Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(29)
There’s been a transition in sports from social activism to social service since the apex of social protests in the sixties. Today’s athletes are discouraged from identifying with a progressive or unpopular cause, the way Bill Russell, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Wilma Rudolph, Althea Gibson, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, and Oscar Robertson did in the 1960s when the civil rights movement was seen as destructive and disruptive. Their activism helped to break down barriers and increase pay and open doors for others, including those who hadn’t protested. Still, we must not forget that they were strongly discouraged from their activism and harshly rebuked by the powers that be.
Since that heyday, leagues have begun promoting race-neutral charitable activities. Visiting a sick kid in a hospital is admirable, and a black athlete is often paired with a white child in an innocent, nonconfrontational setting. But that cannot replace speaking on behalf of black kids who are being gunned down in the streets by cops, or who are victims of the failures of the criminal justice system. Social service at times obscures the need for justice by confusing compassion with change. Martin Luther King, Jr., said that charity is a poor substitute for justice.
The white agents who represent black athletes have often undercut the value of social activism too. Many white agents counsel their players not to take on social issues. They are extremely careful about what causes may enhance or soil their clients’ brands. While brand management is vital, their hesitancy to encourage principled protest by their clients means that commercial interests trump social conscience. A less charitable interpretation suggests that white agents who don’t have deep investments in black communities are not motivated to address the plagues that black folk confront. These white agents fail to see the need of that athlete to speak up on behalf of the black and minority communities that nurtured and sustained them.
Kaepernick has bravely touched the third rail of American sport, one that we have not yet contended with. The status quo always favors neutrality, which, in truth, is never neutral at all, but supports those who stand against change. Cam Newton—the Carolina Panthers quarterback who refrained from saying whether he thought Kaepernick was right or wrong—may be superman on the field, but his response to Kaepernick’s cause of social justice has kryptonite written all over it. We don’t need Newton’s signature dab gesture on the field; we need to fight for all folk to get dab off it. The real heroes, the real supermen, are those willing to take a stand, even if it means taking a knee while the national anthem plays.
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Beloved, your white innocence is a burden to you, a burden to the nation, a burden to our progress. It is time to let it go, to let it die in place of the black bodies that it wills into nonbeing. In its place should rise a curiosity, but even more, a genuine desire to know and understand just what it means to be black in America.
Being Black in America
4.
Nigger
Admit it, beloved, that word—that abomination—is still with us.
Yes, it’s ugly. Yes, it’s vile. Yes, it’s full of hate.
And yet, a lot of you, or at least a lot of the folk you know, still think of black folk as niggers.
I remember the first time I heard the white world call me “nigger.”
I say white world because it was not an individual man saying that to me, mind you, even though the words came from his mouth. This man was simply repeating what he had been told about me. I was every black person he’d ever meet. We were all the same. That’s what nigger meant. That’s what it still means.
It was 1965. I was seven years old. We and family friends were down south for a monthlong visit with our kinfolk. On that day I drove with our friends to see other relatives who lived hours away. In the backseat of the car my friend Johnny and I behaved like typical kids. We had quickly plowed through our brown paper bags of bologna sandwiches and our Mason jars of Kool-Aid. Soon our stomachs started to groan in hunger. A shiny diner appeared up ahead and we begged Johnny’s parents to stop. Looking back I’m not quite sure what made them ignore their sense of the likely reaction we’d all face. I think the cumulative indignities of racism had finally got to them. It was absurd not to be able to eat the same food at the same time in the same place with white folk. I think they just momentarily snapped. Well at least his mother did. His father knew all too well the price he might pay for offending the white world with something as simple as his voice. His pleasing baritone was a threat to the tenor of the times. That’s why he stayed behind in the car, while Johnny and I and his mother took a chance that just this one time some white person might be kind enough to treat us like human beings.
“We don’t serve niggers here.”
He didn’t yell. His eyes were cold but his words were dry and matter-of-fact. He spoke them the way you might tell someone they’d reached a wrong number. But for me they altered the shape of my universe.
Even if we were “good niggers,” we were still niggers. (That is why, when I preach, I can never say “good Samaritan,” as though the distinction between a good and bad Samaritan, like the one between a good and bad nigger, rests on anything except what the larger world deems good, that is, subservient.) The strength of the adjective had no way of modifying the vulnerability of the noun. Blackness could never be good in a way that could help black folk because a nigger could never be of any service to himself if he were busy living down to expectations. It was a wash from the start. If you accepted the term nigger, no speech or grammar could rescue you.