14 The New York Review
Wieden+Kennedy sent out an agency-
wide e- mail about how the death of
yet another Black man at the hands
of the police had affected him. (I was
still on the agency’s e- mail list.) This
prompted a reply- all deluge of sincere,
at times uncomfortable conversations
about race. After dozens of emails,
Wieden+Kennedy’s website went
black but for a short, succinct message:
#BLACKLIVESMATTER.
A few days later, the agency an-
nounced their newest client: social
justice. Some very serious Super Bowl
ads followed, and then in 2018, a full
two years after Colin Kaepernick knelt
for the national anthem and was sub-
sequently blackballed by the NFL, my
pleasant and earnest ex- colleagues
put out Kaepernick’s famous Nike ad.
The spot, which did not once mention
the police—and which featured the
nebulous slogan, “Believe in some-
thing. Even if it means sacrificing ev-
erything”—was widely celebrated, not
so much for its message but for its ex-
istence in the sports economy. If Nike
and its billions of dollars and its influ-
ence could stand with Kaepernick, that
meant something was changing.
This was two years ago. I found myself
thinking about those advertising col-
leagues this summer, when news started
coming out about the NBA’s plans to
“address systemic racism” inside its
elaborate, Covid- fighting bubble at
Disney World, which it set up after sus-
pending regular season play in March.
These plans included a set of messages
agreed on by players and owners that
could be worn on the back of jerseys
that ranged from “I Am a Man,” the
slogan used by Memphis sanitation
workers during their 1968 strike, to an-
odyne words like “Equality” and the
even more bendable “Freedom.” The
league, in addition, would be placing
decals saying “Black Lives Matter” on
the courts at Disney World. Before the
players arrived, Kyrie Irving, one of the
league’s most popular athletes, tried to
convince his fellow players to not play
and focus, instead, on the protests.
Irving did not give much detail about
what that might mean, but on a confer-
ence call with over eighty players, he
reportedly said, “I don’t support going
into Orlando. I’m not with the system-
atic racism and the bullshit. Something
smells a little fishy.” He added, “I’m
willing to give up everything I have”
for social justice.
His declaration was debated on all
the usual sports talk shows. The atten-
dant chatter on social media focused
on whether or not Irving—who was
injured at the time and couldn’t play
in the bubble anyway, and who has
occasionally floated flat- earth theo-
ries—was serious. Far less time was
spent discussing the (valuable) line he
seemed to be drawing between suppos-
edly real protest and the display put on
by the league and its corporate spon-
sors. Weeks later, Irving donated $1.
million to help offset the salary losses
of WNBA players who had decided to
opt out of their own bubble. (That in-
cluded Maya Moore, one of the greatest
women’s basketball players of all time,
who sat out last season to help free a
wrongfully incarcerated man from
prison.) The question Irving seemed to
be posing was not unlike the one I had
cast aside when I decided to go work in
advertising: Can the NBA partner with
Nike and its marketing and advertising
machine to create a meaningful mes-
sage of dissent? And if so, whom is the
message supposed to reach?
For Irving, the answer was no. At the
time, he was seen as an outlier—not just
in the league, but also among protest
leaders, including Alicia Garza, one of
the three Black women who started the
Black Lives Matter movement. Garza
recently told the sports website The
Athletic that seeing those words used
by professional sports leagues across
the world “blows me away. It’s incred-
ibly amazing.”
Jackson, for his part, is not a critic
who wants to tear everything down
at the first whiff of impurity. He, like
Garza, believes that dissent in sports,
even if it’s organized by the biggest
corporations in the country, can have a
profound transformative effect. In his
introduction, Jackson writes, “THIS IS
A BOOK ABOUT POWER,” and while
he concedes that white ownership ulti-
mately calls the shots on the business
side, he still sees great potential in both
the actions of individual athletes and
the physical and spiritual spectacle of
the games themselves:I’ve noticed how most of the
people making decisions that af-
fect sports at the highest money-
generating level are those furthest
removed from the cultural center
of the games....
I’ve also learned that not hav-
ing power or ownership in sports
doesn’t make you powerless....
Sports in America gives—and has
given—minorities, women, the
disenfranchised and disrespected
leverage that is rarely afforded by
any other chosen American pro-
fession. Through sports we have
found a sense of freedom that is
nonexistent or not accepted in
other walks of life.For Jackson, the game is the game, but
there’s still the game itself, which is not
a game.These are real distinctions, not just
semantics, but as I read through Jack-
son’s book, I couldn’t always tell where
power started or ended. He describes,
for example, how a team’s ownership
can work with media to offload its own
messaging onto an athlete, but he also
touts the social importance of Nike ad
campaigns, calls Kaepernick a “mili-
t a nt i n N i ke c l o t h i n g ,” a n d eve n s u g g e s t s
that Popovich and Kerr should have a
Nike shirt that reads, “I’m Not Woke,
I’m Wide Awake.” The final chapter,
titled “I (Still) Can’t Breathe,” argues
that individual athletes should not have
to be the face of social justice in sports,
but that teams, their owners, and the
leagues themselves should take the lead.
