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5 Trump Is Not the Problem
Black athletes, similar to what we have seen over the last several years, were not hesitant about being heard. For example LeBron James tweeted, “It’s sad what’s going on in Charlottesville. Is this the direction our country is heading? Make America Great Again huh?! He said that.”
We have reached the point with LeBron James when it would have been surprising had he said nothing. There was also NBA player Evan Turner who responded to Trump’s pathetic tweet about the American Nazi march by commenting, “Y’all won’t do what is needed because you have tolerance for hate. These people are breeding more humans to keep this ignorant cycle going!”
Green Bay Packer tight end Martellus Bennett tweeted, “I Wish there was a rotten tomatoes for presidents. The current president rating would probably be the same as the Emoji movie.” His brother, Seattle Seahawk Michael Bennett sat during the anthem on Sunday, the day after his former teammate, Oakland Raider Marshawn Lynch did the same. Afterward, Bennett pledged to sit all season saying: For too long this political weight has been on the shoulders of black athletes – women and men – to speak out against Trump’s racist agenda.
Seeing everything in Virginia…I just wanted to be able to use my platform to continuously speak out on injustice…. First of all I want to make sure people understand I love the military—my father was in the military. I love hot dogs like any other American. I love football like any other American. But I don’t love segregation, I don’t love riots, I don’t love oppression. I don’t love gender slander. I just want to see people have the equality that they deserve and I want to be able to use this platform to continuously push the message and keep finding out how unselfish we can be in society, how we can continuously love one another and understand that people are different. And just because people are different doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t like them. Just because they don’t eat what you eat, just because they don’t pray to the same God you pray to doesn’t mean you should hate them. Whether it is Muslim, whether it is Buddhist, whether it is Christianity, I just want people to understand that no matter what, we need to stay together. It’s more about being a human being at this point.
But Bennett told me that he doesn’t want to be doing this kind of work alone. He said, “If want to get anything done, we need white athletes to stand along side us. It can’t just be our voices, our burden.”
As Charlottesville shows, it certainly cannot be black voices and bodies alone to beat back the Trump/Bannon agenda. This is an all-hands-on-deck time in our history. In the words of a friend who was in Charlottesville and almost hit by the car driven by the murderer of Heather Heyer:
In order to command the streets, we have to fill them. If we had had people covering every inch of downtown Charlottesville, we wouldn’t have been so vulnerable. In order to demobilize the fascist movement, they have to be physically outnumbered and driven out (they won’t be won on a political basis, their politics are based on hypocrisy and violence). Isolate them, demoralize them.
It is tough to think of something that would demoralize these bottom dwellers more than seeing their white athletic heroes publicly and loudly telling them that they can go to hell.