{"id":4011,"date":"2016-07-27T16:06:01","date_gmt":"2016-07-27T21:06:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/?p=4011"},"modified":"2016-07-27T17:10:00","modified_gmt":"2016-07-27T22:10:00","slug":"a-new-era-of-athlete-awareness-and-advocacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/2016\/07\/27\/a-new-era-of-athlete-awareness-and-advocacy\/","title":{"rendered":"A New Era of Athlete Awareness and Advocacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/div>When even Michael Jordan—that erstwhile poster child of the transcendent, apolitical, super-star athlete—jumps into the fray, you know something is up.\u00a0I am referring, of course, to the public announcement Jordan made Monday.\u00a0Saying he could “no longer stay silent<\/a>,” legendary\u00a0#23\u00a0pledged to donate $1 million each\u00a0to a charity for community-police relations and to the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. Jordan said, “We need to find solutions that ensure people of color receive fair and equal treatment AND that police officers—who put their lives on the line every day to protect us all—are respected and supported.”Athletic advocacy can play an important role in bringing issues of social injustice to broader public visibility and debate.<\/span><\/p>\n
\"Serena<\/a>
Serena Williams after her 2016 Wimbledon win, via bustle.com.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But Jordan is not the main story here, at least not when viewed in sociological perspective. The main story, the bigger story, is about all<\/em> of the athletes and sports organizations who have been speaking out about social issues in one way or the other over the course of the past few months: NBA star and American Olympian\u00a0Carmelo Anthony urging athletes to quit worrying about their endorsement deals and speak out on police killings<\/a>; tennis player Serena Williams offering support and then a clenched fist salute on the hallowed grounds of Wimbledon<\/a>; the testimonials of Anthony and fellow NBA stars Chris Paul, LeBron James, and Dwyane Wade at the ESPYs<\/a>; WNBA players and teams, led by the Minnesota Lynx, dressing in support of\u00a0Black Lives Matter<\/a>\u00a0and against police shootings; the NBA moving next year’s annual All-Star game<\/a> out of North Carolina because of that state’s LGBTQ politics. My hometown paper, The Star Tribune<\/em><\/a>, ran a whole page story in last Sunday’s sports section\u00a0about a host of\u00a0athletes taking social justice stands or actions in Minnesota alone.<\/p>\n

Let there be no doubt: we live in a new era of athlete awareness and advocacy, unlike anything we’ve seen since the late 1960s.<\/p>\n

\"LeBron
LeBron James and the Miami Heat in 2012, hoods raised and heads bowed in memory of Trayvon Martin.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I believe the\u00a0roots of this new movement can be traced to LeBron James and his Miami Heat teammates tweeting out a picture of themselves in hoodies, with heads bowed in support of Trayvon Martin<\/a>, a few years back (see also<\/a>). Others recall when the entire Phoenix Suns team wore jerseys in solidarity with Latinos<\/a> who felt threatened by proposed anti-immigration legislation in Arizona. Since then, we’ve seen NBA players like Chris Paul threatening to boycott the NBA All-Star Game<\/a> unless something done to disavow the blatant racism of then-owner Donald Sterling; St. Louis Rams football players entering the field in the “hands up” gesture of Ferguson protestors<\/a>; and, perhaps most amazingly, the University of Missouri football team using the threat of a boycott<\/a> to force the removal of their university’s president.<\/p>\n

\"Hartmann<\/a>As a scholar\u00a0who’s done a good bit of work on sport and race and social unrest and social protest over the years—including a book<\/a> on the 1968 African American athletic protest movement, the activism associated most famously with Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s iconic victory stand demonstration in Mexico City—I’ve been asked a lot of questions and invited to make a lot of presentations on athlete activism over the past year.\u00a0So, as all of this has been unfolding, I’ve begun work on a paper situating the most recent activism and advocacy in the context of the protests of the Civil Rights era. Below,\u00a0a few of the points I’m building the paper around:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Athlete<\/em> Awareness.<\/em> While public advocacy may be new, social awareness among athletes is not. Athletes, especially elite professional and Olympic athletes, have long been far more educated, intelligent, and aware than prevailing if outdated “dumb-jock” stereotypes allow. The problem, in my view, has not been lack of social awareness and understanding, but barriers to public expression. Anthony has referenced highly lucrative endorsement deals (sometimes offering more renumeration to players than their actual sporting endeavors do), but formal and informal league rules, organizational pressures, and norms about the public roles of athletes all also apply. If there is a new consciousness, in my view, it involves a revitalized understanding of the powerful platform that sports provides athletes who are so inclined to voice their opinions.<\/li>\n
  2. <\/div>Larger<\/em>\u00a0Context and Connections.<\/i>\u00a0Those\u00a0athletes who have chosen to use their status as public figures\u00a0to speak out on social issues are not just speaking off the cuff, nor are they isolated malcontents. These public expressions are deliberate and reflective, responding to social issues such as police brutality and profiling or hateful gender or sexuality policies outside of the world of sport, in concert with other public leaders, and more often than not in close communication with other activists and organizers. Perhaps the best and clearest example of this was at the University of Missouri last fall: football players launched their boycott after working with campus leaders on\u00a0ways to show their support for student on a hunger strike in protest of racial conditions and treatment on campus.Those\u00a0athletes who have chosen to use their status as public figures\u00a0to speak out on social issues are not just speaking off the cuff, nor are they isolated malcontents. These public expressions are deliberate and reflective, made in concert with public leaders, activists, and organizers.<\/span><\/li>\n
  3. Black Athletes as Leaders.\u00a0<\/em>It almost goes without saying that African American athletes have been the most prominent and powerful figures in this emerging movement (I think all but one of the athletes profiled by the\u00a0Star Tribune\u00a0<\/em>were persons of color)—except that in our perverse “colorblind” culture, we often dodge the opportunity to name race explicitly and talk about it openly. This conversation is important for far more reasons than I can discuss here; it\u00a0speaks to the unique racial composition of the American sports world, the prominent role of African American athletes in our culture, the centrality of race and racism in American society, and the larger role of sport in the construction, reproduction, and contestation of existing racial hierarchies. At the most basic levels, though, we can consider how\u00a0sport is both impacted by and a driving force in the larger racial unrest in contemporary America—including the recognition of persistent patterns of racial injustice, emergent movements of resistance and opposition (such as Black Lives Matter), and the countervailing, reactionary movements of containment, denial, and resentment. The role of white athletes will be interesting as today’s\u00a0movements unfold. At the\u00a0University of Missouri, white players and coaches supported black activists, and, in the WNBA, star Minnesota Lynx point guard Lindsay Whalen and head coach Cheryl Reeves, both white, lent their support to protesting players. Whether white athletics and athletic leaders continue to step up and assume responsibility remains to be seen. For what it is worth, I’m impressed though\u00a0not at all surprised the female athletes–including a huge swath of the WBNA–have been such powerful public voices in recent weeks.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Will this advocacy and activism change anything?<\/p>\n

