Suppressing dissent is dark path to take
TONE-DEAF DECISION
showed the world just how much the NFL doesn’t care about the almost 70% of black players in the league or what’s going on in the communities that most of them come from.
Before this week, Sterling Brown was nothing more than a man on the end of the Milwaukee Bucks’ bench trying to carve out a career in the NBA.
Today, he’s yet another reason why every black athlete should be protesting.
“We all need to take a knee, wherever we are,” said Hollywood actress Jenifer Lewis in a recent interview with radio show “The Breakfast Club.” Lewis stars on the hit ABC sitcom “Black-ish,” which recently shot an episode that discussed the topic of kneeling in the NFL that the network refused to air.
“Y’all better speak out,” she continued. “What are you going to do, let the people that were on the frontline of the ’60s and took those dogs and hoses, and you’re going to ride around in your big car and do nothing?”
Lewis is right, because after watching the video of Brown’s arrest it’s evident that police officers in this country know that they can get away with anything.
How else can a routine police stop that should have ended with a parking ticket turn into a situation where at least six officers slam a man to the ground and use a taser on him for calmly asking a question?
Sterling Brown is the exact reason why Colin Kaepernick took a knee, so it’s somehow fitting that Roger Goodell and the NFL announced their new anthem policy on the exact same day the Brown was video was released.
This was never about football anyway. Yet the league has unwittingly created a monster, because from now until the season starts this discussion will continue.
During Week 1 of the upcoming season, ratings could very well be at an all-time high as people tune in just to see who stays in the locker room during the anthem, or if anyone is bold enough to challenge the new policy.
Which is why everyone should remember what happened on Wednesday, because the NFL drew a line in the sand.
The owners have made their intentions clear. Now it’s up to the players. They can stand up for what’s right, or be viewed as million-dollar house slaves. The NFLcan punishdissent. But it shouldn’t. On Wednesday, the National Football League put forth a new policy intended to clamp down on players’ national anthem protests. Under this rule, players cannot kneel during the anthem, and are required to remain in the locker room if they are unwilling to stand. Teams whose players violate the rule will be fined by the league.
The league’s decision is the latest development in a closely watched culture war front; in celebration of the NFL’s decision today, Vice President Pence tweeted “#Winning.” But we should consider the idea that ensuring a major cultural center of American life becomes a muted, dissent-free safe space is not an exercise in winning, but rather in loss.
Let’s dispatch with the easy questions. The NFL and its teams haven’t violated the First Amendment by setting these rules. The relationships between player, team and league are governed by contract, not the Constitution. Instead, the question we should be asking ourselves is not about whether the NFLcan suppress dissent, but whether itshould.
If you support the NFL’s new policy, ask yourself a few questions. Would you support the same policies applied to players kneeling during the anthem in protest of something other than police brutality? It’s not unreasonable to imagine that an NFL player who believes he cannot, in good faith, show support toward a countrywhere abortion is legal maywant to kneelduring the anthem.
If the league crafted a policy to ensure his team would be punished for his decision to kneel, would you celebrate the policy in those circumstancesas well?
You can substitute any controversial social or political issue you care about and the question remains the same. Would you be equally supportive of a major sports league in anothercountry —say,Turkey or China —enforcingthesame policies on its teamsand players?
Do you believe that society will benefit from punishment of teams whose players use their platform to engage in nondisruptive support for human rights? Consider that this may be an illiberal standard we should avoid rather than celebrate.
Finally, are you certain that private organizations’ punishment of political speech is a good outcome for American society? Thanks to the First Amendment, Americans can engage in political speech with the knowledge that the government cannot punish them for it. Of course, those rights do not extend to the private workplace, even for famous athletes. But the fact that companies can punish political speech is not a compelling argument thatthey should.
Dissent always provokes suppression from powerful actors, here and abroad, through private and government action. If you don’t believe me, take a moment to find out what has happened to dissidents just recently in Thailand, Cambodia, China, Russia, Turkey, Spain or the many other countries where political speech is often treated as a crime.
We have a moral responsibility to do what we can to protect people’s ability to dissent when given the opportunity to do so. This is one of those opportunities.
Protest makes people uncomfortable; that’s often the point. Perhaps, rather than demanding the NFL punish teams to ensure that their players do not protest, we should accept that encountering expression that briefly makes us uncomfortable is a small price to pay for ensuring the protection of expression we deeply value.
One last suggestion: Question whether the NFL’s demand for a dissent-free national anthem cheapens, rather than enhances, the message of those who do stand for the anthem. As the Supreme Court warned decades ago, “Words uttered under coercion are proof of loyalty to nothing but self-interest.”
McLaughlin is a senior program officer at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The views expressed here are her own.