Megan Mulls It Over

+JMJ

This is not a very timely post by today’s standards, but this blog doesn’t exactly run on a 24-hour news cycle. Over the Christmas holidays, I learned that basketball star LeBron James had ruffled some feathers by comparing NFL team owners to slave owners. He referred to them as “old, white men” who have “that slave mentality” and an attitude of “This is my team. You do what the f—k I tell y’all to do, or we get rid of y’all.” These comments referred specifically to the difference between the NFL and NBA’s responses to players who want to engage in some form of protesting or activism on the job.

I hope that most Americans realize that this is the kind of stuff you say when you don’t have to worry about actual oppression on a regular basis. NFL players and other professional athletes make millions of dollars a year and are among the most admired and envied people in our society. How exactly is that slavery? Athletes are free to leave their posts any time they want. Sure there are things like breach of contract lawsuits, but there’s no such thing as a “Fugitive Athlete Act.” And it’s also illegal for a team owner to assault a player, either for not performing or just because he feels like it.

Ironically, black American professional athletes who share James’ mindset are proof that the American dream is not just for white Americans. Many of these athletes, including James himself, didn’t have privileged beginnings, but their present success is evidence that that doesn’t have to be a permanent hindrance. They are walking refutations of their own arguments. My explanation of this is probably going to sound kinda Marxist, but I’m willing to take that risk.

These guys will talk all about The Struggle on ESPN and then get in their Ferraris, drive home to their mansions, and open up a bottle of $500 scotch to drown their sorrows.

James & Co. think that their race is a guarantee that they understand the troubles of lower income black Americans. As I mentioned before, James has not always been wealthy and privileged, but many of his peers who share his views seem to underestimate how much their wealth insulates them. These men do not live in the sorts of neighborhoods where young black men are most likely to be shot by the police. And if they themselves have run-ins with the police, they have the money and connections to beat the charges or get a slap on the wrist.

“But Megan, the protesting players do understand The Struggle! That’s why they protest!”

But I still don’t get how telling someone that he can’t protest on the job is the same as telling him that you literally own him.

The attitude of “Do what I tell you or you’re fired” is pretty much the attitude of every employer ever. I’m sure James would disagree because he had very high praise for NBA commissioner Adam Silver and his tolerance of on-court activism. But I am going to go out on a limb here and say that if the NBA’s fan base had the same reaction to these activities as the NFL’s fan base had to its players “taking a knee,” things might be different.

In this article from Huffington Post, James states that Silver is “absolutely OK” with “educational, non-violent” forms of protest “because at the end of the day it’s the players that make the ship go.” I don’t doubt that Silver understands that without the players, there’s no team. But I think he also understands that without fans, there’s no revenue.

And it seems like the demographics of NBA fans give Silver the freedom to be tolerant of on-court activism without fear of financial troubles. This article from Forbes explains that the median age of NBA viewers is almost a decade younger than that of NFL viewers (42 vs. 50) and that the 2017-18 NBA season saw an increase of 14% in viewers aged 18-34.

The article cites the relatively short length of a basketball game, compared to that of a football or baseball game, as one of the reasons for this. It is no secret that people in the 18-34 age group and younger have very short attention spans, largely because of their dependence on technology. I also think these people are very likely to get their news primarily from headlines and sound bites. And when Stephon Clark was shot, most outlets went with “Unarmed Black Man Shot by Police” rather than “Burglary Suspect Shot While Jumping Fences.” So it is no surprise that this audience would be sympathetic to the causes that James favors.

Also, I don’t think that there’s necessarily an “apples to apples” relationship between the protests of NFL players and those of NBA players. The HuffPo article talks about how James once wore shoes that said “Equality” on them “in reported solidarity with the NFL protests…” I don’t follow sports much, so I have no idea how much the announcers talked about these shoes and how much this talk did or did not interfere with coverage of the game itself. If the shoes were the star of the show (and their meaning was made clear by the announcers), I think people with negative views of #TakeAKnee may very well have switched off the game.

