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http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/football/kaepernick-kneels-anthem-espy-4-remains-silent-article-1.2795227
As Colin Kaepernick kneels during national anthem, NBA stars who started the conversation remain silent
The call to action came two months ago, eloquent and bold and invoking the names of Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
There stood Carmelo Anthony, LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Paul on the ESPYs stage, exhorting athletes to “educate ourselves” and “speak up.” It was a loud push for an athletic awakening to activism, a quartet of powerful voices campaigning for social justice.
Two months later, those powerful voices seem conspicuously — and bafflingly — silent, content to let a backup quarterback drive the conversation that they started. Two months later, it is Colin Kaepernick who has staged a “Star-Spangled Banner” protest that has no end in sight, and it is Kaepernick who has emerged as the bold epicenter of a growing athletic movement to end police brutality and black oppression in this nation.
Two months ago, some thought Anthony, the Knicks star who experienced a sudden social justice epiphany, would carry the mantle of Ali. Instead it’s Kaepernick who has wrested that baton from Anthony and pushed for change at an electric pace, drawing some athletes to emulate his national anthem kneeldown and others to lend vocal support.
The NBA is poised to be the next battleground for Kaepernick’s protest, and earlier this week, Oklahoma City Thunder guard Victor Oladipo hinted at that. Yet with just one week to go until NBA training camp, LeBron is firing off birthday shoutouts on Twitter, and Carmelo is showing everyone highlights from his “Rum and Rain” charity dinner.
Not one of the four players who had so much to say at the ESPYs has had anything to say about Kaepernick at all. They have offered neither support nor criticism nor even observation of the backlash Kaepernick has faced, seemingly content to preserve every last ounce of their star power, eroding none of their influence by inflaming no one. In the same moment that Kaepernick’s protest became a racial flashpoint for this nation, the ESPY 4 regressed back to '80s-era Michael Jordan, fearful to take any stand that risked great cost.
Kaepernick’s protest forced a nation to choose and take sides. James and Anthony have avoided taking sides going all the way back to that awards night, when their ballyhooed statement carefully massaged both African-American frustrations and police indignation.
This isn’t about James and Anthony and Paul and Wade committing to kneeling during the anthem, because at this point, the next name to do that is just another headline. But the ESPY 4 has spent too much time in a wishy-washy middle ground, failing to enrich a messy national discussion with the voices and experiences of four of the most powerful African-American men in the nation.
This discussion needs the potent voices of James and Anthony. Alongside the backup QB kneel names such as Megan Rapinoe, a backup on the US women’s soccer team, tight end Martellus Bennett, who’s on his fourth NFL team, and Arian Foster, a running back in the twilight of his career. It’s blue-collar athletes guiding a discussion that’s taking place in the NFL, a battleground that, until recently, has stifled self-expression.
But the athletic elite that is the ESPY 4 has yet to join this fray, content to keep raking in dough despite residing in an NBA that, under Adam Silver, has consistently fostered players to speak out on causes. And it’s hard not to wonder whether all the silence from Anthony and Co. is because the war has changed, whether the ESPY 4, all tremendously business-savvy, really just always wanted this to be the businessmen’s war that it’s not.
Yes, it was Melo who helped spark this generation’s athletic activism in the wake of Alton Sterling’s shooting death, when he delivered an impassioned Instagram post that proclaimed he would head the charge “By Any Means Necessary,” and diagnosed the American system as “broken. Point blank period.” And for years, James has had a heart for his hometown of Akron; it’s part of why he returned to Cleveland in the first place.
But their actions have been the antithesis of Kaepernick’s protest, cautiously undisruptive of the status quo, attempts to repair the system from the inside. The ESPYs statement stepped on the toes of nobody, and Anthony, after a brief flirtation with an Olympic protest, won gold in Rio and did nothing.
The plan of the ESPY 4, it seems, was to fix the world through conventional means, through reality shows and town hall meetings, endeavors that put nothing at risk for four athletic icons.
Colin Kaepernick, meanwhile, accepted the ESPY 4’s call to action from two months ago, educating himself and then speaking out. And he’s put everything at risk these last few weeks to focus a nation’s attention on the subjects of police brutality and oppression.
It would be a shame if the powerful LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony ignored that powerful platform.
-The Knicks’ coaching search still includes a lone frontrunner, Kurt Rambis, whose qualifications for the position include a strong relationship with Jackson and a willingness to take the job.
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