This week, it’s easy to see two possible futures for America. Our darker path is on display at a Republican national convention reaching new levels of xenophobia and paranoia. Every night, millions of viewers are hearing about enemies, “human sex drug traffickers”, even, being just barely held back by the steady leadership of Donald Trump.
And then there’s basketball. Not just an incredible week of playoff comebacks and buzzer beaters, but real political action. Players from the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) Milwaukee Bucks and Orlando Magic went on a wildcat strike of sorts on Wednesday and decided not to play game five of their playoff series. They were protesting against the police shooting of Jacob Blake, the 29-year-old black man shot seven times by police in the back this Sunday in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Kenosha is less than 40 miles from Milwaukee and, according to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, Bucks players made the decision just before tip-off, deciding that they would not leave their locker room. Soon after, the two other NBA games were cancelled and Major League Baseball’s Milwaukee Brewers followed suit.
Racial justice has been at the forefront of this NBA postseason. League owners had pushed to restart the season which had been put on hold since September due to the coronavirus pandemic. There were health concerns about plans to play games in a “bubble” in Orlando, Florida, but elements of the National Basketball Players Association also worried that the resumption of play could overshadow protests for racial justice.
In the end, athletes took to the court, but with politicized slogans approved on their jerseys – pre-approved messages that ranged from laudable affirmations that “Black Lives Matter” and calls for equality and justice to ones that demanded neoliberal “education reform”.
Among the four major sports, commissioner Adam Silver’s NBA has a reputation for being the most progressive. When confronted with potential unrest, it wisely chose to go with the flow and issue vague anti-racist statements, while carefully controlling and moderating statements coming from players.
It was going swimmingly. But Wednesday’s strike was not according to the league’s careful plan.
About 75% of the NBA is black and many of its athletes come from poor and working-class backgrounds. They may have become millionaires in their 20s, but many still identify with those facing the brunt of violence and neglect. As the Toronto Raptors’ Fred VanVleet said on Wednesday: “We’re the oppressed ones and the responsibility falls on us to make a change to stop being oppressed.”
It is a statement that has more in common with the radical national liberation movements of the 20th century than a more recent crop of anti-racist literature like White Fragility and corporate musings about diversity – directed to a white audience to foster white guilt and introspection.
For now, despite vague sloganeering turning into real disruptive action, the NBA has continued to swim with changing tides. Even the Orlando Magic, owned by the DeVos family and with deep ties to the Donald Trump administration, issued a statement saying that they stand united with the rest of the league “condemning bigotry, racial injustice and the unwarranted use of violence by police against people of color”.
However, disruptive action costs the NBA advertisement dollars and potentially polarized fans. There will be every attempt to control the league’s ongoing rank-and-file rebellion and to neuter its development.
A similar attempt, of course, was made to shape the wider Black Lives Matter movement. The 2015 protests in Ferguson emerged organically from a black working class not content to following the lead of Democratic party policymakers. But before long, the elite NGO world was able to elevate the movement’s most banal voices and shift a yet undetermined revolt from below into a “national conversation” about race hosted by the Ford Foundation.
The direction that the unprecedented sports protests will take is, of course, up to the professional athletes and their willingness to continue even after public sentiment possibly turns against them. But it would be a mistake to dismiss this as just a rebellion of millionaires.
NBA players might not be ordinary workers, but they have far more in common with the working-class communities that nurtured so many of them in childhood than with the billionaire owners they now work for. What’s more, to make change, just like all workers, they have to organize collectively. As journalist Branko Marcetic put it: “Millions of people are seeing workers they admire, even idolise, effectively striking in solidarity with a bigger cause.”
If this becomes a running feature of sports celebrity culture in the United States, that will be cause for celebration – and emulation.
Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin magazine and a Guardian US columnist. He is the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
