The NAACP’s boycott call is a wake-up moment for the American Black athlete | College sports

Six years after the nation underwent what is called a “racial reckoning,” Black America is under global attack.

The assault comes from the nation’s highest elective office, where the president has, on the first day of his reinauguration, made clear his belief that it is the world’s white people who are the true victims of racial discrimination. He has codified into policy what many non-black Americans of all political persuasions quietly believe in public and loudly among themselves: that the achievements and positions of black people are the byproduct of unfair diversity initiatives in the workplace and not the talent, hard work and ambition of the people in question. As it limits immigration to the United States from the rest of the world, the administration announced earlier this week plans to allow the entry of an additional 10,000 white South Africans as an “emergency response” to anti-white discrimination. The New York Times reported that it would cost taxpayers about $100 million.

The attack comes from the nation’s highest judicial office, where the Supreme Court gutted the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 on the grounds that protecting black voting opportunities is a discriminatory and non-restorative practice, despite the hundreds of graves, marked and unmarked, of black Americans killed for trying to vote throughout the South.

The assault continues from the nation’s highest legislative branches, state and federal, where massive redistricting efforts in the South threaten to erase much of the black political representation gained over the past 60 years. The move is similar to that of 1902, when the cities of New Orleans, Montgomery, Memphis, and Mobile all passed legislation within weeks of each other segregating public railcars. Within two years, all public facilities in the South – from transportation to water fountains – were segregated by race.

With all three branches of government mobilizing, businesses across the country have acted in concert, reducing or eliminating initiatives aimed at encouraging the hiring of Black professionals instead of remaining committed to addressing historically low Black employment rates in corporate America. Whether on purpose or through fear of government retaliation, from sports to retail, from education to entertainment, anti-Black hostility is as bold and aggressive in this country as it has been in the past 75 years.

This week, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) turned to sports to join some of its dissent, calling on black athletes to boycott public universities in the Southeastern Conference (SEC), arguably the nation’s most powerful football conference and certainly its largest incubator of black sports talent. The NAACP responds to a political attack with a social and economic attack, because no institution is as culturally relevant in the South as college football, and few economic engines command as much public attention as sports.

The NAACP is betting that black Americans will finally recognize the urgency of the moment, that the parents of these talented and valuable young people will join the fight, put two and two together, and realize their power. Black people make up 14 percent of the population, but they certainly make up more than 14 percent of American culture, and the black athlete is the most successful, influential, and visible black employee this country has ever produced. A sustained, coordinated movement of black athletes against hostile states would have a profound effect on the football and basketball fields – as well as politics.

The sports industry, if it recognizes a potential threat, is banking on apathy and nihilism, whereby no one can be bothered to engage in anything other than themselves. They want black players to believe they are powerless when they are not, to believe they are separate from the land battle taking place in their communities.

Black athletes have been here before. In 2015, a protest on the University of Missouri campus brought down the school’s system president and chancellor when black football players threatened to boycott games unless students’ demands were met. In the 1960s, the exodus of black talent from Southern high schools forced Southern universities to integrate. Americans have comforts and luxuries, big televisions and cars – but history has proven that boycotts work.

The black college football or basketball player has more power today than ever before. Athletes can now be compensated through name, image and likeness (NIL) agreements. The freedom of the transfer portal allows them to change schools without having to take a year off.

A boycott of the SEC, which includes Florida (whose governor, Ron DeSantis, led the charge in banning books by black authors), Louisiana (where the Supreme Court case that cleaved the Voting Rights Act originated), South Carolina, Alabama and Tennessee (all of which are in the process of massively disenfranchising black voters through redistricting), and Texas would have an immediate impact. The NFL, whose playing field is about 70% black, recently awarded Tennessee the 2030 Super Bowl.

As they did in the 1960s, black actors could flex their political muscle by making themselves available to the powers in the North, Midwest, and West Coast. NIL money combined with political awareness and strategy represents a powerful response. The SEC is the NAACP’s target, but the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) also has schools in Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina.

We are at a pivotal moment. The Trump presidency received the spotlight — on branding an America that has mastered focusing on a single culprit while leaving the broader unsavory culture intact — but the country’s institutions have exposed theirs through their complacency, their own racism. Sport only has socio-political weight through the quest for equality – racial, economic, gender. The triumphs of Jackie Robinson, Bill Russell and Billie Jean King made sports much more than bread and circuses. Black political voice in sports is an essential part of understanding the games, the people who play them, and the country we live in.

But over the past five years, the sports media has willingly eliminated that voice, which is like saying they’ve willingly abdicated their journalistic responsibility, which is like saying they’re guilty. Silencing athletes by reducing them to sterilized laborers who run the often predominantly white season ticket purchasing and distribution engines that fuel the sport is collaboration. Even though Trump is called a racist, that title applies to many editors who have decided to stifle the black voice because the country has recovered from the very public killing of George Floyd, an accusation especially true in the sports industry where the workforce is nearly three-quarters black.

Sports media – responding both to white audiences who want their entertainment to be simple and to their own biases of ignoring the black perspective – have engaged in a simplistic but effective scam. There are a lot of black faces on sports television – addressing the empty catch-all of “representation,” but what exactly is being represented? What remains: former black players replacing black journalists, shouting at each other on TV with no depth, no reporting, no coverage of a major national story – his silence is collaboration. ESPN responded to the NAACP boycott with a television article on its website. In less than a day, the story was all but gone. The words “athlete activism” seem as outdated as “groovy.”

It is in the interest of rights holders to convince black athletes that their only value is to play and be grateful, to reinforce the stories of death or prison if not for sport that guarantee their silence. The NAACP asks players – and their parents – to care about more than just the bouncing ball.

The NAACP’s action is a reminder that black athletes have power – if they choose to use it. Like it or not, they are inextricably linked to the future of black America because of the economic profits they generate in friendly and hostile areas, and the cultural cachet they hold. As an economic bloc, they can change the destiny of the institutions they inhabit. If one thing can be sure, it’s that there’s a lot of money for sports in America. If Alabama or LSU can pay a wide receiver, so can Oregon. Or USC. Or Michigan.

After a decade of activity in the 2010s, athletes have remained politically silent since the Floyd protests of 2020. They did not mobilize after Jan. 6, even though the insurrection at the world’s most symbolically important legislative building was populated by the same political base that told players their anthem protest was disrespectful. Players began playing again, but the anti-blackness only intensified. The players, however, are part of a black sporting legacy – and a civil rights legacy as black people – who literally gave their lives for comfort that is now being erased, and a new generation is being asked to pay their dues. Why should they? Why do they have to? Because they received.

• Howard Bryant is the author of 11 books, including The Heritage: Black Athletes, A Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism and Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America.