Mediaboss Marketing

September 1, 2016, in San Diego, California: Eric Reid (No. 35) and Colin Kaepernick (No. 7) of the San Francisco 49ers kneel on the sideline during national anthem, as free agent Nate Boyer stands, before the game with the San Diego Chargers at Qualcomm Stadium. Photo: Michael Zagaris/San Francisco 49ers/Getty Images

Unless you know what to look for, its not clear why the photo is notable, let alone historic. It shows a football field, Levis Stadium in Santa Clara, California, before the start of a game. The teams are on their respective sidelines. Nothing is happening. The playing surface is still smooth, and if anything stands out, its the 50-yard-line logo: SF, for San Francisco. If you arent looking closely for the player wearing No. 7, the only one sitting down, youll probably miss him.

But hes there, a red speck near the bottom of the frame. Colin Kaepernicks protest would soon upend the world of professional sports, though nine months earlier, his body had betrayed him. He had lost his starting-quarterback gig to a younger player and suffered a season-ending labrum tear in his shoulder that required surgery. He was 29 years old and three years removed from his Super Bowl appearance, and success had eluded him since then. Criticisms he had faced since becoming a starter that he was physically impressive but cognitively limited, uneasy in the pocket and unable to read defenses had fueled the broad impression that he was little more than a body.

So by August 2016, when a reporter named Jennifer Lee Chan photographed Kaepernicks first documented refusal to stand during the national anthem, igniting a controversy that led to his vilification by the Trumpist right and his blackballing by the leagues owners, the ailing quarterback wasnt just out for justice. He was seeking control.

A paradox of professional athletics is how mastery over ones body facilitates its surrender. Few jobs call for such exhaustive submission to the dominion of other people. Players spend years fine-tuning muscles most people dont even know exist, breaking them down and rebuilding them to perform astonishing feats under duress, only to realize that autonomy is an illusion. Team executives use athletes as assets to trade and discard as it suits them, while spectators project and process their neuroses through the players.

Kaepernicks battle raged on two fronts. A maelstrom of circumstances gave the Black Lives Matter movement its unique contours, and one of the more striking aspects was the involvement of high-profile athletes, many of whom were negotiating professional reckonings at the same time. This was not a coincidence. When LeBron James led his Miami Heat teammates in their silent protest after the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012, he was less than two years removed from his infamous Decision to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers and join rivals Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in South Beach to form the NBAs first modern superteam an alliance of stars who would have, in years past, sought championships as leaders of their own franchises.

The next half-decade saw James smeared as a traitor and accused of ruining the sport. Since then, the formulation he pioneered has become the league norm, heralding a departure from the days when players settled for the hand fate dealt them when they were drafted. A new age had come, marked by greater self-determination over how and where their bodies were deployed.

Variations on this theme echoed across sports. In womens athletics, it often materialized in disputes over equal pay. The killing of Michael Brown by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer in 2014 came months into an intensifying debate about WNBA players flying overseas for money. Brittney Griner, it was reported, earned 12 times more to play in a Chinese league during the WNBAs off-season than she received during her entire rookie campaign with the Phoenix Mercury. The resulting discontent rippled outward; after the killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in 2016, WNBA players wore BLACK LIVES MATTERemblazoned shirts to their pregame warm-ups and declined to talk to reporters about anything besides police violence, resulting in fines from the league.

The U.S. womens soccer team was fresh off their victory at the 2015 World Cup when Megan Rapinoe knelt during the national anthem in solidarity with Kaepernick. They were embroiled in their own push for equal pay, premised on the absurdity of earning less money than their flailing male counterparts. Tennis star Naomi Osaka has made her support for the Black Lives Matter movement an exception to her reluctance to speak in public. Simone Biles, the most decorated gymnast in history, became an outspoken supporter of the movement as she openly assailed her professions sanctioning body, USA Gymnastics, for enabling the sexual abuse of its athletes by Dr. Larry Nassar.

