ESPN Magazine’s Howard Bryant: insightful on sports, but prone to suffocating liberal piety when he starts talking politics. As a special treat for fans, ESPN posted online Bryant’s “The Truth” column for the upcoming September 19 NFL Preview II Issue: “Response to protest shows the power of the sports machine.”
That would be the protest of infamous San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, whom Bryant predictably hailed as a hero for failing to stand for the National Anthem at a preseason game last week, citing United States “oppression” while collecting a $19 million annual salary in that same oppressive country and providing this classy tribute to police officers: “There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
(Ironically, the United States is the one place on earth where Kaepernick can make such a good living hurling a pigskin – there’s a reason it’s called American football overseas.)
Bryant portrayed the quarterback, whom many criticize as hypocritical and ungrateful as well as anti-police (his workout socks featured pigs in cop hats), as “awakening” into brave dissent, in a country where he is perfectly free to act the way he does toward the anthem, and everyone else is free to criticize him for it.
The fragile relationship between police and African-Americans is in deep crisis, anecdotally and statistically, and when Kaepernick expressed his awakening by refusing to stand for the national anthem, he and any peers considering similarly expressing themselves learned how society will respond to their citizenship and dissent: by using a playbook of distortion and misdirection as old and predictable as the Packer sweep.
Bryant tried to further pry open the racial divide by blaming white athletes for not supporting Black Lives Matter:
For the past two years, after Michael Brown's killing in Ferguson gave rise to a volatile America divided by police and protest, the sports machine -- rooted in the structure of black player/white media/white ticket buyer/white owner -- was largely silent. Some prominent black players expressed support for the protesters; virtually no white male players did. With the exception of the Baltimore Orioles, teams have ignored the grief of their large black fan bases and abandoned their historical neutrality on social issues in favor of hero worship of police at the ballpark, supported by a white mainstream that is rarely the target of police aggression.
(Bryant really doesn’t like cops singing the National Anthem before games; he has said that the tradition contributes to a game atmosphere that is “decidedly, often uncomfortably, nationalistic.")
Kaepernick protested, and the reaction was predictable. White athletes and the predominantly white media, once largely silent, finally spoke but said very little about the substance of his dissent. They opted for intimidation by pile-on...
Bryant again mounted his high horse, sticking up for another brave band of entertainers that were persecuted by fawning news stories.
....Real, difficult concepts -- like America not living up to the ideals of its flag (as the Dixie Chicks protested in 2003, to similar backlash), or how police could shoot a 12-year-old child in Cleveland and go unpunished, or how federal oversight of local police was granted in response to officers beating Rodney King when Kaepernick was 3 years old -- are met with hostility and simplistic narratives about patriotism and freedom of speech.
