In early September, a group of longtime Utah Jazz fans had seen enough.
They’d seen NBA players, starting with the Jazz, kneel during the national anthem in the Orlando bubble.
They’d seen Jazz star Donovan Mitchell become an outspoken advocate on racial justice initiatives.
And they’d seen the NBA not only allow such behavior, but encourage it by painting “Black Lives Matter” on the court and allowing players to wear social justice messages on their jerseys, among other gestures of support.
So on Sept. 9, four executives from West Jordan-based SME Steel Contractors sent Jazz owner Gail Miller a letter explaining why the company wouldn’t renew a luxury suite it had leased since 1992. They would stay away, they said, “until the NBA and its franchises again offer sports and entertainment rather than divisive political propaganda.”
In the three weeks since the letter became public, SME President Deiter Klohn said the company has received over 1,500 emails and 200 letters, cards and phone messages from as far away as Germany, New Zealand and Japan. “Overwhelmingly,” he said in an email to the Deseret News, “these responses have been supportive of our company’s position.” He also said the company has received some death threats and accusations of Nazism, but those are far fewer, and he remains undeterred. “We/I have no regrets sending the ‘letter’,” he said, “(and) would do it again tomorrow.”
The letter takes issue with politicizing a sport that, to Klohn and his fellow executives, is meant to be nonpolitical. Klohn maintained his support for “free speech and debate of free speech and peaceful protest if needed” in his email to the Deseret News, but said to “leave politics of any kind out of sporting events.”
He said he still hasn’t heard anything from the Jazz, aside from Mitchell’s response on Twitter telling the company it’s within its rights, “just like it’s ours to kneel.”
He’s certainly not alone in his frustration, though other avenues of criticism toward the NBA’s embrace of social justice have often focused on what changes they’ve actually brought about.
“Whether the opportunity can be sustained and affect change? That’s still unknown,” wrote LA Times NBA writer Dan Woike back before the bubble even began.
Nearly three months later, much has changed, but the question of the long-term impact of the NBA’s embrace of racial activism — on fans, revenue and the push for social justice — remains.
History of athlete activism
Athlete activism and corresponding pushback are almost as old as American sports themselves. Len Elmore, a former NBA player who teaches a class at Columbia University called “Athlete Activism and Social Justice in Sports,” said that when sports “became a thing in America” after the Civil War, African Americans became prominent — as did attempts to exclude them. “And in many ways,” he said, “in ways that they could during the times, they took activist positions.
That trend continued into the new century, perhaps most prominently with boxer Jack Johnson. In 1908, he became the first African American heavyweight champion. His success made him a target of the racist Jim Crow policies of the era, and in 1913, he was convicted for the crime of transporting a white woman across state lines. President Donald Trump pardoned Johnson in 2018.
Later, in the 1930s, Black track and field athlete Jesse Owens considered boycotting the 1936 Olympic Games in Nazi Germany, saying “If there are minorities in Germany who are being discriminated against, the United States should withdraw from the 1936 Olympics.” But American Olympic Committee President Avery Brundage called him and others supporting the proposed boycott “un-American agitators” and pressured them to participate. Owens did, and won four gold medals, becoming one of the most recognized track and field athletes of his day.
Elmore encourages his students to consider whether prominent Black athletes from America’s past, from Joe Louis to Jackie Robinson to Paul Robeson, were activists or were simply reacting to the times. “And if you really understand social justice, and you understand the mores of the times,” he said, “you’ll understand that they were activists.”
It became more obvious during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, as names like Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith and John Carlos gained national prominence. And even beyond individuals, institutional changes started taking place, too. Like Texas Western’s 1966 NCAA men’s basketball title, which marked the first time five Black players started in the championship game. Or the Pittsburgh Pirates fielding the first all-Black and Latino lineup in 1971.
“I also realized in my research that Black athletes couldn’t do it alone,” Elmore said. “There were moments where you needed white athletes to stand beside you.”
Athlete activism still happened occasionally between the 1980s and 2010s, but it re-emerged in force in 2012, when LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and their Miami Heat teammates wore hoodies in a group photo dedicated to Trayvon Martin, the Florida teen killed by a neighborhood watchman. That photo was the beginning of the NBA’s modern social justice movement, though it wasn’t the main catalyst for the larger movement of athlete activism.
That distinction belongs to NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, whose decision beginning in 2016 to kneel during the national anthem in protest of racial inequality and police brutality — along with the subsequent backlash — inspired Elmore to teach his class.
“Things have changed,” added Charles Ross, a history professor and director of African American Studies at the University of Mississippi. “And that change hasn’t been easy, but it’s because of people like Ali and Kareem (Abdul-Jabar) and Jim Brown speaking out and making it easier for folks like LeBron James, (Colin) Kaepernick and others to kind of walk through these doors and take the position they’re taking today.”
About that backlash …
Elmore’s research has found that pushback almost always follows athlete activism, and as athletes have become more outspoken over the last decade, the pattern has continued.
