Sports is part of the fight against racism, and there’s no turning back: Arthur
Sports, like everything else, lives in the world. It can be tempting to believe sports is a shiny, ridiculous bubble of wins and losses and dingers and dunks. It’s like closing your curtains and pretending the stadium down the road was built by magic. It’s one of many comforting illusions. Stick, as they say, to sports.
And then Sunday the sports world found itself more enmeshed with politics and protest than at any point in modern history. A little over one year ago then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt during the American national anthem before a pre-season game to protest against systemic racism in the United States. Nobody even noticed at first. He kept kneeling. He left the 49ers after last season, and was not signed by any NFL team. He isn’t a top-10 QB, but he’s being blackballed without shame.
One year later, the argle-bargle-belching president of the United States decided to play to his canker-sore ego and his racism-fuelled base by attacking the athletes of the National Football League and the National Basketball Association, which by sheer and utter coincidence are the two pro sports leagues in North America with the most Black players. At a rally in Alabama — another coincidence! — he called players who kneel to protest during the national anthem “sons of bitches,” and said they should be fired. Then, after Golden State Warriors star Steph Curry said he didn’t want to visit the White House to celebrate their NBA championship, Donald Trump rescinded the invitation. Sunday, on the only Twitter account in the world that may start a nuclear war, he called for a boycott of the NFL.
Suddenly sports hadn’t been this political since Muhammad Ali. LeBron James called Trump, with devastating precision, “U Bum.” Jim Harbaugh, the football coach at Michigan, said, “Read the Constitution.” People across the NFL criticized Trump: Even former coach Rex Ryan, on ESPN, said: “I supported Donald Trump . . . and I’m reading these comments and it’s appalling to me, and I’m sure it’s appalling to almost any citizen in this country. And I apologize for being pissed off, because right away I’m associated with what Donald Trump stands for.”