Goodell changes heart, not history on protests
As heartening as it is to hear NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s newfound wokeness, it doesn’t earn him a pass. Not after the damage he and the NFL did.
Had Goodell stood behind Colin Kaepernick when the then-49ers quarterback began his protests against police brutality four years ago, maybe Kaepernick wouldn’t have been blackballed by the NFL. Had the NFL not demonized players with its attempts to enforce faux displays of patriotism, maybe we’d be further along in recognizing and confronting the racism that is baked into every aspect of our society.
Had Goodell and the NFL cared as much about doing the right thing as they did about making money, maybe, just maybe we could have avoided the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, as well as that barbaric shooting Sunday of Jacob Blake.
“It was horrific to see that play out on the screen. There was part of me that said, ‘I hope people realize that’s what the players were protesting,’ ” Goodell told former player Emmanuel Acho in an appearance on Acho’s social media series “Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man.”
“That’s what’s been going on in our communities. You see it now on television, but that’s been going on for a long, long time,” Goodell continued. “That’s where we should have listened sooner. And we should have been in
there with them, understanding it and figuring out what we can do as the NFL.
“We can’t solve all problems. We can’t,” Goodell added. “But we’re big in our communities. We have a platform. We have an opportunity. And we’re using that effectively now. I wish we could have been doing it earlier.”
That’s the thing, Goodell and the NFL could have.
Long before the country was horrified by the video of Floyd begging for his life while a white police officer knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes, there was Eric Garner. And Michael Brown. And Tamir Rice. And Walter Scott. And Alton Sterling. And Philando Castile. And Atatiana Jefferson.
And Trayvon Martin. And Sandra Bland. And Ahmaud Arbery.
Do I really need to continue? NFL players protested the deaths of Brown and Rice at the time, while WNBA and NBA players spoke out after the deaths of Martin and Sterling. If Goodell “didn’t know what was going on in the communities,” as he told Acho, it’s because he didn’t care to.
Goodell also told Acho that he wished Kaepernick would have taken the NFL up on its offer to come in and enlighten the league on his protests and the reasons behind them. But what reason did Kaepernick have to do that, after the NFL left him twisting in the wind while the president of the United States and a good portion of America hurled insults, vitriol and worse at him?
Besides, it is the height of privilege for white people to expect Black and brown people to educate them on racial injustice. We are the ones who created this system. We are the ones who have perpetuated it for some 400 years. It is on us to recognize that, realize the many ramifications of it and then figure out how to fix it.
To Goodell’s credit, he has been willing to do the work. I was there in New Orleans when he sat in on one of those bail hearings he mentioned to Acho, and I watched as he had a long conversation with the grandfather of one of the young men in custody. I saw on his face the impact of hearing former Saints tight end
Benjamin Watson say the sight and sound of young Black men in chains reminded him of slavery’s ugly history.
Yet it wasn’t until June, after it had become acceptable, did Goodell say that he would support players who knelt in protest. Only now is he calling out those who have bastardized the reasons for the protests in order to discredit them.
“What they were trying to do is exercise their right to bring attention to something that needs to get fixed,” Goodell told Acho. “That misrepresentation of who they were and what they were doing was the thing that really gnawed at me.”
Did it, though?
Either Goodell didn’t understand what was happening in the communities and, thus, didn’t see why the mischaracterizations were so damaging. Or he did, and didn’t have the guts to stand up to President Donald Trump, Jerry Jones, Bob McNair and everyone else who gets twitchy when they’re asked to acknowledge that Black lives really do matter.
Acho opened their interview by showing Goodell a picture of the commissioner’s late father, Charles, who lost his U.S. Senate seat because he had the courage to change his mind and protest the Vietnam War.
To which Goodell said, “It’s not always easy to know what’s right. But when you do know what’s right, you have to have the courage to do it.”
It’s easy to stake your claim on the right side of history after you’ve seen how it’s ultimately going to be written. But that isn’t courage.
It’s calculation.