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The NBA Strike Will Reverberate for Years to Come

Jack Hamilton

Aug 27, 2020: On Wednesday, the Milwaukee Bucks refused to play basketball against the Orlando Magic in the NBA bubble, and in doing so may have set in motion a sea change in the social fabric of American sports. In the aftermath of the Bucks’ decision, news quickly arrived that the Thunder, Rockets, Lakers, and Trail Blazers would not be playing either. Around noon Thursday, ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reported that the players will return to play, though as of this writing, no one knows when. Regardless, the force of this action will reverberate through professional sports for years to come. Once this is on the table, it doesn’t come off.

I have been watching sports for about as long as I have been watching anything and have never witnessed anything like what I saw Wednesday evening. We saw Kenny Smith walk off the set of TNT’s Inside the NBA in solidarity with players. We saw former player and current broadcaster Chris Webber ruminate with stunning emotion and eloquence on the congenital danger and terror of being a Black man in America. We saw Boston Celtics guard Jaylen Brown, all of 23 years old, speak with the precision of a veteran public intellectual about the structural and rhetorical forces that undergird and excuse anti-Black police violence. Most of all, we saw a labor action long anathema to American life—the wildcat strike—undertaken by some of the most famous athletes on the planet for political purposes, a refusal to perform their craft for a country so resistant to adequately addressing racism and anti-Black violence.

A defining feature of American sports is that a predominantly white management class and consumer base is dependent on the labor and talent of a workforce that is disproportionately Black. This is particularly pronounced in the NFL and NBA, where the players are roughly 70 percent and 80 percent Black, respectively. (Recent studies have found that the NBA’s audience is now majority nonwhite and plurality Black, although nowhere close to 80 percent.) College football and college basketball face a similar dynamic, with the crucial distinction that in those venues, players are not even paid. Commentators ranging from sports writer William C. Rhoden to historian Taylor Branch have likened the landscape of big-time sports, college and pro, to a plantation, and attitudes of white fans, media, and management have often reinforced this. One need only think back to the outrage of certain white NFL fans (most prominently the president) over the peaceful sideline protests of Colin Kaepernick and other players against police brutality. It’s a worldview that grants Black people the right to work and entertain, to “shut up and play,” but not to be full human beings or coequal members of the populace. It is not a stretch to say that this attitude is a bedrock of American racism.

What the Milwaukee Bucks did Wednesday is several orders of magnitude greater than any act of protest we have seen in major American team sports. With the simple act of refusing to work under present conditions, they brought an entire lucrative industry to a halt and have undoubtedly brought terror to some of the country’s powerful people. As many Wednesday were quick to point out, one of the Bucks’ owners, Marc Lasry, is a highest-echelon donor for the Democratic Party. The Orlando Magic, the team the Bucks were scheduled to play, are owned by the DeVos family. The NBA is a league run by billionaires, in a country in which billionaires wield obscene amounts of political influence. “But what do the players actually want?” people will ask, many of whom not remotely interested in the answer to that question. Well, for starters, they want more power in shaping the conditions of the country they live in. And now they unquestionably have that.

The fact that it was the Milwaukee Bucks who took this stand is crucial in several respects. The Bucks play in the same state where Jacob Blake was shot in the back seven times; as Wojnarowski reported, in the wake of their decision the Bucks soon found themselves on a conference call with both the attorney general and lieutenant governor of Wisconsin. But the Bucks also have the best record in the NBA and are one of the two or three teams considered most likely to win this year’s bubble championship. They have the sport’s Defensive Player of the Year and presumptive repeat MVP in Giannis Antetokounmpo. If the Bucks refuse to play, in other words, the general premise of this entire NBA playoffs is instantly invalidated. Along these same lines, on Wednesday night Shams Charania of the Athletic reported that, during a players meeting, both the Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers—two other top contenders—voted to stop playing entirely, a stance apparently spearheaded by LeBron James. James, of course, is the league’s marquee star and was one of the most vocal advocates for the bubble in the spring and early summer. A LeBron-less bubble is the NBA’s nightmare scenario.

The bubble has thus far been a smashing success. The level of play has been terrific, the television presentation has deftly mitigated the absence of fans, and, most importantly, there have been no virus outbreaks. The bubble has functioned as a spectacular showcase for the league’s young talent, as burgeoning superstars like the Jazz’s Donovan Mitchell, the Nuggets’ Jamal Murray, the Celtics’ Jayson Tatum, and the Mavs’ Luka Dončić have let fans and corporate sponsors know that the league is in good hands for years to come. For an extraordinary 20-ish hours, all of this was put in jeopardy, because the league’s players, a group of people to whom sports are more important than literally anyone else in America, collectively declared to all Americans that certain things are far more important than sports.