Back in 2018, Fox News host Laura Ingraham told James to “shut up and dribble” after James criticized Trump. A year later, right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro called out the league’s activism as more a product of convenience than conviction. “It’s not about pure principle for Adam Silver and company,” he wrote. “It’s about the green. It always is.” And more recently, sportswriter Jason Whitlock opined that the NBA’s current social justice messaging is nothing but a branding exercise. He called the messages on NBA jerseys “empty slogans and … gestures.” Others have gone further; the four SME executives, for example, called the NBA’s actions “ostentatious acts of disrespect for our country and its values.”
Indeed, opposition to the NBA’s embrace of social justice has proceeded mostly along two paths: What they’re doing is harmful and offensive, or what they’re doing is meaningless.
The first path is the one taken by SME, which wrote, “It is ironic that pampered and exceptionally well-paid athletes cavalierly exercise the freedom bought for them through the courage, and sacrifice of this nation’s servicemen and women by disrespectfully kneeling during the country’s anthem.”
The second path, marked by accusations of futility, is best illustrated by Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Victor Joeks. “Rarely has an effort garnered so much praise,” he wrote of the wildcat strike initiated in response to police shooting Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, “for accomplishing so little.”
Whichever path you take as a critic (perhaps both), you’ll arrive at money; whether harmful or meaningless, critics argue, the end result is losing cash. Whitlock, for example, is positive the league is accomplishing nothing aside from alienating fans. A common argument used by Whitlock and others to support this idea is the NBA’s declining TV ratings.
President Donald Trump celebrated the league’s low NBA Finals ratings Oct. 12 on Twitter, and the NBA has struggled with ratings even pre-pandemic. Many assume the league’s overt social justice messages to be the culprit of, as one examples, the ratings for Game 3 of the NBA Finals. At 3.1, with 5.94 million viewers, it was the least-watched Finals game ever.
“Perhaps when the arenas are empty,” the SME executives wrote, “the NBA, its franchises, and its players will rethink their present course of action.” Such predictions rely on the assumption that arenas will, in fact, be empty; that people will stop caring and watching — an assumption that even Klohn, the SME president, implied will be difficult. When asked if he’ll miss the Jazz, he said, “For sure.”
But he’s willing to hold out until, rather than overt on-court promotion of social justice causes, players embrace “an open, honest dialogue leading to a start of peaceful resolutions of the issues,” Klohn said. “Those dialogs would be based on the very basic understanding that we are all American, have the same rights and privileges.”
Elmore and others, meanwhile, operate under a different assumption.
The future of NBA and athlete activism
Elmore criticized the NBA’s wildcat strike as performative, but he viewed other parts as productive. The players, he said, earned a “mixed grade” on their activism. “The sloganeering, the T-shirts, the various verbal reflections and verbal references to the injustices that have occurred most recently,” he said, “those were important.”
They reminded viewers of the harsh realities outside of basketball, and part of the player-activist’s role is keeping the public aware via their immense platform. “Protests are a grab for attention,” Zeynep Tufekci wrote in the Atlantic. “They are an attempt to force a conversation about the topic they’re highlighting.”
The next step is legislative or societal change, and what that could look like depends on who you ask. ESPN questioned a dozen leaders, from the NAACP to law professors to politicians. They offered a range of answers that often came back to creating change at the local and state levels. Ross, however, suggested pushing for federal voting rights legislation. “Here we sit in 2020,” he said. “And we really can be criticized as a country about our commitment to include people in the voting process so that we have a democracy.”
Elmore, meanwhile, hopes players will be willing to go further in the future. In the bubble, for example, they could have avoided accusations of performance by shutting the league down for an extended period. “They might have lost some money initially, but after the smoke cleared, I think many of them would have made it back,” Elmore said. “The owners would ultimately make their money back as well, and our society might be all the better for it.”
That’s his assumption, but it’s based on a deep understanding of the league. Playing in the NBA is unique. NBA superstars like Mitchell and James aren’t easily replaced, and they sign guaranteed contracts, giving them immense leverage and power. “And they’ve shown they’re willing to use that power,” said Richard Sheehan, a professor emeritus of finance at Notre Dame and an expert on sports economics, “and the franchises are along for the ride.”
“It’s no accident,” Ross added, “that (the players) are so passionate.”
NBA fans also appear less likely to be bothered by the protests than other sports fans. In a recent poll from Marist Poll and the Center for Sports Communication at Marist College, 26% of NBA fans said they were less likely to watch sports because of athletes speaking out on political issues, but another 26% said they were more likely to tune in. “The antipathy to social causes can’t account for a drop this large. It’s a whole combination of factors,” Dr. Zachary Arth, assistant professor of sports communication at Marist College, said in the poll’s release.
Still, critics — or even casual NBA fans — might worry about the repercussions to the game should the players continue to push. But in Elmore’s view, sports are entrenched in the American social fabric, and people won’t easily walk away. “So if you can’t walk away from sports, maybe you need to start listening to the athletes,” he said. “That is their power.”
But how far are they willing to go? They’ve already gotten people talking; they’ve already caused some changes, like securing NBA arenas as polling places. But Silver also announced plans to shift social justice messaging off the court. So what now?
Have the players done enough when they, too, have seen enough?
“We can’t solve all the world’s problems,” Mitchell told GQ earlier this month, “but we can at least make the world more vigilant and see what needs to be seen.”