THE BLACK ATHLETE REVOLT

An overview of Black athletes’ recent history of protest.

The Trump era has been an especially divisive one for Black athletes speaking out on social justice issues. NBA players now have more opportunities to use their platform to protest police killings and vocally participate in the Black Lives Matter movement, but Colin Kaepernick remains frozen out of the NFL for kneeling during the national anthem. Meanwhile, Trump and his supporters have routinely strived to shout the athletes down. (“Shut up and dribble,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham infamously chastised NBA star LeBron James.) Anderson, a business consultant and professor at Loyola Marymount University, recaps a half-century of shifts around Black athlete protests. Outspoken Black athletes weren’t hard to find before the 1980s, from Arthur Ashe to Muhammad Ali. But the arrival of superstars with hefty endorsement deals made apparel companies—and the athletes they sponsored—averse to social commentary, and some were bluntly punished for it. “Black athletes have expressed their discontent with issues such as police brutality, inequality, racism, lynching, and systematic oppression, only to be met with opposition,” writes the author. In 1996, NBA player Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf was indefinitely suspended after sitting out the national anthem in protest. The mood shifted, Anderson explains, once the outrages became too big to ignore, such as Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012 and virulently racist remarks caught on tape by LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling in 2014. The author’s discussion of how these incidents ushered in a new era of protest, accelerated further by the Black Lives Matter movement, is workmanlike, but his closing chapter thoughtfully explores how recent trends can fuel a “sport justice movement” that addresses pro teams’ relationships with police, equitable treatment of college players, and players’ deeper engagement with their communities. Former NBA veteran Len Elmore, also a longtime sportscaster and lawyer, provides the foreword.

A useful primer on the ever shifting playing field of sports and race.