Most labor stoppages in major American sports have been the product of byzantine collective bargaining struggles that fans often don’t understand. Because of the fact that professional athletes generally make more money than the people who watch them, in these situations it’s been easy for management to demonize the players as greedy and lazy, narratives that certain corners of sports media are often all too willing to amplify. We have already seen Jared Kushner, a profoundly unaccomplished person, workshopping this take, but in this context it’s just incoherent, and if anything illustrates how unequipped so many are to even process what took place Wednesday: a labor action of enormous bravery and moral principle.

The British music critic Charles Shaar Murray once described American music history as defined by “the need to separate black music (which, by and large, white Americans love) from black people (who, by and large, they don’t).” I think about this quote a lot, and how sickly applicable it is to so many areas of American culture, sports perhaps most prominently. On Wednesday the Milwaukee Bucks made that need markedly more difficult to fulfill. No one knows where we go from here, but I expect it will be somewhere different than where we were.

(Jack Hamilton is Slate’s pop critic and associate professor of American studies and media studies at the University of Virginia. Slate is a US daily magazine on the web and podcast network.)

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The Sports Strikes Against Racism Have Not Been Coopted

Dave Zirin

August 31, 2020: The story of the 2020 wave of sports strikes against racism is already one of both inspiration and cooptation. It’s also a story that is being written in pencil, not pen. In other words, it’s a story that still does not have an ending, and we should be wary of anyone who thinks they have an ironclad analysis of where all of this is headed. But to even have a sense of where it might go, we need to understand why it detonated in the first place.

It starts by understanding the impact of the police murder of George Floyd—which has led to the most important social uprising in decades and the largest series of marches in the history of the United States, a social uprising that’s been met with terrible violence thanks to this president, his cohorts in the police, and the violent white militia movement.

The NBA and WNBA players argued back in June about whether to play in this Covid-free bubble or if they should just sit out the season so as not to distract from the demonstrations in the streets. They did, of course, decide to go back and, as part of the deal, the owners and commissioner Adam Silver incorporated Black Lives Matter into their messaging, with “BLM” written on the court, players kneeling during the anthem, and slogans written on the uniforms. Call it woke capitalism. Call it woke marketing—if you like. It was corporate symbolism in the model of so many companies that put out statements against racism following Floyd’s killing.

But after the police shooting of Jacob Blake, that contradiction became too intense. Players in the NBA and the WNBA—which have led on all of these political questions—felt like chumps. They were in a figurative and literal bubble away from their families and friends, living in dorms, saying to one another, “Here we are playing with BLM on our uniforms and nothing changes.”

That led to the Milwaukee Bucks’ decision not to play Wednesday in their playoff game against the Orlando Magic. Other NBA teams followed suit. Then the WNBA teams announced that they would be sitting out, which was stirring, but not surprising. Then Major League Baseball joined the strike, which really was stunning given its conservative history and paucity of Black American players. Then Major League Soccer and, gobsmackingly, the National Hockey League. Naomi Osaka, the tennis star of Japanese-Haitian descent, also bowed out of her tournament and tweeted the following, which summed up so many of the feelings across the sports world:

“[B]efore I am an athlete, I am a black woman/And as a Black woman I feel as though there are much more important matters at hand that need immediate attention, rather than watching me play tennis. I don’t expect anything drastic to happen with me not playing, but if I can get a conversation started in a majority white sport I consider that a step in the right direction.”

She continued, adding hashtags:

“Watching the continued genocide of Black people at the hand of the police is honestly making me sick to my stomach. I’m exhausted of having a new hashtag pop up every few days and I’m extremely tired of having this same conversation over and over again. When will it ever be enough?”

The sports media largely called these “boycotts.” But they are not boycotts. They are strikes. These athletes are not consumers but workers, and they were withholding their labor in protest of police murder and white supremacy. Some people on the left have cynically rolled their eyes at this. After all, as they say, these are very wealthy people. They’re not real workers… What could they really accomplish? (This dismissiveness, unfortunately, mirrors the racist drivel from Jared Kushner and his implication that the players’ efforts are somehow inauthentic because of their wealth and fame.) This analysis, in addition to ignoring that racism affects all Black and brown people and not just the poor, misses three objectives that the players have already achieved:

1. 1. Recentering the conversation around Jacob Blake and not on “anarchists” burning cities and all the ways the right has tried to reframe what is happening.
   2. Capturing people’s imagination about labor striking for Black lives.
   3. Giving a sense of hope during a period of profound sadness and helplessness—from the Kenosha shootings to that feeling that we marched after Floyd’s murder yet here we are. Nothing changes.