But even if this happened, I think it’s more related to the coverage of the shoes rather than the shoes themselves. I would argue that words on a basketball player’s shoes are not as inherently confrontational as taking a knee. If the announcers hadn’t pointed out the shoes, anti-#TakeAKnee spectators might not have even noticed them. Or if they noticed them they might have interpreted them as a general message about racial equality (or some other form of equality) rather than associating them with the NFL protests.

And even if they did notice and take offense because of the association with those protests, sneakers on a moving player are still not as “in your face” as kneeling during the national anthem. Words on shoes can get lost in a blur of on-court maneuvering, and there’s always a chance that some epic play will end up distracting fans from the activism. During the national anthem, however, there is nothing else going on, so it’s hard for spectators to focus on anything other than the protesting players.

I learned about another way in which NBA players protested police brutality from this article in The Guardian by basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He states that “LeBron James, Kyrie Irving, Jarrett Jack, Alan Anderson, Deron Williams, Kevin Garnett and others wore ‘I Can’t Breathe’ T-shirts during warm-ups in 2014 to protest the death of unarmed Eric Garner by police.” As with James’ “Equality” sneakers, it is hard for me to tell if the overall tolerance of this by NBA fans was due to explicit support for the cause or if it’s more related to the nature of the protest itself. I don’t think that wearing a T-shirt with a slogan on it, even a potentially controversial one, is as risky as the more iconoclastic gesture of taking a knee.

I think taking a knee is likely to offend a broader base of people than would be offended by a pro-Eric Garner T-shirt. This is going to sound corny, but I think that the national anthem has a broader fan base than Back the Blue and Black Lives Matter. And when you throw in the number of people who aren’t necessarily fans of the anthem but don’t want to rock the boat and are willing to go along to get along, you end up with even more people whose default is to stand while it is played.

Overall the Abdul-Jabbar article is a mixed bag. Some of the sports history was very interesting (which surprised me because I’m not really a sports fan), and I loved the article’s digs at American militarism. There are places where Abdul-Jabbar does truly amazing things with words, but then towards the end he takes a sharp turn and sounds kinda like every other virtue-signaling professional victim in America.

I will start with the positive. The sports history section that was interesting to me came early in the article when Abdul-Jabbar describes how baseball and football embodied the prevailing societal attitudes of their heydays. He writes that baseball “once ruled all other sports as America’s pastime because it reflected the laid-back, less confrontational mood of America in the 1920s and 1930s.” Baseball was a sport that “moved at a pace reflective of hot summers in rural towns across the country.”

He contrasts this with football, whose “popularity rose with the increasing aggression of the America at home and abroad.” In his view, “Football embodied an America who faced all challenges head on, forcing its will on opponents through skill, guile and brute force. We were a country taking bold risks in order to succeed and football was the riskiest of team sports.”

In case it wasn’t obvious, that was dig No. 1 of 2 at American militarism. I guess it’s only a partial dig, though, because even though it mentions “aggression” and “brute force,” it also says “faced all challenges head on” and “taking bold risks.”

I also enjoyed the part of the article where he introduces basketball, not so much for the premise of what he’s saying, but simply because of the words he uses and the way he puts them together. He describes basketball as “a perpetual motion machine in which players face muscular opposition, yet don’t conquer with brute force but rather with graceful maneuvers and intense teamwork. Each game is an example of athletic alchemy, producing astounding physical displays of leaping, spinning, passing and shooting. And it does this every few minutes.” I don’t see this when I see basketball being played. This sounds more like ballet. But it sounds good, and his passion for the game is evident.

My first indication that something was about to go horribly wrong with this article was when I read, “With the Trump Administration’s overt racism, misogyny, xenophobia and anti-LGBTQ policies, we haven’t just veered off the road, we’re hanging over the cliff.”

