SORRY ... NOT SORRY ENOUGH
Goodell’s overtures are a start, but NFL still has work to do, writes Kevin B. Blackistone
Commissioner Roger Goodell: In the late 1950s, my father, a native Washingtonian, and his friends started attending NFL games in Baltimore rather than D.C. It was a protest. They refused to root for their hometown team as long as the owner, George Preston Marshall, obstinately maintained its roster as the league’s last for whites only.
Marshall finally retreated, but only under threat of bayonet from the U.S. federal government — which risked alienating white supremacist fans to whom Marshall catered. He traded for a Black player, Bobby Mitchell, in 1962 and infamously welcomed Mitchell to D.C. at a dinner where Marshall instructed the Confederate anthem, Dixie, be played, and urged Mitchell to sing along.
Dad and his friends returned to cheer for the newly integrated team that season, only to realize Mitchell’s arrival was cover for Marshall’s bigotry. For they, the progeny of enslaved Africans like Mitchell, were also forced to endure Marshall’s embrace of supremacists’ messaging. Marshall had every home game opened with his team’s marching band playing that Confederate anthem.
Dad complained about the nauseous song in a letter to Edward Bennett Williams, who became acting team president as Marshall aged into incapacity. Williams agreed that the team had more untangling to do with traditions that were an affront to a growing demographic of players, like Mitchell, and fans like my father and his friends.
Commissioner, I thought of that history after your confession in the wake of yet another Black man’s murder — George Floyd’s, I think, or was it Ahmaud Arbery’s? Or Rayshard Brooks? — that you had led the NFL astray at the behest of 32 franchise owners. You admitted taking it in an insensate direction by refusing to consider the protest waged by quarterback Colin Kaepernick, and other players, against the extrajudicial killings of Black men.
You even uttered the phrase, “Black Lives Matter.”
But as there was for Marshall’s franchise, there is more for the NFL to untangle itself from when it comes to offending the sensibilities of Black men who make up the bulk of the league, who are a significant part of the fan base and for whom the protests of today resonate most.
It isn’t enough that you committed US$250 million over the next 10 years of the league’s estimated $15 billion in annual revenue to aid the plight of racial injustice to which Kaepernick and others demanded attention. I know, I know, that’s at least
1.6 per cent of annual revenue for causes that directly impact upward of 70 per cent of the athletic labour of the league!
It isn’t enough that you openly encouraged franchises to give Kaepernick an opportunity to play again after blackballing him since he stepped into free agency in 2017. What a fortunate thing there are a few Black coaches left in the league. It took one of them, San Diego’s Anthony Lynn, to consider throwing that bone to disgruntled fans on your behalf.
As Penn State professor Amira Rose Davis reminded us on a recent radio show on which we appeared: “(Kaepernick) would get a job in a system that is still exploitative, a system that is run on Black labour but not managed by it. So getting a job within that system, as is, can’t be the goal if we’re serious about this. Because that requires a complete rethinking and overhaul of so many of the foundations of sports.”
In short, the return of Kaepernick, who you and the league kept from playing in what may have been the prime of his career, would be tokenism at best.
Instead, what your league — and all others in recent weeks that have issued what read like boilerplate statements about Black lives mattering — needs to do is heed the reason for which Kaepernick protested, which is systemic racist policing, particularly in cities where NFL franchises play. It is disingenuous for the NFL — or the NBA, for that matter — to market Black athletic talent for billions of dollars in those locales while that talent is unable to separate itself from problematic policing policies.
Want to make a difference, commissioner? Rid the NFL of the imagery it promotes that is at the heart of the uprising in this country in the wake of Floyd’s murder. Steal a page from the University of Minnesota, Ground Zero of the Floyd tragedy, which announced it would no longer contract for extra city police at games and concerts. Replace
Law Enforcement Appreciation game days with those for social workers on the front lines of the mental health and drug abuse struggles in urban America.
And demilitarize game days. “The NFL has mastered the symbolic performance of patriotism through its military partnerships,” Michael Butterworth, who directs the University of Texas’s Center for Sports Communication & Media, said via email. “There was shock and outrage when the ‘paid patriotism’ story broke in 2015, but those reactions failed to acknowledge all of the other co-ordination between the league and the military — from the NFL Kickoff Live events in the years just after 9/11, to the endless mythologizing of Pat Tillman, to the marketing of Salute to Service month each November.”
End the war machinery flyovers in an effort to honour troops that the late senator and prisoner of war John Mccain in 2015 called a “boondoggle.” Replace the marching of the military to kickoff games with, say, kids, as is the routine in soccer nowadays, which hearkens to a purity we wished our games had as well as a future we may want them to realize.
As entrenched as the NFL is with soldiering, it may seem an impossible task given the popularity of such performances. But the same was thought of imagery Marshall promoted.
Dad asked Williams to consider not insulting Black NFL fans with Confederate imagery. Williams responded by ordering Dixie,.
Commissioner, the Washington franchise all these years later still has a big step to take on this front. And so does your league if you really believe Black Lives Matter.
The Washington Post