That is all incredibly important. Especially the second point. As I wrote before, I received half a dozen calls from labor folk asking how to contact the players. It raises a challenge to labor officialdom to no longer be on the sidelines in the fight for Black lives.

But the radical potential of this moment also means that within hours of these strikes, the forces of cooptation were also working overtime. Sports owners, who tend to be to the right of Ghengis Khan, were scrambling to show their support for the players. Entire teams started putting out statements and talking about action plans that came out of conversations between management and labor. Instead of players striking, it was teams announcing that they would not be playing: “labor and management against racism!” The Baltimore Ravens are a great example of this, putting out on the team letterhead a statement decrying racism, calling for the arrest of Breonna Taylor’s killers, all with the aim—at least for now—of appeasing some fed-up football players whose season is supposed to start in less than two weeks.

The players in all the leagues, in an absence of a lead from the broader labor movement, have been left operating in a vacuum, trying to wrest concessions from ownership to join the struggle for Black lives. As one could imagine when dealing with billionaires, this had led to tamping down of demands, with much of the energy being channeled toward the November election and electoralism, most notably an agreement to open up stadiums as voting centers.

There has also been a great deal of publicity about the appearance of President Barack Obama, who spoke with LeBron James and Chris Paul, encouraging them to go back to work, use their platform through playing basketball, and start a social justice committee. This is Obama trying to neutralize a struggle and channel it in a safer direction, less likely to offend the white majority, and less likely to spread.

But the intervention of Obama has also led to an analysis that this is a story that has ended with cooptation, of selling out. That is wrong. Again, this is a story written in pencil, not pen. We still don’t know where this is going. We need to understand that this situation is on a knife’s edge. The players now have incredible leverage to use their spotlight, to extract concessions from management, or to go back out on strike again, especially if police and militias aren’t brought to heel. And of course, they haven’t been.

We don’t know where this is heading. Instead of decrying this for what it isn’t, we need instead to be holding up these players’ example to inspire the rest of the labor movement to act with similar urgency at this political moment, and not expect athletes to do it for us. What we can also do, though, is acknowledge that any action that lays down a gauntlet and challenges the labor movement to act should be seen as a step forward. Striking for Black lives is now on the table, not as an abstraction but as a goal worth fighting for.

(Dave Zirin is an American political sportswriter. He is the sports editor for The Nation, a weekly progressive magazine dedicated to politics and culture.)

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Let’s Call Athletes ‘Workers,’ and Let’s Call These NBA Protests What They Were – Strikes

Abraham I. Khan

August 28, 2020: The Milwaukee Bucks’ startling refusal to take to the court for their NBA playoff game on Aug. 26 was the most consequential political development in sports over the last 50 years.

In recent years, the prevailing media narrative is that athletes have routinely used their platforms to “raise awareness” or “bring attention” to a social issue.

Awareness, though, has its limits. Rarely does it lead to the kind of structural changes the shooting by police of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin seems to demand.

In this case, the players met the moment, marking a fundamental shift in the direction of activism generated by Black athletes. The mass player walkouts that followed the Bucks’ initial protest were no exercise in awareness, though some commentators framed it as that way.

Instead, these athletes were, in effect, going on strike – and showing the world just how much economic leverage they could wield.

Pressure builds

When I began studying Black protest speech in sports around 10 years ago, athlete activism appeared to be in decline.

Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods had become marketing demigods, bringing sports into the rarefied circuits of global capitalism. By signing increasingly lucrative endorsement deals with risk-averse corporate partners, Black athletes, critics argued, were trading their conscience for the promise of wealth.

The narrative, however, began to change around 2012, when the Miami Heat posed in hoodies for a widely circulated photograph meant to protest the murder of Trayvon Martin in Florida.

Two years later, athlete activism accelerated when the Los Angeles Clippers demonstrated against their team owner, Donald Sterling, for making racist comments. NBA stars wore T-shirts that said “I Can’t Breathe” to protest the killing of Eric Garner’s by police in New York. And five St. Louis Rams players raised their hands in “don’t shoot” poses to bring attention to the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Vice Sports declared 2014 “the year of the activist athlete.”

