After Justin Durant, Charles Tapper and Demarcus Lawrence finish their football playing days with the Dallas Cowboys (or another team if they are traded) and the cheering ends, they will all revert back to being just big black niggers — and America will treat them accordingly. They — and all of the other black players in the NFL — need to keep that in mind as they make their decisions in regards to taking a knee (or not) in the games this Sunday.
Due to Trump sticking his nose where it really doesn’t belong — into cultural, social and racial issues on which he possesses zero sensitivity — the kneeling controversy is being raised to a much higher level. He’s already destroyed another football league — the USFL back in the 80s — and evidently is set on destroying the NFL too.
The league is in a no-win position. How can Roger Goodell expect black players to bend over and take it up the ass from the prick owners who want them to compromise their principles and betray their racial identities on the sidelines, and then go out onto the playing field and be ass-kicking monster/men? These players are either gladiators or pussies, and those two personas are not interchangeable — and certainly not as easily as putting on or taking off a pair of shoulder pads. Either these are men or they aren’t.
If they bend to the owners’ will and break to their demands to just shut up and entertain howling fans, what are these black players going to tell their wives and children if they are questioned about their commitment to racial pride? Are they going to be willing to say that they just broke weak, hung their heads and meekly shuffled their asses back onto the plantation/playing field?
I know, I know, these footballers have very expensive lifestyles to maintain, and the thought of losing a paycheck or two scares the shit out of them. But now is the time for them to man up and strap their nuts on. If black folks are ever going to bring about a cessation to the rampant and enduring ill treatment we’ve been receiving at the hands of institutionalized racism for centuries then we’re going to have to return to the days and tactics of our forbearers — men and women who were not afraid to sacrifice for what they believed in. And if when they were afraid, they still screwed up their courage and did what needed to be done.
Hush, truth.
The question the players have to ask themselves is this: Where is it OK for them to protest racial injustice? When is it OK? The answers that will come thundering back from the establishment are, “No place, and never.”
The plain truth is that most of white America has never listened to black complaints of mistreatment, and they damn sure don’t want to hear about them now, while they’re out to have a good time on a Sunday afternoon.
So the whites who run the NFL (and kowtow to Trump) obfuscate, dissemble and outright lie. They echo his claim that the issue is over respect for the flag and veterans, as if they have the moral right to tell blacks when, how, where and even what to protest over. This is the absolute height of racist paternalism.
This is similar to the National Rifle Association — via their bought and sold politicians — telling those clamoring for gun reform in the wake of the worse mass shooting in modern American history in Las Vegas that “now is not the time” for this conversation. When will the time be right, after hundreds are slaughtered the next time — or never?
Progressives have allowed themselves to be “compartmentalized” over their issues; they don’t raise their voices en masse. When the Las Vegas killings occurred, those advocating for racial justice for blacks should have been weighing in on the conversation loud and clear, just as those who want saner gun policies should now be strongly supporting the black players in their stance for racial justice.
Trump and the NFL owners might be able to coerce and break the resolve of the black players this Sunday and force them to stand when their hearts are not in it. But the underlying issues that originally caused the demonstrations in the first place will still be there, festering like open wounds — wounds that just won’t heal. The difference will be that the president will have forced the owners to rub salt into them.
Eventually in this country there’s going to be hell to tell the captain. Just watch.
From CoolCleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.