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61775-591-0

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-61775-612-2

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017936007

  All rights reserved

  First printing

  Edge of Sports

  c/o Akashic Books

  Brooklyn, New York, USA