If you’ve been living anywhere other than the underside of a rock, you know that the eye of the international community has been focused on what’s going on in Hong Kong.
The protestors everyone’s talking about are entrenched in a battle most simply explained as democracy vs. authoritarianism – a fight against the Chinese government’s forceful nationalism. And even through an impeachment inquiry, the protests have top ranking members of both political parties expressing clear, unified, and bipartisan support.
At the same time, the NBA scheduled preseason games in China, its largest market outside of the US. For a brief period, the showdown seemed to have been set. Finally, some of the world’s most outspoken athletes, and most notable brands, would be able to speak up and show support for clear American values.
The NBA surely wasn’t the NFL, who notoriously handled the Colin Kaepernick situation with an outdated and purposeful blind eye to racial inequality.
Maybe we’d get a moment similar to when the league outed Donald Sterling as head of the Clippers after his racist remarks. Maybe we’d get a moment like the aftermath of the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner, with players wearing ‘I Can’t Breathe’ shirts and taking videos in dark hoodies like what Martin was wearing when he was killed.
What happened was not a moment. One NBA team executive’s pro-Hong Kong tweet sent the league reeling in lost revenue from the Chinese market. The NBA silenced CNN reporters at post-game interviews, instituted what was largely seen as a gag order on its athletes, and turned a league celebrated for its social, cultural, and political presence into one that showed the same thing many hate the NFL for: cowardice.
Even the league’s biggest star, LeBron James, chose his wallet over the “More Than An Athlete” slogan that has propelled him to the forefront of where sports and politics collide. For all the accurate anger towards the racist remarks Fox News host Laura Ingraham told James, instructing him to ‘shut up and dribble,’ it seems that in this scenario James chose to do just that.
James expressed that Daryl Morey, the NBA executive that started this mess, was uninformed, that he should have kept quiet, or that at the very least he should have waited a week.
It’s here that a key flaw in major modern social movements presents itself. It’s a weakness that restricts the ability of these movements to achieve a wider goal: there isn’t enough inter-movement cooperation to advance common goals forward. The LGTBQ movement has been historically racist and silent on issues involving black and brown members of its community. The Feminist Movement has an underlying connotation that focuses on breaking the glass ceiling of white women, without focusing enough on breaking the chains still holding minority women down from the moment they stepped foot on this continent four centuries ago.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” It’s one of the more famous lines from Martin Luther King Jr., written within the pages of his historic Letters from A Birmingham Jail.
I simply wish we lived in a world where those words were still the standard for meaningful change. And the NBA’s response to the Hong Kong protests is yet another example of our failure to live up to that.