    \"Via<\/a>
    Via Time Magazine, the 1968 Olympics victory stand salute.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    The initial answer is not always encouraging. If my study of the 1968 Olympic protests taught me anything, it is that sport protests usually do not change anyone’s mind or political position. Though we tend to heroize Smith and Carlos these days (as we did with the recently deceased Muhammad Ali), the truth is that these athlete advocates were seen as villains and traitors by mainstream Americans in the 1960s. If anything, their actions inspired a good deal of backlash and resentment, probably hardening\u00a0some lines of conflict and division. Some of that reaction is already unfolding now.<\/p>\n

    But this doesn’t mean that nothing at all came of athlete activism in the past or today. One of the things that athletic\u00a0protests and demonstrations can accomplish is forcing\u00a0Americans who are or were not otherwise interested in such issues to look up from their otherwise comfortable, apolitical lives and pay attention to the social issues around them. So athletic advocacy can, in fact, play an important role in bringing issues of social injustice—police bias and brutality, policies toward LGBTQ Americans—to broader public visibility and debate. I believe it’s already happening.<\/p>\n

    And all of the money and attention we lavish on athletes and athletics in this country does put athletes in a unique and, on occasion, powerful material position. Witness the events at the University of Missouri: here, we saw athlete activists and their allies using the power afforded to them by virtue of how the institution and the public rely\u00a0upon them for their athletic performances to force concrete, organizational change. This was amazing, revealing, and essentially unprecedented.<\/p>\n

    <\/div>One final point on social and cultural change. When harkening back to 1968, I constantly find myself remembering and trying to remind others that\u00a0Smith and Carlos not only didn’t change many people’s minds about race problems and civil rights, they didn’t change American norms about the relationships between sport and social change. If fact, they and their allies (as well as their opponents) were caught within prevailing conceptions of sport as a somewhat special, sacred, or apolitical cultural space. To wit: while some saw athlete activists in the 1960s as heroes or\u00a0villains, public opinion polls showed that most everybody\u00a0agreed that sport wasn’t a place for politics or, by extension, protest. The two sides simply\u00a0disagreed on what counted as protest and politics. Those who\u00a0sided with Smith and Carlos saw them as standing up for what was good, right, and morally just—in the idealistic way that high-minded sport supporters have long celebrated sport; the majority who\u00a0were against them saw them and their actions as disruptions\u00a0outside the social status quo.While some saw athlete activists in the 1960s as heroes or\u00a0villains, public opinion polls conducted showed that most everybody\u00a0agreed that sport wasn’t a place for politics.<\/span><\/p>\n

    What is at stake here is not just whether we agree with the particular causes of athlete activists. What is also at stake is how we understand sport and athletes in society, especially when it comes to issues of racial justice and social change. Will the cultural stereotypes about athletes change? Can we begin to see sport as something more than an arena for entertainment and release, or some kind of apolitical sacred space? If social change is hard, sometimes cultural change is even harder—so on those questions, I remain cautious and curious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    When even Michael Jordan—that erstwhile poster child of the transcendent, apolitical, super-star athlete—jumps into the fray, you know something is up.\u00a0I am referring, of course, to the public announcement Jordan made Monday.\u00a0Saying he could “no longer stay silent,” legendary\u00a0#23\u00a0pledged to donate $1 million each\u00a0to a charity for community-police relations and to the NAACP’s Legal Defense […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":4024,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[46,546,30415,41,470,6055,13,143,14,3497,45,50],"class_list":["post-4011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-activism","tag-athletes","tag-black-lives-matter","tag-celebrity","tag-discrimination","tag-fame","tag-inequality","tag-labor","tag-race","tag-social-justice","tag-social-movements","tag-sport"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/files\/2016\/07\/Lebron-Heat-Miami-Hoodies-Trayvon.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4011"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4011\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4031,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4011\/revisions\/4031"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}