Then, in 2016, Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the anthem to protest police brutality, ultimately becoming the avatar for the activist athlete. By the time the NFL’s biggest stars shot a #BlackLivesMatter video in the summer of 2020 to protest the murder of George Floyd, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was admitting that “we should have listened earlier,” despite having overseen Kaepernick’s effective banishment three years earlier.

Yet professional athletes’ reliance on Twitter, Instagram and T-shirts often falls short. Yes, they have an enormous platform for political speech and can often use social media to bypass traditional outlets. But thanks to their relationship with sponsors, advertisers and TV networks, professional sports leagues have an even bigger one.

This gives sports executives like Goodell the power to lead from behind, making the athletes’ message their own.

Perhaps the most cynical use of this technique came in 2017, after Donald Trump said that NFL players who kneel during the national anthem ought to be fired. When the Dallas Cowboys expressed their desire to kneel in solidarity, they were joined arm-in-arm by team owner Jerry Jones, a vocal Trump supporter, who agreed to participate – provided that it did not occur during the anthem.

The corporate dance

Of course, it is possible for activist athletes to compete with leagues for attention and influence. But this often requires a perilous relationship with corporate power, such as when Nike announced its brand partnership with Kaepernick.

“Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything,” read Kaepernick’s Nike ad. This slogan – which could just as easily have been catchphrase for the military or the police – reveals the anesthetizing effects corporate messaging can have on politics. Sure, athletes might appear in ads that mention social justice. But they’re ultimately there to sell products, and often deliver more value to the corporation than they get in return.

Corporate messaging, moreover, depends not on moral imperatives, but on prevailing public sentiment and shareholder interest. The marketplace provides no guarantee that a company changing its Twitter avatar to say “Black Lives Matter” will always be more profitable than staying silent or doing the opposite.

Furthermore, it is impossible, by definition, for corporations to send anti-corporate messages. For these reasons, athlete activism’s relationship to corporate power is inherently fragile.

From talk to action

This week’s work stoppage in professional sports is the most significant moment of athlete activism in a half century not because it “raised awareness” or “started a conversation,” but because it exercised labor’s most elemental form of political power: the strike.

By walking out, professional athletes leveraged their power to exploit, as sociologist Harry Edwards wrote in 1969, “the white man’s economic and almost religious involvement in athletics.”

After a summer of racist police violence and nationwide protest, the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin forced athletes to confront persuasion’s futility and embrace their capacity for leverage. T-shirts and television commercials do not yield phone calls with attorneys general and lieutenant governors, but strikes do.

The same point was made most forcefully in 2015, when football players at the University of Missouri got their university president fired within 36 hours of announcing a strike for racial justice.

As major media organizations framed the walk-off as a “boycott” and leagues announced that games had been “postponed,” these descriptors hid the threat striking athletes pose to sport’s economic health and racial order. In a vivid demonstration of worker agency, Black athletes refused to entertain audiences and make money for the wealthy owners of their teams.

This, they were saying, was not a conflict to be resolved through “listening.” It would require direct economic pressure.

It is tempting to view the walkout’s spread through baseball, football, soccer, and even tennis as an expansion of the activist athlete’s platform. But maybe we should view it as the emergence of interdependent workers’ collectives. After suspending the season in March, the NBA decided in July to resume play in Orlando at a Disney complex where all participants would undergo regular virus testing and live together under quarantine.

The “bubble” in Orlando was designed to protect the league’s assets from COVID-19. But what if, instead, the players’ forced proximity to each other ended up cultivating a radical consciousness and facilitating a spirit of worker resistance?

Where the athlete strike goes next is not entirely clear. The NBA has announced that games will resume, and the NFL and NFL Players Association issued a joint statement indicating their intention to “use our collective platform to call out racism and injustice whenever and wherever it occurs.”

The statement is a reminder that when corporate power seeks common cause with labor, the result is almost always “difficult conversations about these issues.” Corporations love conversations. They reduce politics to speech and forestall the pace of meaningful social change.

However, sports organizations tend to move more quickly when their workers refuse to play.

In a polarized political environment under a president keen to stoke racial division, I see attempts at moral persuasion as teardrops in a poisoned well. What began with the Milwaukee Bucks in Orlando signals a new form of athlete activism not because the platform is growing or the arguments are becoming more convincing, but because it eschews the trappings of symbolic spectacle.

The players are leveraging labor power to accomplish real political work.

(Abraham I. Khan is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Communication Arts & Sciences, Pennsylvania State University. Article courtesy: The Conversation, an independent source of news and views based in Australia.)