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Are Top Players in the NBA and WNBA Doing Enough to Defeat Donald Trump?
For example, where is Lebron James now? As far as I can tell, he has said little about the presidential race despite the incredibly high stakes of next week's election.
Oct 29, 2024
Back in 2020--during the BLM protests following the murder of George Floyd—NBA and especially WNBA support for the Biden-Harris campaign played an important role.
Now Kamala Harris—the first Black woman to run as a major candidate—has a very real chance of winning the presidency.
And she is running against a Donald Trump that is even more racist, and angry, than he was in 2020, spreading lies about the Haitian community, promising to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, and publicly calling for a “very rough day” in which police could violently punish suspected criminals—a nod to the racist police brutality that sparked the 2020 protests. He even ranted against President Biden for rescuing WNBA star Britney Griner from Putin’s Russian prison.
This would seem to be an all-hands-on-deck moment for the NBA and WNBA, many of whom care deeply about these things and often act on their convictions. Yet little seems to be happening, especially compared to 2020.
An active campaign by top NBA and WNBA players to support Harris could have a major impact in mobilizing voters...
There are some promising signs.
Back in July many high-profile WNBA players publicly backed Harris.
Both Steve Kerr and Steph Curry publicly endorsed Harris at the DNC Convention in Chicago (both enjoy a Bay-area connection to Harris, a Golden State Warriors fan).
An Athletes for Harris group was recently formed, whose co-chairs include Earvin “Magic” Johnson, Steve Kerr, Candace Parker, Doc Rivers, Dawn Staley, and Chris Paul. Johnson spoke clearly for the group, declaring: “I’m so happy to be a part of Athletes for Harris . . . For all of the athletes out there, don’t be afraid to use your platforms – we need all of you to get involved.”
These things matter.
But there was so much more in 2020.
Back in 2018, when LeBron James was scolded by Laura Ingraham to “shut up and dribble,” he responded: "I get to sit up here and talk about social injustice. We will definitely not shut up and dribble. ... I mean too much to society, too much to the youth, too much to so many kids who feel like they don't have a way out.” In July of 2020 he joined with other players to form “More Than a Vote.” The following month he publicly praised Biden for nominating Harris as his vice-presidential candidate. In October he endorsed the ticket. And in November, he celebrated the Biden-Harris ticket victory.
But where is James now? As far as I can tell, he has said little about the presidential race.
In August, James publicly turned over leadership of “More Than a Vote” to Nneka Ogwumike--a 9-time WNBA All-Star and current president of the players union. The group pledged to focus its attention on reproductive freedom—a theme obviously resonant with the Harris campaign, as James alluded: “I started More Than a Vote to give athletes a place to educate themselves and get active authentically to who we are. It’s only right that this election be about women athletes. We’re all following their lead right now and Nneka is the perfect person for this election. I’m excited to support her vision.” But neither James nor “More Than a Vote” has publicly endorsed Harris. The group’s Instagram account features powerful posts on reproductive freedom, but nothing about the election, even though Trump opposes reproductive freedom and it is the centerpiece of the Harris campaign.
To be fair, like “More Than a Vote,” the NBA has “teamed up” with Power the Polls to promote poll worker volunteerism, and has also promoted non-partisan voter registration. But this is a far cry from making a strong political statement or endorsing the Harris-Walz campaign.
An active campaign by top NBA and WNBA players to support Harris could have a major impact in mobilizing voters, especially in large cities of hugely important swing states. Cleveland, Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Charlotte, Phoenix—these are cities with major NBA and/or WNBA teams that feature some of the sport’s most revered stars.
Is there a television network in the country that would say “no” to interviews with James or Curry or A’ja Wilson or Breanna Stewart or Candace Parker? Where is the Kamala campaign ad featuring “Magic” Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? Where is the warm-up gear with the slogan “Kamala, We Won’t Go Back?”
