There is something brewing in our society that I frankly don’t understand. The backlash toward NBA players for speaking about social justice and BLM. I mean, it’s not like their lives are at risk or anything.
While I understand the argument that it’s their job to entertain and that the NBA should “stop pushing their political agenda down my throat,” we’re talking about human lives at stake here.
There have been many cases where NBA players have been harassed with the police for no reason, like the recent surfacing of the altercation Raptor’s President, Masai Uriji, had with a sheriff. It’s very easy to see the sheriff is in the wrong. It’s acts like this that fuel the BLM and the NBA’s movement. If this altercation occurred outside without any witnesses, who’s to say that a gun wouldn’t have been drawn for no reason?
But, regardless of all this, a simple way I use to explain it to my friends who don’t understand the movement and why the NBA had the potential to be canceled is this: say you’re back in high school and your teacher starts giving everyone Fs for no reason, an excessive use of force. You obviously wouldn’t want to go to that class because no matter what you did, you’d end up with an F. NBA players didn’t want to go out and play because no matter how hard they fought for social justice, they weren’t getting anywhere.
Now, you may counter with, “but they aren’t in that class. How does that even affect them?”
Well let’s take another play out of this case. Now say that other teachers, including your teacher, adopt this kind of grading and now the class you’re in is getting Fs because these teachers realize that they can get away with anything; a perfect model of what’s happening with police forces in some areas. This is a legitimate fear NBA players have.
Another situation of this would be that you get switched into that class where everyone is getting Fs. This is like the NBA players going onto the street in their daily life and now have the potential to face these teachers (cops) that cause these problems.
So while people are out bickering about how they don’t want to see this type of content, realize that the NBA players aren’t doing it because they want to, they’re doing it as a preventative measure so they (and others who don’t have a platform) don’t ever experience this.
I fully understand that people want to watch sports to escape from religion and politics, but at this point, that’s just an ignorant wish. Sometimes, problems are too big to ignore and it’s time to soldier up and face them – no matter how much you don’t like it.
