Things That Make White People Uncomfortable

At this point, I think if you’re being silent, you’re making a choice and taking a side.

Remember what John Carlos said: “There is no partial commitment to justice. You are either in or you’re out.” Trust me: if you’re willing to be uncomfortable, you will also feel blessed, if you can see it through and make it to the other side.

I was also proud. Wow. We got under the skin of the president of the United States. I was grateful. Even though he disagreed with us, he turned it into a worldwide conversation. Maybe he wasn’t willing to have a discussion with us about what we were protesting and why it mattered. No beer summit for us. But his comments did allow for us to go global with the problems of racial inequality in this country.

Don’t feel guilty. Do something to make it better. Help us heal by standing—or sitting—alongside us.

The largest culture shock was being Black in this atmosphere. We had white coaches, and they wanted the Black players to be the embodiment of who they were. They would tell us to wear our pants or shoes a certain way; this is what it meant to “be a man.” They thought our path to manhood was to be found in skinny jeans and a tucked-in shirt. (Although now Migos, getting “Bad and Boujee,” has all kinds of young players dressing like that by choice. Go figure.) But they never understood or tried to understand us. They projected their morals and thought processes onto young Black men without figuring out who we were. This struck me as a recipe for our continually being misunderstood, misguided, and misjudged, ingredients for disaster and rebellion, or at the very least for stress and self-destruction and the creation of the very PTSD that afflicts players when it’s all over.

hate comes at you when you make any stand. It’s the price of trying to be heard. If that’s the case, and we accept it, then it’s a waste of emotion to react to the negativity. The hate, the rage that people throw at you only has power if you let it affect you.

By not standing, I wanted to honor the founding principles of this country—the freedom of self-expression, liberty, and the equal opportunity to pursue happiness—and challenge us to try to reach those goals.

We have a civil rights photo collection in our house, a big, beautiful coffee table book with images so vivid they cause jaws to drop. When my daughters and their friends pick it up to look at the young Black boys and girls in the middle of a dangerous struggle, I remind them that our eyes are trained to look at the Black faces and their determination as they walk to school. But I tell them also to look at the white faces in the background: the young, jeering faces shouting slurs and throwing things. “All of those folks are now around your granddad’s age,” I tell my daughters. They’re still with us, and those people now walk around, every day, living with what they did, and either trying to rectify it in their brains, through penance, or voting for Donald Trump and passing that hatred down to their children’s children. That is this country. Them. We cannot afford to pretend they don’t live among us.

It gives the whole game away that college football is so popular in the SEC, where the legacy of Jim Crow and segregation is so powerful, and now they worship Black football players who make no money and are out there providing entertainment. The university people and the networks intentionally create this fake feel—they use the football field to miseducate people with a fictional portrayal of life off the field. The fiction is that because all these white student fans are cheering majority-Black teams, the dynamic is somehow postracial. It creates an illusion for both the fan and the player—the student and the student-athlete—so they don’t have to face how messed-up this country is. You’re not Black on the field. You’re a representative of your school. There’s no New Jim Crow when you’re on the field. There’s no Donald Trump. There’s no Trayvon Martin.

In that moment I saw the part of the man that makes me feel pity: he has no ability to walk in other people’s shoes, to see the world from another perspective, from Puerto Rico to the NFL.

If I can't forgive birth mother, how can I be out in the world arguing for love, justice, and community? How can I hold her hostage away from my heart for something she did when she was so young? My instincts are to stay angry, but my heart says that anger is the road to ruin.

If you don’t ask why, you’ll never be attacked or criticized. No one is going to go after you or your family. But if you don’t ask why, nothing, not a damn thing, is ever going to change. I think that’s the difference between philanthropy and activism. Philanthropy is this kind of life-saving work. Activism is when you ask why this work needs to be done in the first place.