Racial Injustice and the NFL - It Don't Mean Nothin'

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Respect for What Now?

People who know me know I am a football fan and a committed advocate for social justice. So why, they are apparently wondering, have I been silent on the events of the last weekend? Trump's vicious, authoritarian, racist tweets and the overwhelming response of the NFL players, coaches and owners have dominated the news cycle over the last several days, and oddly - it seems - mikey has had nothing to say. I'm going to clear that issue up right here, but you may find yourself unsatisfied with my position. Why? Because it's a nothingburger, a false argument based on rigid idealism, institutional racism and a fundamental unwillingness to face the hard truths about the lived experience of poor African Americans across the US.

Now, of course, people will shriek at this point "mikey, are you saying that the horrific social injustice brought about by hundreds of years of institutional racism is a NOTHINGBURGER??!!11". And of course, that's not at all what I'm saying, but that's a clear insight into the problem. Everybody's lying. They KNOW what this is about, but they refuse to have THAT conversation. So they use this one weird trick to argue against what someone DIDN'T say rather than engage them on the issue honestly. That, of course, would require they accept the fundamental premise. Not. Gonna. Happen.

Think about the wall to wall coverage of the Warrior's statements, the Trump responses, and then the huge outpouring of opinions and vitriol that carried through the football games on Sunday. This all started when Colin Kaepernick decided that he could not stand for an anthem that spoke to American values when the institutional racism in law enforcement and city management in cities and towns all across America were killing children and destroying families. When now, unlike the preceding two hundred years, there was repeated, ubiquitous video evidence of these brutal murders and beatings, and yet, time after time, these uniformed thugs, filled with hate, were repeated absolved of any wrongdoing. Another young person dead, another family destroyed, another cop goes home to his loved ones, smirking at our corrupt system of 'justice'. But when you look at the coverage on TV and social media, you hear about the flag, the anthem, the military, words like "respect" and "patriotism", of soldiers who died protecting the very rights we find ourselves arguing about.

Now, let me tell you why it's all a lie:

1.) The flag is a piece of colored cloth, mass produced by the millions. No one ever died defending a flag - or if they did, they were a mindless tool. 

2.) The national anthem is a song. A crappy song, commemorating the otherwise fairly obscure naval bombardment of Fort McHenry in September 1814, a small part of the larger Battle of Baltimore in the War of 1812. No one ever died defending it either - or even tried to encourage troops in battle by singing it. 

3.) Black Lives Matter is not a political movement. It is not "Liberal", nor is it "Conservative". It is an anguished cry for justice - a demand that the lives of young African American citizens not be thrown away by angry men who hate the communities they ostensibly serve, and that the people who carry unimaginable power into the heart of cities and towns already racked by a century of poverty and oppression use it with even just a modicum of restraint and humanity. 

So how much did we hear about the actual point of the argument this weekend? I don't know what you heard, but I heard nothing. It was about respecting the flag, standing for a song, slavish mindless love for an overpowered and grossly mis-used military. The dead kids, the free smirking cops, the images of dead children lying facedown a block from home, shot to pieces by a heavily armed, armored, uniformed thug? Yeah, no, I didn't see any of those. I didn't hear any of the voices of the aggrieved mothers, the vacant-eyed siblings, the cops with blood-soaked hands sitting at home retweeting our racist presidents twitter rants. I heard about the military, and some weird kind of childlike 'respect' that sounded more like loyalty demanded by an authoritarian cult leader. In a weird way, it kind of sounded like North Korea, not America.

So no. I've got nothing. I'm not going to lie to help people perpetuate the claim that this was about a flag, or a song, or a soldier. When we're ready to have a real conversation about institutional racism, when we start to hold our law enforcement officers to at least a minimal standard of humanity, when SOMEBODY in power agrees that yes, Black lives DO matter? That's a process I want to participate in. All the hand-waving and misdirection in the name of protecting the status quo? Nope. I'm just not interested.

It's a nothingburger....
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