by Glenn Stout
There is constant cheering. Trump calls the hockey players handsome. He says they are incredible patriots, embodying values all young Americans needed to see. It’s unclear if Trump realizes how many of these young men weren’t born in the U.S.
It’s also clear that these hockey stars aren’t being celebrated for what they have accomplished. Trump’s White House has not rushed to invite any other teams who have won championships, including the Golden State Warriors. It took Stephen Curry saying he wasn’t interested in going to the White House for Trump to say the invitation was rescinded—in truth, no invitation had ever been sent to the team. The only other team Trump has welcomed has been the Chicago Cubs, whose co-owner, Todd Ricketts, was a Trump supporter and had been considered for Deputy Secretary of Commerce.
The Penguins are welcomed with open arms as a display of how white athletes are meant to behave. The president can’t put aside his own agenda, even for a moment. Trump brought the team here to reinforce his attacks against the black people he deems dishonorable, the football players who have protested police brutality, and who Trump has made his latest adversaries in his never-ending culture war.
The white audience seems unaware or uncaring. The blackness in the room or watching on TV is being taunted. Trump is taking a victory lap with his chosen champions, gaslighting nonbelievers and smiling while they squirm.
These political gymnastics are exhausting. For the entirety of this charade, I have felt disoriented. How can no one address this?
In this moment, I remember where I’d seen that smile.
II. The Day of Reckoning
It was a few weeks before that day at the White House, September 25, when Dallas and Arizona faced off in a Monday Night Football game.
All weekend, NFL players had kneeled during “The Star-Spangled Banner,” some in support of Colin Kaepernick and his original protest against the police killing of black people. Others were responding to Trump, who implored NFL owners to “get that son of a bitch off the field right now” if a player kneeled during the National Anthem at a rally earlier that week.
While some NFL owners supported their players and were vocally against Trump’s vulgar tirade, reports had come out that the majority of NFL owners were scrambling to find a way to stop the protests, or at least quiet them down enough to make football the story again.
Ahead of Monday Night Football, there was little talk of what would happen in the game. It was all about what would happen before the kickoff, during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Sports fans, culture warriors, and America tuned in as Cowboys owner Jerry Jones walked out with his players. I’ll admit: I did not, in my wildest thoughts, think I’d see ol’Jerruh, practically a caricature of a rich white man, walk out with these men.
Then, before “The Star-Spangled Banner” began, they all kneeled, arms locked, Jones right in the middle. Jones kept his head down while fans booed. He did not care. His plan was already in motion. He finally looked up. The cameras moved closer. He looked directly into the lens and there it was: the smile. That same, soulless smile.
Then, just before the song, Jones and the rest of the Cowboys stood. It was a protest without any teeth. His smile had been a clear signal to white America: Don’t worry. Jerry will take care of this. We’re going to put them in their place.
What was funny about all this was that Jones, certainly by accident, actually showed hypocrisy on the part of the white people he was trying to send a signal to. He exposed the lie that kneeling was about “The Star-Spangled Banner” or patriotism or Trump. He knelt before the song played and was still booed.
If Jones’s demonstration was inartful, it was at least emphatic. Jones has made no mistake about his belief that players should stand for the National Anthem, even threatening to lead a coup against Commissioner Roger Goodell in part because Goodell wouldn’t place any mandate on players. Even within a group of 31 owners who had collectively donated millions to Trump’s campaign, Jones was a hard-liner, and he was lockstep with Trump that Goodell should have nipped the protests in the bud. Via ESPN:
At first, some in the room admired Jones’ pure bravado, the mix of folksy politician and visionary salesman he has perfected. But he was angry. He said the owners had to take the business impact seriously, as the league was threatened by a polarizing issue it couldn’t contain or control. To some in the room, it was clear Jones was trying to build momentum for an anthem mandate resolution, and in the words of one owner, “he brought up a lot of fair points.”
Jones couldn’t get exactly what he wanted—what Trump had demanded—in part because the movement was too big. Watching black bodies defy power in prime time was unexpected. Players reacting so quickly and strongly was unexpected and beautiful, and the league was too overwhelmed to react. The weekend had a chance to be historic. Jones needed to usurp the cause somehow, and he found a way. That moment when Jones smiled, I felt that beauty slip away.
That smile haunts me. It was in that moment I understood that this movement would be taken over and killed. This was the white owner reasserting control.
This was the co-opting of a black message. This was a smile equivalent to a death sentence, signaling the fate of Colin Kaepernick’s movement—the end of an international moment staked in black pride.
This is something we have seen time and time again in the history of American sport: the use of the black body for popular entertainment; black men and women using that popularity to speak out, then white gatekeepers (either owner, audience, or overseer) co-opting that message or striking it down, often violently.
Truthfully, football was never meant to serve the black body, which has been abused for generations. America watched as men they perceive as property begged for a voice and were muzzled. This is a cycle America has always known. It is no wonder these NFL players did not get far.
III. “Those wild and low sports”
Maybe it was destiny that led Tom Molineaux to Copthorne Common on a blustery December afternoon in 1810 to fight Tom Cribb.