I guess this means that if one more snowflake gets triggered, we’ll fall off.

Quick, nobody say anything. Wait for Angela Davis to speak. She’s a black lesbian, so we should be safe if we listen to her. But wait, I think she’s able-bodied. We need to find a black disabled lesbian. Or would it be better to find a black disabled lesbian who was “assigned male at birth”?

I just can’t keep all this stuff straight. Oh no, using “straight” to mean “organized” is the height of heteronormativity. Should I have said that I can’t keep all this stuff gay? Or I can’t keep all this stuff pansexual? Agggghhhh…

Returning from that detour into the weeds, I now turn your attention to how Abdul-Jabbar echoes James’ narrative of black profesional athletes as victims of oppression. He says that “there is a racial component” to the NFL’s policies against players taking a knee. He believes that this is evident in that “It is the players of color who are being denied their freedom to protest because they are the ones who are part of the oppressed social group.” This does not make sense to me. First of all, the only demand that was being placed on them was that they not protest on the job.

How many jobs other than “paid protester” will allow you to protest on the job?

They were not being told that they couldn’t post things about police brutality on social media or that they couldn’t organize or attend rallies and protests off the clock. Also, the NFL can only control what its players do. It has no control over the fans in the stands. As far as I know, no one was stopping the protesting players from encouraging their fans to take a knee or wear clothing to games that advertised the cause.

Second of all, I would argue that the NFL’s prohibition of on-the-job protests was based on business considerations rather than racist ideology, parallel to how the NBA’s tolerance of them is probably based as much or more on business than wokeness. I’m sure that NFL leaders have their own opinions about #TakeAKnee, but I truly believe that they would have been willing to go any way that they thought would be most profitable. If the fans didn’t care about the kneeling, I don’t think they would have either. And if the fans would have overwhelmingly liked it, they might have encouraged all the players to do it. (Of course prioritizing profit isn’t always the same as choosing the most profitable course of action. The current setup where they’re not televising the anthem at all is probably more odious to many in the anti-#TakeAKnee crowd than the kneeling was.)

I personally liked the “stand or stay in the locker room” approach because I think it was fair to everyone, even though the pro-#TakeAKnee side didn’t see it that way (and maybe the other side didn’t either). The way I see it, there was something in it for the #StandForTheAnthem crowd to like because it promoted on-field respect for the anthem. And it also gave an impression that the protesting players were “banished” or “in timeout.”

I think the #TakeAKnee players missed an opportunity to capitalize on staying in the locker room, though. A boycott is one of the strongest forms of protest, and I think that staying in the locker room had a certain connotation of boycotting, even though the option to stay in the locker room was not initiated by the players themselves. Furthermore, if you are so triggered by the anthem that you’re willing to take a knee even though it will be controversial, is it a stretch that some might question why you’re willing to be on the field at all during the anthem?

And if the NFL is really such a cabal of dissent-stifling slave drivers, why are you supporting such an institution with your labor? Are you an Uncle Tom in Uncle Community Organizer’s clothing?

Back in the article, Abdul-Jabbar argues that making players stand for the anthem is not just about keeping politics out of football. He says, “…when owners honor military groups at games, or even play the national anthem, they are expressing their political opinions. This means that they aren’t against expressing political opinions, just dissenting ones…”

The military reference there was dig No. 2 of 2 at American militarism that I mentioned earlier. I really liked this part because it was a relief to find out that I’m evidently not the only one who is sometimes uncomfortable with certain ceremonies that are purportedly about “honoring our brave men and women” but look like they could also be a primer for what life would look like under martial law. I also think, as Abdul-Jabbar alludes to, that these sorts of ceremonies are often used to glamorize war and guilt-trip Americans into supporting particular policies.

Translation: If you are against sending these fine men and women overseas to blow up and get blown up, you are traitorous scum.

