Why don't more athletes speak out? They don't feel like they can
— -- This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's June 6 World Football Issue. Subscribe today!
AMERICA HAS A major problem. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the city of Chicago -- home of Isiah Thomas and Dwyane Wade, Tim Hardaway and Derrick Rose -- has paid out over $500 million in police brutality settlements since 2004. Last year in New York, reckless police falsely arrested and used excessive force on retired tennis player James Blake in broad daylight and five months earlier broke Atlanta Hawks forward Thabo Sefolosha's leg. Blake asked for and received an apology from the city; Sefolosha sued the NYPD in April. The NYPD's killing by chokehold of Eric Garner in July 2014 fueled national protests and sparked Rose and LeBron James to wear "I Can't Breathe" T-shirts on court in solidarity. In July 2015, the city settled, paying the Garner family $5.9 million. In Cleveland, four months after Garner's death, police shot and killed 12-year-old, toy-gun-carrying Tamir Rice. The city recently settled with the little boy's family for $6 million, replacing smiles and birthdays with taxpayer money but with no acknowledgement of remorse or wrongdoing.
Last year The Wall Street Journal reported that between 2010 and 2014, the 10 largest police departments in the U.S. paid a staggering $1.4 billion in police misconduct settlements. Americans are told to be realistic, that there is no money for free education, parks or clean drinking water, but every day heartbeats are exchanged for dollars.
Policing is clearly one of the most divisive issues in the country -- except in the sports arena, where the post-9/11 hero narrative has been so deeply embedded within its game-day fabric that policing is seen as clean, heroic, uncomplicated. Following the marketing strategy of the military, police advocacy organizations have partnered with teams from all four major leagues to host "Law Enforcement Appreciation" nights, or similar events. This year 27 of the 29 U.S.-based MLB teams will host games in which portions of ticket proceeds will go to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. Teams from all four major leagues are already partnered with GovX, a third-party vendor that provides ticket discounts to veterans and first responders -- as long as they register with the company, which in turn collects their data and sells them, among other things, discounted military gear and supplies. Despite attempts by Congress to discourage the practice, the Department of Defense continues to militarize sports as a place to recruit soldiers, and until recently teams continued to take millions of taxpayer dollars to stage events like surprise military homecomings, allowing fans to believe these for-profit setups are selfless expressions of patriotism on the part of the home team.
Nobody seems to care much about this authoritarian shift at the ballpark, yet the media and the public are quick to demand accountability from players they consider insufficiently activist. They blame these black players for not speaking up on behalf of their communities, ignoring the smothering effect that staged patriotism and cops singing the national anthem in a time of Ferguson have on player expression. It's indirectly stifled, while the increasing police pageantry at games sends another clear message: The sentiments of the poor in Ferguson and Cleveland do not matter. Several NYPD supporters mocked Garner's grieving family by wearing T-shirts reading "I Can Breathe," then mocked activists with "Blue Lives Matter" slogans, as if police, more powerful than ever, were disenfranchised.
While athletes are routinely criticized for "not doing more," it is conveniently ignored how deeply their employers have mobilized against the most powerless elements of their fan base. The athlete who stands up for the black community, as Rams receiver Kenny Britt did for Ferguson two years ago, risks the rages of the white public, being called "anti-police," just as the player disagreeing with the Middle East wars risks being called unpatriotic, because it is apparently impossible to be both anti-war and pro-soldier.
Maybe the increased politicizing of sports makes it even more critical for the game's most powerful athletes to stand up, for in a world of a billion workers, they are the tiny handful of irreplaceable employees. Equally important, however, is for the public to recognize how much its values are being used for profit, and to acknowledge how the basic idea of going to a game to escape a complicated world for just a few hours has been manipulated into a distant memory.
