Will players be allowed to kneel in protest?
The NBA has empowered its players to speak out on social and racial issues. But will the league allow its players to kneel during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial inequality?
“As has been the case of the last several years, we will work in partnership with the players on important issues like this,” NBA spokesperson Mike Bass told USA Today Sports.
The NBA rule book states that “players, coaches and trainers must stand and line up in a dignified posture along the foul lines” during the national anthem, which the league adopted in 1981. Former NBA commissioner David Stern suspended Denver Nuggets guard Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf for a game in 1996 for sitting during the anthem and calling the American flag “a symbol of oppression of tyranny.” The NBA then allowed Abdul-Rauf, a Muslim, to stand in silent prayer during the anthem. Even when former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt during the anthem in 2016, NBA commissioner Adam Silver affirmed its players must follow the league rule.
In recent days, NBA players have expressed concern over whether a resumed season would help or hurt their efforts to address racial inequality. But there are no indications the NBA players union has asked the league to abolish the rule.
For the past three weeks, NBA players have protested police brutality and racial inequality after a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, killed an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, as three other officers looked on in Minneapolis. Even the NFL has reversed course on not supporting Kaepernick’s peaceful protest.
“I don’t see how the league can keep the ban,” said David Leonard, a professor at Washington State University who teaches classes on politics of sports and the author of “After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness.”
“The ban predates Kaepernick’s protest. But the ban in itself and the connection to the treatment of Mahmoud AbdulRauf speaks to a history of curtailing and silencing Black voices and Black protests. It fits into a larger history of the NBA wanting to sell a league where race and Blackness was not seen.”
The NBA did not encourage players to speak out on social and racial issues during the 1980s. Chicago Bulls legend Michael Jordan infamously declined to endorse Democrat Harvey Gantt, who is Black and ran for Senate in 1990 against incumbent Republican Jesse Helms, who had staunchly opposed various civil rights initiatives. Following the Palace Brawl in 2004, Stern required players to wear “business casual attire,” a dress code former Golden State Warriors guard Jason Richardson considered “kind of racist” since the dress code forbid baggy clothing and jewelry.
Incidentally, that rule led to NBA players wearing colourful and tailored suits during postgame interviews. Those same players have become emboldened to address racial issues.
“I don’t think the NBA will contest that,” said Alex Manning, an assistant professor of sociology at Hamilton College. “It is valuable. I don’t want to diminish the symbolic gestures. They matter a lot. We can see that with Kaepernick. Even with that backlash, the gesture has lived and been a part of what we’re seeing right now. It’s very important. It also normalizes that athletics are not removed from anti-racist struggle.”