One very promising development: Stephen Jackson and Matt Barnes, two outspoken retired NBA champions, recently hosted Harris on their popular webcast, “All the Smoke.” The 47-minute interview has had 605,000 YouTube viewings in two weeks. It’s a great interview, highlighting Harris’s affinities with millions of NBA fans.
Professional basketball is big business, for the league and for its players. There are serious economic risks to being “too political,” as the recent controversy surrounding Celtics star Jaylen Brown’s exclusion from the U.S. Olympic team because of a dispute with Nike make clear. And NBA professionals are certainly no more “obliged” to take a stand than any other professionals or citizens.
At the same time, many NBA stars, and increasingly WNBA stars as well, are huge celebrities with their own “brands” and media companies. As James himself stated back in 2018, “the Association” furnishes a huge platform for professional athletes to promote social and racial justice. In 2020 these athletes very visibly, and heroically, used this platform at a moment of real decision.
The current moment is perhaps even more serious.
Kamala Harris represents the promise of social justice and democracy.
Donald Trump represents contempt for them and contempt for everyone who does not share his racist and xenophobic vision of “American Greatness.”
The choice is clear. And time is running out.
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Trump's War on Black Jocks
Another season of despair or a pigskin blue wave?
Jul 12, 2018
Snatching immigrant babies may have scored some points for President Trump with his base, but it was never going to light up the scoreboard like tackling black jocks. That one really played to the grandstands. The complicated combination of adoration and resentment so many white males feel for those rich, accomplished uber-men is a significant but rarely discussed aspect of fandom, especially in relation to football, that magna cum macho of American sports.
Last September, when the commander-in-chief of toxic masculinity dubbed any football player who didn't stand during the playing of the national anthem a "son of a bitch," the war on black men took a spectacular pop-cultural surge. And unlike white cops who shoot unarmed black men, President Trump didn't even have to claim that he had been afraid.
He should have been, though. After all, he might have sparked a slaves' revolt that, in the end, could do him in. The opportunity to crack the whip on the fantasy plantation called pro football was, however, just too irresistible for him. Whether it will trigger a long-awaited, long-deferred Jock Spring is the big question of the coming season to which there's a critical corollary: Will such sustained activism be supported by the white players of the National Football League as well? That hasn't happened yet and it could change things in major ways.
Trump, once a pro football owner himself, clearly understands a white male mindset in which black football players exist only to provide on-field thrills, never to be humanized, much less allowed to protest inequality and racism.
"For white players it's about the fear of losing their jobs," David Meggyesy, a white former NFL linebacker, who in the 1960s set a standard for radical outspokenness, told me recently. "But too many white fans share Trump's tribalism that includes seeing white players as the brains and black players as the bodies, not too smart, who should just shut up and play."
Trump, once a pro football owner himself, clearly understands a white male mindset in which black football players exist only to provide on-field thrills, never to be humanized, much less allowed to protest inequality and racism. Meanwhile, the players, most of whom know that they are easily replaceable, often lacking guaranteed contracts, exist at the sufferance of their white billionaire team owners, a number of whom were early Trump donors.
Silent Seasons
Looking back, it's little wonder that, for almost half a century, black athletes had been a politically silent segment of the black entertainment industry. The reigning superstars -- O.J. Simpson, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods -- collaborated with owners, television, and corporate America in their successful pursuit of record-breaking wealth, while refusing to take stands against racism. Simpson and Woods even denied their own blackness. O.J. once explained to me that he wasn't black or white, he was O.J., while Tiger, with a Thai mother and an African-American father, claimed to be "Cablinasian." They set the standard and its reward system: as long as the players continued to remain apolitical, owners and fans were basically willing to tolerate bad behavior, ostentation, and a sullen refusal to be grateful.
