No longer room for ‘shut up’ in sports
Athletes must deal with real world
The Steelers and the Pirates lit up their empty stadiums in brilliant orange last weekend, but neither the orange glow in the low sky of a North Side night nor the cooperative effort behind it got much traction in the moment.
Overtaken by a global eruption of civic protest, last week’s sixth annual observation of National Gun Violence Awareness Day drew only a fraction of the focus it typically warrants, but there’s good news in this case, good news that just happens to double as the bad news.
This is America, which means every day is gun violence awareness day.
Prominent Pittsburgh athletes such as NFL superstar Aaron Donald and Meghan Klingenberg of the National Women’s Soccer League’s Portland Thorns were among those giving the event their full voice, mindful of the fact that many readers of the sports pages and websites get uncomfortable when the real world leaks onto the sportscape. Now, of course, it’s a flash flood.
“Stick to sports,” goes the reflexive directive, which you surely know has a more pointed translation: “Shut up.” Or as Fox News agitatress Laura Ingraham admonished LeBron James, “Shut up and dribble,” a swipe the NBA legend and
business partner Maverick Carter turned into a threepart Showtime documentary on the contributions of black athletes to social evolution. It contained precious little dribbling and absolutely no shutting up.
“Although this is an inherently ignorant stance to project onto athletes, it’s especially uniformed to project onto athletes that are female,” Klingenberg said via email. “Not only are we responsible, civic-minded citizens, but the action of a woman pulling on a jersey and playing sport is inseparably political. A field full of women, of all colors, of all orientations and from the lower socioeconomic ladder, all playing together in a ‘man’s world.’ We are fighting for change every time we take the field.”
No, sports fans, this is not the century for “shut up.” Sports are in an existential battle for their very operation amid a stubborn pandemic, the economy only marginally able to support them in the means to which they’ve become accustomed, and with many of their athletes noticing they are the same color as too many people who keep getting killed by authority figures because they are that color.
So good luck watching a game like it’s 1945, or like it’s 1965, or even like it’s 2015.
Hadiya Pendleton couldn’t even make it until 2015, and all she had to do was stay alive until she was 16. Shot in the back in Chicago nine days after her high school band performed in Barack Obama’s second inaugural parade, she was swept away by her city and this country’s endless river of gun violence. Orange is the color Hadiya’s family and friends wore at ceremonies celebrating her memory.
Last week’s orange-out got itself dwarfed by protests in 50 states and 40 countries over the death in police custody of George Floyd in Minneapolis, but it went on anyway because it’s part of the same issue. Gun violence didn’t kill George Floyd, but there can be no meaningful police reform without meaningful gun reform.
“I don’t believe this is a cause,” Klingenberg wrote. “To me, it’s common sense. Less gun violence beget(s) safer schools, less suicide and creates a safer world for everyone, especially for people of color, women in abusive relationships and children.”
In a country armed to its gills, the combustibility of street confrontations is
“I don’t believe this is a cause. To me, it’s common sense. Less gun violence beget(s) safer schools, less suicide and creates a safer world for everyone ...”
— Meghan Klingenberg
displayed every day and every night.
“The backdrop of the nationwide protests really highlighted what we at our organization have long understood based on the data and research that we do,” said Jordana Baldwin, director of cultural engagement at Everytown for Gun Safety. “Gun violence disproportionately impacts black Americans, and police gun violence is gun violence, so it falls under the rubric of the kind of gun violence that we aim to disrupt.
“So with the protests happening on such a large scale that the national conversation was so robust, so emotional, so intense, we did take a beat to consider whether or not it made sense to go ahead with the campaign, but ultimately we felt very certain that we had to because [of] the origin story of our campaign. Hadiya Pendleton’s parents are parents of a black child who was shot and killed with a gun. Nothing can compete and nothing should compete in the national consciousness with the content of the protests, but we felt a real alignment and a synergy with the issue.”
Baldwin said she essentially has been overwhelmed at the extent of the support from prominent athletes all across the country, pointing out that many are themselves survivors of gun violence. More than 25 teams and 100 athletes supported this year’s campaign.
“I see both of these issues as interconnected,” Klingenberg said, “like different sides of the same coin. Gun violence disproportionately affects communities of color, and unfortunately police brutality is part of that violence. Therefore, any positive impact made for one issue indeed will help with the other.”