Molineaux, a man newspapers called the “American Othello,” was a freed slave from a Virginia plantation whose family taught him to box. Cribb was the champion of England and white. Molineaux had sailed from America just six months prior to start a new life as a prize fighter.
Englishmen thought he was a lamb being led to slaughter. Though the English were sympathetic to abolitionism, a slave wasn’t supposed to swing against his white master. By the ninth round, Cribb was being pummeled. After 30 minutes, fans rioted. They thought Molineaux was cheating. By some accounts, they even broke his fingers.
After 39 rounds, Molineaux conceded, finally succumbing to exhaustion. He appeared to knock out Cribb in the 28th round, but no one could hear the referee call “time!” to indicate that Molineaux had won in the chaos that ensued. Cribb recovered and the fight continued. It was a brilliant fight by all accounts, yet there wasn’t much to read about Molineaux’s exploits in America outside of a small clipping in a North Carolina newspaper.
Molineaux was a symbol of a possibility that was deadly to the white world back then. If black people could prove they are equal in one arena, who’s to say they shouldn’t be equal in every arena?
Sports were the thing that kept Molineaux enslaved and his tool for liberation. Sports were created on the plantation as diversions to help slavers control the revolutionary urges of slaves. Frederick Douglass, who fought off his owner and ran to freedom, was a critic of sports on the plantation. In Douglass’s autobiography, he said Southern plantation owners deployed “those wild and low sports” in an effort to keep black slaves “civilized.”
What Douglass wrote is, foolishly, why owners expect athletes to know their place. It is why no one expected a Day of Reckoning to begin with. What Douglass missed, and what black athletes discovered, was the expressionism sports allowed. As Molineaux demonstrated, sports create room for protest because they hold the minds of the white consumers hostage during play.
> White people showed up to watch Cribb beat Molineaux, and instead were held captive as Molineaux upended their expectations. Similarly, they did not think, both owners and fans, that black football players were capable of revolt. And just as Molineaux helped establish a norm, NFL players have made protest commonplace. To restore the old order would require intervention, co-option—violence of a nonphysical sort. That was the reason behind ol’Jerruh’s smile. If order was to be reinstated, pain of some kind would have to be established.
IV. “Coach, a Negro boy can’t play football with white fellers”
It took seven minutes for Oklahoma A&M—the university now named Oklahoma State—to try to kill Johnny Bright, Drake University’s black Heisman candidate. It was 1951. Bright was knocked unconscious three times, often without the ball. The third was the most brutal. A large, white defensive end named Wilbanks Smith saw Bright, looking left, throwing a pass. Seconds later—some say as many as six—Smith leapt from his feet and cracked Bright’s jaw with a forceful elbow. Bright’s trainer and another player carried him to the bench. A penalty hadn’t been called all day.
Maury White, who wrote about the attack for the Des Moines Register, said, “You could feel the bones move.” Photos of Bright are kept in the Drake Heritage Collection. They show images of Bright pulling his mouth apart, wires keeping his jaw straight, the reason his college career was upended. The “Great Negro Flash” would never make it to the NFL.
Local accounts before the game had students saying Bright “would not be around at the end of the game.” Three students told the Register that A&M’s head coach was seen yelling “get that nigger” when the scout team was running Bright’s plays. Bright told the paper in 1980: “There’s no way it couldn’t have been racially motivated.”
Smith, the white man who tried to kill Bright, said in 2012 he had “nothing to apologize for.” Within two days after the incident, Smith received hundreds of letters of support. Half of the messages begged him to run for office in Louisiana or lead local Klan startups.
“If it wasn’t Wilbanks Smith, it would have been someone else,” the A&M basketball player Dean Nims told the Register in 1980. “They were determined to stop Bright.”
Oklahoma State waited 22 years after Bright died to express sympathy.
Violence was the price of being black in these spaces. It is important to understanding the Day of Reckoning. Players are not simply millionaires asking for attention. They have received death threats, their parents have lost their jobs, their jerseys have been burned from New York to Oakland, their likenesses are being used as tackling dummies before games, and their coaches are called “no-good niggers.”
A few years before Bright had his jaw demolished in front of the country, Levi Jackson, the first black football captain at Yale, was playing in a high school exhibition. His body had been thrashed for hours, and he was ready to quit. In this era, it was common for white players to attack black players between the whistles. Jackson, however, was fed up. Reading his words, I assume he knew what this sport could do to us. The message was there: white sympathy was not for us unless we were willing to get over race.
“Coach, a Negro boy can’t play football with white fellers,” he said, according to Sport Magazine in November 1949. “You saw what they did to me today. I’m turning in my suit. It’s not sport.”
V. “Nothing more than a mere picnic”
After the Day of Reckoning, the NFL responded by promoting a message of “Unity.” I have grown so tired of hearing about “unity” that I no longer believe it’s real. What is unity? What are we unifying against? It doesn’t appear to be racism. It has never appeared to be racism. When the concept of unity was offered to these black athletes, it felt comedic.