But by 2016, with Trump soon to be elected, O.J. in jail, Tiger in decline, and Jordan now the principal owner of the NBA's Charlotte Hornets, the resistance, led by Colin Kaepernick on that now-famous knee, began to grow. President Trump would be directly dissed when, in April 2017, many New England Patriots declined invitations to the White House after winning the 2017 Super Bowl. That September, after the president disinvited Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry to the White House for comments he made suggesting that he might not attend a championship ceremony there, the Cleveland Cavaliers' LeBron James chipped in. He addressed Trump in a tweet as "U Bum" and wrote that "going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!" In June 2018, Trump had to cancel a Super Bowl party after most of the Super-Bowl-winning Philadelphia Eagles team indicated they wouldn't be attending. And in June, LeBron and Curry once again said that, whichever of their teams won the NBA championship, neither would be stopping by with the league trophy and a jersey with Trump's name on the back.
That could be part of the reason why, a week before that title tournament began, the president issued a posthumous pardon for Jack Johnson, who in 1908 was the first African-American to become world heavyweight boxing champion. Both Presidents Bush and Obama had declined to pardon him when asked.
In 1913, Johnson had been convicted of transporting a white woman over a state line "for immoral purposes" in violation of the Mann Act. He fled the country but eventually returned to serve prison time. The son of former slaves, Johnson, who died in 1946, became a symbol of black athletic activism for flaunting his money, his bling, and his white paramours.
Sports fans were so outraged by his success and his attitude that the call went out for a "Great White Hope" who would beat him in the ring. Novelist Jack London even begged a retired white champ, Jim Jeffries, to "emerge from his alfalfa farm and remove that smile off Johnson's face." In 1910, in the "fight of the century," Jeffries was soundly beaten and race riots subsequently broke out across the country with hundreds injured and 20 people killed. Back when a boxing champion was the beau ideal of masculinity, it was simply unacceptable to have a black Mr. Man.
Ghosts in the House
Sixty years later, when boxing legend Muhammad Ali returned to the ring (after he had been stripped of his championship title for refusing to be drafted into the Army in a protest against the Vietnam War), he said he had drawn strength from Johnson standing up to his persecutors. Visiting with Ali in those days, I remember him watching old films of Johnson on a bed sheet hung in the living room of his training camp quarters. He kept pointing at Johnson and yelling, "He's the ghost in the house, the ghost in the house!"
Between Johnson and Ali, what I once termed SportsWorld produced plenty of ghosts -- star athletes who were punished for exhibiting a free man's outspokenness in the confines of what filmmaker Ken Burns, in his documentary on Johnson, called "unforgiveable blackness." Brooklyn Dodgers second baseman Jackie Robinson, now a saint for breaking baseball's color barrier, was subjected to pressures that probably led to his fatal heart attack at 53; Ali lost the prime of his boxing career and never made Jordan-style money; sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos were thrown off the Olympic team and marginalized for raising their fists in protest against racism at the 1968 Mexico City games. NBA basketball stars Bill Russell and Kareem Abdul Jabbar were treated coldly for their starchy sense of independence and baseball All-Star centerfielder Curt Flood's career went into the tank after he unsuccessfully challenged baseball's former restrictive reserve clause that kept players tethered to the teams holding their contracts.
Each of those lives also represented a grim lesson learned by the generations of black athletes who followed them. You can be forgiven for violence (especially against women) and even greed (if it isn't at the expense of club owners), but you can't challenge the establishment. As Harry Edwards, the sociologist who advised Smith and Carlos before their Olympic demonstration, once told me, white fans prefer the "grinners" when choosing their favorite black athletes, the ones who allow them to feel good about their fandom.
Not coincidentally, it was Edwards, in his role as an official guidance counselor for the San Francisco 49ers, who advised Colin Kaepernick in his brilliant and apparently career-ending refusal to stand for the anthem.