He seems fully aware that these institu-
tions are almost entirely owned and
managed by white people who exploit
Black labor, but his suggestions mostly
call for a shift in messaging, not exactly
in practice. The discussion of basket-
ball and race, in other words, should be
turned into a monologue, but the triple
consciousness—wherein the white fan
confronts the Blackness of basketball
but accesses it through its white power
structure and uses that comfort to cre-
ate a conditional, and ultimately facile,
“understanding” of Black people—can
remain mostly undisturbed.The Game Is Not a Game was pub-
lished before the protests in response
to George Floyd’s death and the cre-
ation of the NBA bubble, but in his final
chapter, Jackson predicts a revolution
in sports that will spread to the greater
public:Given the state this country is in,
the divided mindset of the people,
the players’ struggles and maneu-
vers for power, the refusal to relin-
quish position or provide leverage
by those in power, the current
outcome may not be an outcome
at all—with sports transforming
into something much more than
a game, athletes subscribing to be
much more than just athletes, and
fans believing more and more that
we have earned the right to be
more than just fans.For the first two months inside the bub-
ble, the NBA followed Jackson’s pre-
scription. Every team and the leadership
of the league placed the vague notion of
systemic racism at the center of their
self- presentation. On the first night the
NBA season resumed, I watched play-
ers, coaches, and referees link arms and
kneel for the national anthem. When the
song ended, the players took the court
with the collectively bargained slogans
on the backs of their jerseys. Following
Popovich and Kerr’s lead, the NBA cen-
tered its show around thoughtfulness,
with dutiful incantations of its respon-
sibility to use its platform for good and
ninety- second videos of players, all of
whom were wearing masks, talking to
the camera about what systemic rac-
ism and police brutality mean to them.
Nothing was unexpected or particularly
moving. I imagine nobody’s mind was
changed about anything, which I imag-
ine wasn’t the point anyway.
During those first days of the NBA
bubble, the only disharmony came
from two players—one white, one
Black—who stood while everyone else
knelt. (Popovich, who served in the
military, also stood for the anthem, as
did Becky Hammond, the first woman
to work as a full- time assistant coach in
the NBA. When asked about it, Popo-
vich said, “I’d prefer to keep that to my-
self.”) These acts of defiance prompted
an interrogation both from the report-
ers inside the bubble and then through-
out social media about why they would
do such a thing, openly at odds with
not only public morality but the stated
values of the NBA. This shouldn’t have
been surprising—protest requires con-
flict, and the most progressive league
will offer the fewest opportunities for
an actual challenge to power. When
almost everyone kneels and the media
asks the standers about it, kneeling be-
comes the league- approved norm.
Professional leagues around the
world have also followed Jackson’s pre-
diction and placed their institutions,
whether franchises or their front of-
fices, behind Black Lives Matter. But
outside of NASCAR, which banned the
Confederate flag from its raceways, pro
sports have not yet “transform[ed] into
something much more than a game.”
The athletes were still athletes and the
fans were still fans.
After two nights of demonstrations
in Kenosha, several NBA players ex-
pressed frustration over being stuck in
the bubble. Their thoughts were most
succinctly summed up by Jaylen Brown
of the Boston Celtics, who tweeted, “Iwant to go protest,” implying that what
he was already doing—giving state-
ments to the press and kneeling for the
anthem—did not qualify. The next day,
the Milwaukee Bucks refused to take
the court for Game 5 of their series
against the Orlando Magic. That same
night, WNBA players staged a walkout;
the Milwaukee Brewers declined to
play their scheduled MLB game against
the Cincinnati Reds; the tennis star
Naomi Osaka said she was dropping
out of her semifinal match in the South-
ern Open; and Kenny Smith, a former
point guard and longtime commentator
on TNT’s Inside the NBA, walked off
the set. For the players, coaches, and
media who withheld their labor, true
resistance lay outside the game.
The day after the strike, the NBA an-
nounced it would resume the playoffs.
Shams Charania of The Athletic re-
ported that the players wanted to “find
new and improved ways to make social
justice statements,” but that “games
would be returning over the week-
end”—which does not make the NBA’s
initial bubble demonstration meaning-
less. If the league’s experiment showed
just how effectively a well-run corpo-
rate machine can keep the balls bounc-
ing during a time of viral infection and
uprising, the player strike showed what
can happen when all that comes crash-
ing to a halt, if only for a couple of days.
When yet another Black person is
killed by the police, no person of good
conscience will stay home because they
believe that watching a basketball game
has fulfilled their duty to humanity. Nor
will the spectacle of players kneeling at
half court inspire anyone to walk into
clouds of tear gas. Kaepernick’s initial
act of protest, four years ago this week,
was replicated in stirring, meme-like
fashion on high school lacrosse fields,
college basketball courts, and through-
out the NFL; it has become a signifier of
assent. Nike just provided every NBA
player and coach with a “Black Lives
Matter” T-shirt written in the familiar
“Just Do It” font. And the league has
made it clear that they, too, consider so-
cial justice a treasured client. After the
strike, these messaging efforts will only
be redoubled. All of this could help
lessen the distance between the white
fan and the league he loves—but I don’t
see how diminished self-consciousness
or increased social awareness will lead
to Jackson’s revolution.
Soon the season will resume, and the
league will again test hundreds of its
players, coaches, and staff for Covid-
in a bubble located in Disney World.
Those players will receive their results
within twelve hours in a state where
doctors, nurses, and elder care aides re-
port twelve-to-fifteen-day waits on their
diagnoses. Between games, the players
will head back to their rooms, which are
cleaned by a workforce made essential
by the NBA’s need to play games. They
will eat food cooked by another, simi-
lar group of workers, none of whom are
within the bubble or have access to the
same testing capacity. The vast majority
of those workers will be Black or Latino.
This is also a form of “systemic racism,”
but it’s one that the usually smooth,
frictionless politics shared between the
NBA, its players, and its fans will never
acknowledge because it goes beyond
the abstract desire for white people to
understand Black people, and speaks,
instead, to the ritual exploitation that
benefits—and damns—us all. Q
—August 27, 2020