Look at all these white men. They do not look afraid, as I have. They do not seem tired, as I am.
And the black athletes who felt the same way were often labeled as ungrateful millionaires. “Ungrateful is the new uppity,” Jelani Cobb wrote in the wake of the president’s attack on players.
For the current revolting black athlete, this certainly seems the case. By co-opting the message of the protests, NFL owners like Jones were able to make still-unsatisfied athletes seem bitter and greedy in a certain light. Thus, Jones’s performative wokeness successfully play-actioned protests about police brutality into something lesser that many players felt obligated to accept or else be ostracized even more.
This sort of transformation of messaging angered Bill Russell, one of America’s great social agitators in sports. By the time the March on Washington came to the capital in 1963, Russell was disenchanted with the civil rights movement. He was sick of compromises. He said the day became “nothing more than a mere picnic” because whites marched. The message changed, and the voice of the oppressed was not one with the oppressor at his shoulder.
“The March on Washington was brilliantly conceived and badly executed,” Russell recalled in Go Up for Glory in 1965. “The bigots will make something of this. But I concur with what Malcolm X said: ‘They merely marched from the feet of one dead president to the feet of another.’”
Acts of “Unity” have been the fodder making America’s heart swell. Hand-holding in the face of a president who believes people of color are inhuman plays into America’s often misguided ideals of egalitarianism. Our nation loves to see black hands holding white hands but has never stopped to gauge what it accomplishes. We are not postracial by any means, and we will not get there soon by evading America’s insidious nature.
Co-option is a powerful tool. So is money. This year, Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins said he would stop protesting after NFL owners met with the Players Coalition—a group Jenkins cofounded—and agreed to give $89 million over seven years to charitable groups working toward criminal justice reform and better relationships between community and law enforcement. Several members of the Players Coalition, including 49ers safety Eric Reid, publicly announced their decision to leave the group when the announcement was made.
NFL owners didn’t have to look far for a lesson in how to stifle a movement.
In 1961, the Baltimore Colts played the Pittsburgh Steelers in an exhibition game in Roanoke, Virginia. Virginia State Police were enforcing Jim Crow seating. Local NAACP chapters filed lawsuits. For days state courts didn’t hear the suit. Telegrams were sent to black players on both teams. Coaches asked them what they would do if the game proceeded, and many said they wouldn’t play if segregated seating was enforced. Roanoke officials gathered and said they would ignore the segregationist law to keep peace with players. Pete Rozelle, the NFL commissioner, even sent out a press release.
Newspapers labeled the day a victory before it began. Then Lenny Moore, a star tailback for the Colts, walked inside the stadium and saw that the gatekeepers had lied. Jim Crow seating was enforced, just like any other day.
“I had to reach through the chain-link fence in order to shake their hands,” Moore said in his autobiography. “No image had ever made me realize, with such force, just what blacks have been up against all through American history: We have always been on the outside looking in.”
The lesson here is to be wary of white folks; to know that football is fun, but it is also work. You must maim your body for the happiness of your owner, fans, and America. Or you will be fired. You will be cast aside. And you will go back to being an unknown number in a country that does not love you.
VI. “What they are saying is don’t upset the system”
As we leave the East Room back on that October afternoon, I think to myself that this did not happen by chance. The concerns of black constituents, black footballers calling for an end to police brutality, none of these is as mighty as the man attacking them to get praise from white Americans.
Only under Trump could the Day of Reckoning have happened. If Obama’s presidency was a result of a second era of Black Reconstruction, then Trump, as the journalist Adam Serwer and the author Ta-Nehisi Coates have noted, sparked a
second wave of white redemption.
Trump’s white identity politics are stronger than concerns about his temperament, his sanity, or the people who inhabit his administration. They are stronger than the black athletes at odds with him. If white Americans of virtually every economic background were willing to elect a man like this, one whose political identity is tailored for white nationalism, then there is no place for black, protesting football players.
Trump will always attack black athletes because they pose a threat to this white power dynamic, and because it is the easiest way to signal to his base that that they are right to feel threatened. They are evidence that the gatekeeper’s control is slipping. To suppress that idea, Trump must dismiss them and dehumanize them. As an added bonus for Trump, this excites the base—the large swath of the country that created this moment.
“If you look very carefully you will see that they are the same people who are quite happy with the situation as it is,” the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe told James Baldwin in 1980. “What they are saying is not don’t introduce politics. What they are saying is don’t upset the system. They are just as political as any of us. It’s only that they are on the other side.”
I can understand why the gatekeepers claim these footballers are unpatriotic, because they don’t see us as citizens of their states. This can be an argument about the flag if you don’t believe it represents folks like me.
Near the manicured lawn of the White House, Mike Sullivan, the Penguins coach, begins speaking to gathered press. Sullivan reinforces the lie of the afternoon: he says he felt no pressure accepting an invitation here because it wasn’t political. This was only a celebration, he said.
At this point in our history, it seems foolish that someone could offer this misconceived belief unless they are too nonchalant to care or very careful to preserve their position of power. Either feels like cowardice.