Again, the empire struck back, as it had 48 years earlier against Smith and Carlos. Without either official acknowledgement or explanation, club owners have simply denied Kaepernick, a skilled quarterback in his prime, a chance to work. In that group decision, the arrogance of the National Football League seemed modeled on the Olympic Committee's. The severity of the response was also an updated affirmation that, in SportsWorld, star athletes are never to repudiate the values of the establishment, that independence will be quashed.
The Heritage
Sportswriter Howard Bryant, author of The Heritage: Black Athletes, A Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism, traces the recent rise of black activism to a post-9/11 transformation of sports events into celebrations of the military and the police even as African Americans were victimized in America. In an interview with Dave Zirin, Bryant said:
"And now we have black players being turned against their own country by the White House and by the people who own the teams, and it is deliberate. It's deliberate and it's designed to demonize not only the black athlete, but the black concern over police brutality: to turn fighting police brutality into being un-American. It has essentially turned the American flag into a symbol of whiteness and turned the players who are protesting police brutality into symbols of anti-Americanism, which could not be further from the truth.
Zirin himself co-authored Things That Make White People Uncomfortable with star Seattle Seahawks defensive lineman Michael Bennett, who decided last year not to stand for the anthem "to honor the founding principles of this country." That was soon after the alt-right, neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, that the president did anything but condemn. In response, Bennett wrote: "I can't hide behind the glamour and glitz of football and fame. The reality is that I'm a Black man in America and I am going to be a Black man in America long after I'm out of this league."
While no one can doubt the physical courage that NFL players are paid to display in game after game at the risk of disability and early death, moral courage is another matter. Once you get beyond figures like Kaepernick, his 49ers teammate Eric Reid (who has also been shunned by the NFL), Bennett, Philadelphia Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins, and -- a true rarity in these years -- his white teammate defensive end Chris Long, things thin out relatively quickly.
"For all the talk of color-blind team brotherhood and shared goals, the racialism that black players live with every day is simply not shared by whites. It would be great if a Tom Brady, an Aaron Rodgers had the balls to step forward."
Those pro football players who want to protest without necessarily meeting Kaepernidk's end will be challenged further in the coming season by new league rules. In a clear concession to Trump and the preponderance of owners who backed him, the NFL decided several months ago that players must stand for the national anthem or be subject to fines. Alternatively, they may remain out of sight in the locker room until the anthem is over, which, of course, is just another way of shutting them up (or down).
For a variety of reasons, despite the president's focus on them, National Football League players are not in the same progressive league as their basketball equivalents, although the NFL and the NBA are both about 70% black. Basketball superstars like LeBron, Curry, and Carmelo Anthony, as well as white coaches Gregg Popovich and Steve Kerr have spoken out strongly against Trump and racial inequality. Oscar Robertson, now 79, an all-time NBA star and activist, has, for instance, wondered out loud just where the white allies of the protesting black football players might be.
"They don't fully understand the issues yet," said Meggysey, now 76, in a phone interview. He became an official of the NFL players union long after his football days ended and now he concludes, "For all the talk of color-blind team brotherhood and shared goals, the racialism that black players live with every day is simply not shared by whites. It would be great if a Tom Brady, an Aaron Rodgers had the balls to step forward. Thank God for Colin. Every so often a hero comes forward. Ali, Smith and Carlos, Billie Jean King. You can only hope their message is delivered."
Then he laughed and added, "You know, this new rule about staying in the locker-room during the anthem, it doesn't say for how long or when you have to come out. If they could just all get together and delay the TV broadcast of the game for ten or fifteen minutes, cost millions in commercials, who knows. Maybe that's something the owners and Trump would understand."
They would also understand that a wider resistance among young men who posture as warriors but too often act like the serfs of the owners, coaches, and even doctors who use them as avatars of their own macho dreams of power could make common cause with those in the grandstands. Sports fans, seeing activist athletes finally standing up as the multi-colored brotherhood they are supposed to be, might figure out which side they are really on.
