NBA Stars at ESPYs: “The racial profiling has to stop. The shoot-to-kill mentality has to stop”
July 14, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
On Wednesday, July 13, NBA stars Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul, Duane Wade, and LeBron James opened the Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly Awards (ESPYs) show in Los Angeles in a much different way than such awards shows normally begin: with a bold call to athletes—”with the country watching”—to step up and take responsibility to help end violence, in particular racism and police violence against Black people.
Carmelo Anthony began, “The events of the past week have put a spotlight on the injustice, distrust and anger that plague so many of us. The system is broken. The problems are not new. The violence is not new. And the racial divide definitely is not new. But the urgency to create change is at an all-time high.”
Chris Paul said “Generations ago, legends like Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, John Carlos and Tommie Smith, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Jim Brown, Billie Jean King, Arthur Ashe and countless others, they set a model for what athletes should stand for. So we choose to follow in their footsteps.”
Duane Wade declared: “The racial profiling has to stop. The shoot-to-kill mentality has to stop. Not seeing the value of black and brown bodies has to stop. But also, the retaliation has to stop. The endless gun violence in places like Chicago, Dallas, not to mention Orlando, it has to stop. Enough. Enough is enough.”
LeBron James concluded: “ It’s not acceptable to feel helpless and frustrated...It’s time to look in the mirror and ask ourselves what are we doing to create change,” and pointed to the example of Muhammad Ali, who was being honored at that night’s ceremony.
This joint and widely viewed statement on national TV followed Carmelo Anthony’s call for athletes to speak out in the wake of the police murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile and the shooting of police in Dallas and his op-ed in the Guardian on July 13, calling on athletes to speak out at the coming Olympics in Rio: “The teams and the support systems around athletes urge them to stay away from politics, stay away from religion, stay away from this, stay away from that. But at certain times you’ve just got to put all of that aside and be a human being. That time is now.”
As we wrote about Carmelo Anthony, it’s very good that athletes of such stature as well as others in the public eye, “are speaking out and calling on others to stand against the outrage of murders by police and to fight for justice and change. We call on them to follow through on their convictions—and, in the course of fighting for justice, to really dig into the source of terror by police and other outrages of this system, and what it is going to take to win real and lasting change for the better.”
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