The NFL and the Police

I am sure a lot of NFL yakkers are very happy that the DeShaun Watson rape allegations can push what the Miami Police Department did to Tyreek Hill out of the headlines. As Dave Zirin points out, the NFL is all about policing. What happened when the Commanders employee told the truth about all this to the James O’Keefe idiots, i.e., he was immediately fired, demonstrates a single fact–the NFL is run by racist white billionaires and it thus has the politics of racist white billionaires, even if Roger Goodell can put a gild of Respectable New England Republicanism on as its public face.

You might expect the NFL to stand up for one of its most famous players, but the NFL does not cross the police. The NFL partners with the police. This is a league that blackballed quarterback Colin Kaepernick for kneeling during the national anthem to protest racist police violence after the killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile in 2016. It is also a league that, in the wake of outrage from all sides over how it handled Kaepernick’s protest, turned to public relations instead of honest dialogue. It wanted to be seen as a force to “end racism”—words it emblazoned in the back of every end zone. It would play “Lift Every Voice and Sing” before the “Star Spangled Banner.” Even Sunday’s news that rapper Kendrick Lamar had been chosen to play the halftime show at the next Super Bowl is a part of this agenda. (And if you’re surprised that the NFL would choose someone as political as Lamar, you might remember that the last time he played the Super Bowl halftime show, his lyrics about police killing civilians mysteriously disappeared.)

Notice what all of these gestures elide: They refuse to address what Kaepernick called upon the world to confront: racist police brutality and those in uniform “getting away with murder.” It immediately brought to mind last week’s scandal when a right-wing propagandist allied with James O’Keefe surreptitiously videotaped Washington football team vice president Rael Enteen. The O’Keefe Media Group is putrid, but it did catch Enteen telling truths that people “behind the shield” are afraid to utter. About the league’s anti-racist efforts, Enteen said, “It’s performative. It’s not done out of the goodness of their heart and morality. It’s done because George Floyd changed the game.… I mean that the social justice efforts are a performance for the sake of public perception and not because they want to actually push progress.”

O’Keefe’s minion asked if this kind of branding was being done to assuage “liberals,” and Enteen perceptively said: “No, I think it’s to make as much money as possible. I think the NFL cares about the bottom line like any corporation above all else. And they don’t need to really pinch pennies because they make so much revenue. Therefore, they can faux-prioritize DEI for the sake of good publicity.”

The Washington Commanders fired Enteen faster than a Tyreek Hill sprint to the end zone.

There were loud voices online that said Hill should not receive sympathy because of his ugly past of spousal and child abuse. While that behavior was awful, this is absurd. It is a logic that advances a reactionary line of thinking in which only a perfect victim deserves justice. The police did not know or care about Hill’s past, and it wouldn’t matter if they did. No one should be subject to state violence.