And let me remind anyone who may be offended by my discomfort with certain military performances that today’s military isn’t all about promoting bravery and patriotism. It is also very much about social engineering. So the next time you go to a military occupation where a football game breaks out, hold your applause until the very end of the show.

It’s all stars, stripes, and honor until they bust out the rainbow flag at the end and say “Surprise! Every one of these soldiers is one or more letters on The Acronym! #DontAskButPleaseDoTell.”

Anyways, I don’t really like that Abdul-Jabbar lumps in the national anthem with the military thing because I have never been triggered by the national anthem. I think that it is meant to transcend political and racial boundaries. I also understand that some people have very sincere religious, moral, and political objections to participating in anthem ceremonies. And that’s okay, too.

What’s not okay for me is when filthy-rich professional athletes argue that being required to stand for the national anthem as a condition of employment is like being required to chop cotton for free amidst constant danger of beatings.

I also think that Abdul-Jabbar’s characterization of military performances and the national anthem as ways for NFL owners to express their own views is erroneous. I view these things as giving fans what they want, the pro sports equivalent of catering to customers.

If the fans were mostly pacifists and anarchists, the military and national anthem would be nowhere to be found at a football game.

The bottom line in all this for me is that the NFL and NBA are businesses that make decisions that they feel are in the best interests of the business and may or may not fit with the political ideologies of the business owners. And unfortunately, victimhood is also a sort of business. Professional athletes are in a unique position to bring about social change. They have lots of money, connections, and resources. When they talk, cameras roll and people listen. So when LeBron James and his partners in activism say things that suggest that black people are destined to be perpetual victims of white people, this resonates with their fans, particularly the young black men that they claim to care so much about.

And the biggest problem with this is, as discussed above, that James & Co. are proof that black Americans can be successful and achieve a social status that their enslaved and truly oppressed ancestors could not have dreamed of.

Another ironic thing about James is that he is also proof that making responsible, moral choices is just as important as addressing systemic problems. I’m sure he bristles when people say things like, “America’s inner cities would be a lot better if the people living in them made better choices.” And yet his own life is a testament to the truth in that statement.

I found out from the Wikipedia entry about him that he had an absent father with “an extensive criminal record.” According to the entry, when he was a child, his mother arranged for him to live with a youth football coach and his family, a man who undoubtedly gave James a lot of the tools that he needed to get where he is today.

If his mother had been like a lot of other single mothers, she would have insisted that she could raise him all on her own, with occasional help from some strange man that she would bring home because “she has needs, too.” But she loved him enough that she wasn’t willing to sacrifice his well-being just so that she could put on a show of independence.

Americans of a variety of races are way too in love with the concept of single motherhood. We often praise single mothers for their “bravery” with no regard for how the absence of a father is affecting their children. “But Megan, some single mothers were raped by the fathers of their children! Some single mothers are widowed!” The thing about statements like that is that they really don’t help the children of single mothers who simply slept with deadbeats or ran off good men. When we are too quick to point out exceptions to the rule (like rape victims or widows), we are letting others off the hook who might need to be called out.

So not surprisingly, I found a way to bring this post to a close on a note about how feminism is destroying America. And lots of people don’t notice because they think feminism is all about women being able to vote and call the police on abusive husbands. Unless of course they think prisons are mean, in which case I hope they don’t think guns are mean, because if they do, they’re kinda out of options. Which is ironic since they love “choice” so much.

So far I haven’t seen LeBron James spouting feminist talking points, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he has been or will be pressured to do that at some point. Because I’m sure that there are women out there who would have no problem saying things like, “You talked about how many black men were killed by the police last year. But you didn’t say anything about how many black women were forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term due to oppressive abortion laws.”

Please, Mr. James, get off the victimhood bus while there’s still time.

If you wait too long, you could find yourself thrown off of it. And then run over by it. And then backed over a few times. All with a #DrivingWhileWoke woman behind the wheel. And no, the fact that women are horrible drivers will not save you.

Verso l’alto,
Megan