From Robinson to Ali, the power of sports activism has always been rooted in its moral imperative. The recent wave of activism has not been different, motivated by moments like the one in August 2014, when the Ferguson police shot and killed Michael Brown and left his body in the street for hours under the intense summer heat. Or when the police drowned Eric Garner until his death that same summer or when he killed Philando Castile and Terence Crutcher in 2016. People went out to protest against the violence. Players like Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid joined them and protested on the football fields.
The sports world did its best to end the protests with the help of the media that largely refused to understand the revolt and the willful ignorance of team owners and fans who never believed that this part of What is the United States was a problem. Your efforts seem to have succeeded. Kaepernick does not have a job yet. Reid, a free agent safety, said on March 22 that if a team hired him, he would not continue kneeling to protest against police brutality as he did for two years. The next day, Malcolm Jenkins, Anquan Boldin and Devin McCourty, three members of the Players Coalition-a group of activist players who negotiated with the owners of teams in an $ 89 million partnership in November to contribute to social causes-offered a talk on a Harvard seminar on reforms to the justice system. Speaking about the protests in the countryside, McCourty told USA Today, "That was the vehicle we used to attract attention, but protesting in any way every week in the camp is not going to prevent an African-American boy from being killed."
The children went out and marched. They incorporated Columbine children, who are now adults, and Sandy Hook's parents. When African-American children affected by gun violence felt left out, they got into the fight, became visible. The movement incorporated military veterans who shared their views on gun control, a strategic alliance that obscured the violence of constant warfare but silenced accusations that the children were unpatriotic. The children faced attacks on their own, not only at the level of hostility faced by the players who protested. Children and adolescents, slowly connect the points that lead from gun violence to domestic violence, to police violence, points that players were very willing to disconnect.Check out some of the best soccer bettings.
The children moved to the United States without begging the powerful millionaires for money - or for having their movement handled by meddlesome companies. Their success illuminates the failure of the players, because at the same time that the coalition spoke of demonstrations at Harvard, the moral imperative to do so has only increased. In Baltimore, when Freddie Gray died in police custody, two officers were found guilty of corruption and six others pleaded guilty to the same charge. Houston police killed Danny Ray Thomas, another African-American who was not armed. Four days earlier, Sacramento police killed Stephon Clark in the backyard of his grandmother's house, shooting him repeatedly in the back. Louisiana prosecutors reported that the Baton Rouge policeman who killed Alton Sterling in 2016 - the death that sparked the activism of Reid and Jenkins - would not be charged. By their agreement, the NFL players now look like followers who settled for a bank check instead of having the stamina to stay on the streets, where social movements are always more dangerous.