The NFL’s “Commitment” to Racial Justice
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Let’s just say that like Dave Zirin, I am highly skeptical of any claims to social and racial justice by NFL owners.
Just take a look at what the NFL is currently doing to demonstrate its sincerity to players, even if it upsets Trump and a section of its fan base. Goodell has announced that “End Racism” and “It Takes All of Us” will be stenciled in the end zones of all stadiums. Week one games will begin with, in addition to the national anthem, the song that is known as the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Decals with political slogans will be allowed on helmets. Voting drives will be a part of the league’s initiatives. Goodell has even said that he wishes “we had listened earlier” to what Kaepernick was trying to bring attention to when he began kneeling during the national anthem in 2016 and that he wants to “encourage” a team to sign the exiled quarterback. In addition, teams are putting out their own statements that call for police accountability, voting drives, and even legislation to deal with the reality that police exist above the law. Anti-racist authors are being brought in to speak to team executives. Everything short of Jerry Jones coming out in a Dashiki and leading a team study group in “Go Tell It On The Mountain.”
The question, of course, is whether this will achieve the goal of making sure that no games have to be canceled. NFL Executive Vice President of Football Operations Troy Vincent has said that players “have the choice” to sit out games and can do so without threat of reprisals. This is likely a way to prevent entire teams from acting in unison and instead present protest as the symbolic action of an individual player—making sure that the games get played, even if a couple of players take Sunday off.
Excuse my cynicism, but the overwhelming majority of the league’s revenue doesn’t flow from fans’ buying nine-dollar bears and big foam fingers. It comes from multibillion-dollar television deals with the networks and ESPN. The NFL is by far the most popular sport in the land, and if its players, 70 percent of whom are Black, decide that the money will stop flowing, then that’s exactly what is going to happen. It’s not just the players who are realizing their power, but Goodell and friends are realizing that the players are realizing their power.
The NFLPA is probably the weakest of the four major sports unions and NFL owners have run roughshod over players for decades, very much including the blacklisting of Colin Kaepernick. So they have a lot–A LOT–to prove before anyone should think of anything the league or its owners say as anything but pure cynicism.