Hopkins says comment from late owner made him feel ‘like I’m a slave’

A 2017 comment by Robert Mcnair, the late Houston Texans owner, cut so deeply that the team’s star wide receiver said it made him feel “like I’m a slave again.”

As NFL players and owners debated player activism that fall in the wake of controversial protests during the national anthem, Mcnair told fellow owners “we can’t have the inmates running the prison,” according to an ESPN report.

The comment infuriated players, threatening the already fragile relationship.

The Texans’ Deandre Hopkins, one the league’s top wide receivers, was so offended he sat out a practice and seriously considered sitting out a game.

In a GQ interview published this week, he described the cultural divide between NFL owners and a majority black workforce.

“It’s hard for people to understand what that means when your family was slaves. You can’t relate to something like that if your great-uncle’s not telling you stories about their parents or their grandparents and what they went through,” Hopkins said in the GQ story. “Not even too long ago, people couldn’t even drink out of the same water faucet. Not even 100 years ago.

“I’m from South Carolina. I’m from a real cultured state, where there’s still racism daily. Still, places are segregated. I really didn’t want to play. I’ve got to stand for something (to set an example for his children). If their daddy don’t stand up, then what the hell am I going to tell them?

“It feels like I’m a slave again. Getting ran over. Listen to the master, go to work.”

Mcnair continued to speak out against player protests, saying in 2018 that NFL fields are “not the place for political statements.”

Mcnair died in late 2018 at the age of 81.