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Lebron Calls Trump a "Bum" After President Attacks Protest of Yet Another Black Athlete
As multiple crises swirl, U.S. president slammed for targeting black athletes who speak out against racism
Sep 23, 2017
U.S. territory Puerto Rico is in utter ruins, with nearly the entire island without power and a failing dam threatening tens of thousands of people, on Saturday.
High-stake tensions as international worries continue about North Korea's testing of nuclear weapons and the U.S. military's provocative show of force with South Korea.
A Republican effort, though faltering, to strip Medicaid and other healthcare coverage from millions of people in the U.S. Senate.
Wars without end in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elswhere amid news this week that Trump wants to loosen restrictions on the U.S. military borderless overseas drone program.
But on Saturday morning, a day after calling on NFL owners to fire players who protest over racial justice issues, what is President of the United States Donald Trump tweeting about? Another black professional athlete that isn't doing what Trump thinks is appropriate.
\u201cGoing to the White House is considered a great honor for a championship team.Stephen Curry is hesitating,therefore invitation is withdrawn!\u201d— Donald J. Trump (@Donald J. Trump) 1506170719
Aimed at Steph Curry, NBA All-Star and member of last year's championship-winning Golden State Warriors, the attempted "disinvitation" comes after Curry on Friday said he would not attend the traditional White House reception due to objections over Trump's history of racist and demeaning statements towards people of color, women, and other minority groups.
Lebron James, one of the league's most high-profile players, was having none of it:
\u201cU bum @StephenCurry30 already said he ain't going! So therefore ain't no invite. Going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!\u201d— LeBron James (@LeBron James) 1506179844
As ESPN reports Saturday:
There had been no previous indication of a White House invitation for the Warriors. ESPN reported late Thursday night that the NBA had been in communication with the White House on the matter and believed an invitation would be extended, if the team decided as a group to attend.
Warriors coach Steve Kerr told ESPN that the team was planning to meet to discuss a potential White House visit. Warriors owner Joe Lacob told ESPN that he planned to meet with the team Saturday morning before its first practice to discuss the issue and that the White House was aware of the timeline.
Kerr and several Warriors players have been openly critical of Trump and his administration on multiple occasions. On Friday, Stephen Curry said he would vote no if the team were invited to the White House. Kevin Durant previously told ESPN that he would not go to the White House either.
On Friday, Curry answered questions and explained why he would not attend a White House event hosted by President Trump:
While an obvious bone to his political base, Trump's critics were quick to point out how obnoxious, racist, and beneath the dignity of the president's office his behavior on such issues remains:
\u201cSo Trump didn\u2019t have shit to say about Miss Texas when she called him a white supremicist but speaks on Jemele, Kaepernick & Steph Curry \ud83e\udd14 https://t.co/u0jamkYS3z\u201d— Matthew A. Cherry (@Matthew A. Cherry) 1506175195
\u201cPuerto Rico has no power and a dam is about to collapse. Meanwhile you are a 6th grade mean girl having a slumber party. https://t.co/rd9gWtH8Mb\u201d— Rachel Dratch (@Rachel Dratch) 1506172005
\u201cTrump has now attacked Jemele Hill, Colin Kaepernick, & Stephen Curry. All have something in common but I can\u2019t quite put my finger on it.\u201d— Ryan Lizza (@Ryan Lizza) 1506173314
\u201cWhen Steph Curry makes you angrier than Nazis, you might be Donald Trump. https://t.co/Bo9A4v8XdH\u201d— Dave Zirin (@Dave Zirin) 1506172456
\u201cTrump attacking both Colin Kaepernick and Steph Curry in the past 24 hours is totally proving Jemele Hill right.\n\nHe is a white supremacist.\u201d— Adam Best (@Adam Best) 1506173815
\u201cCurry wasn't hesitating - he forcefully said he didn't want to go, "won't stand for" things Trump has done. https://t.co/0N9moLFrNU\u201d— Daniel Dale (@Daniel Dale) 1506173609
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