For his part, Kaepernicks dilemmas werent limited to his injuries or deteriorating relationship with the 49ers. Revelations about the long-term effects of concussions among NFL players had recently turned litigious, forcing the league to admit, after years of lying and thousands of lawsuits from ex-players, that football and chronic traumatic encephalopathy were linked.

All of these conflicts dealt with a basic question how athletes might take greater control of the way their bodies are used that was coming into focus for the players long before the misuse and abuse of human bodies became a national fixation. And for many, these concerns would only get more entwined. When NBA players initiated a wildcat strike during the COVID-disrupted homestretch of the 2020 season, it was nominally about getting more league support for that summers protests. But the strike followed a series of physical attacks against their fellow players by the police. Thabo Sefolosha, then a forward for the Atlanta Hawks, had his fibula broken by cops outside a New York City nightclub in 2015. Milwaukee police officers assaulted thenBucks guard Sterling Brown in a Walgreens parking lot in 2018.

Historically, the challenge of such paradigm-shifting moments has been less about drawing attention to these outrageous injustices to energize the public than funneling that energy into lasting solutions. Just as the advantages of athlete involvement in the Black Lives Matter movement were self-evident its help in mainstreaming once-marginal ideas about racism and policing, for example so were its drawbacks. A celebrity milieu begets celebrity-driven problem-solving. The NBAs strike broke not after radical changes to how this country addresses public safety but after some players phoned Barack Obama, who advised them to establish a social-justice committee and keep playing. The banner result was the leagues making some of its arenas available as voter precincts in the 2020 election almost a cruel joke, in retrospect, given how ineffectual the subsequent Congress has been in passing police reforms.

Elsewhere, the athletes particular mix of concerns, social and professional, skewed queasily and predictably toward the latter. The glaring refusal of many NBA players to admit that the Chinese governments abuses of the countrys Uighur minority were, in fact, bad China is a huge revenue generator for the league often overwhelmed their cries for human rights in the U.S.

One thread stands out, though: the galvanizing potential of feeling precarious. The psychic bridge that links the worries of a teenager walking home in suburban St. Louis to those of a multimillionaire athlete in Santa Clara is clear once you recognize that both look in the mirror and see a body in peril. This is not to equate the two but to note their rare convergence over the past decade and to ask what its rareness says about the long-term durability of their shared response. Can precarity felt by rich and famous athletes sustain ten more years of their investment in this movement? The only certainty, for now, is that the police will give them plenty of opportunities to show us.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 31, 2022, issue of New YorkMagazine.

Want more stories like this one? Subscribe now to support our journalism and get unlimited access to our coverage. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 31, 2022, issue of New York Magazine.

Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.

Visit link:
Black Athletes and the Value of a Body - New York Magazine

The attorneys general of California and Washington have an obligation to investigate and penalize Black Lives Matter for its "flagrant" violations of state law, according to a pair of legal complaints submitted Friday by a conservative watchdog group.

The Washington Examiner's investigation into the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the legal entity that represents the national BLM movement, which exposed the charity's lack of financial transparency surrounding its $60 million bankroll and its refusal to disclose who has been in charge of the group since May, is cited extensively in the two complaints filed with the attorneys general of the liberal states Friday by the National Legal and Policy Center.

"The total lack of transparency and accountability for such a highly visible and well-funded organization is alarming and justifiably criticized by Black leaders at the local level," the complaints state. "It is incumbent on the Attorney General to launch a full investigation of [Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation's] finances and governance and to impose appropriate fines and penalties, including possible criminal prosecution."

Black Lives Matter shouts down fundraising days after liberal states threatened legal action

California and Washington both warned BLM in January to stop soliciting contributions from citizens of their states until the group forks over information about its finances in 2020, the year in which the group raked in millions of dollars during the nationwide social unrest that followed George Floyd's killing. But the charity continued to solicit contributions from citizens of the two states despite the warnings, the Washington Examiner previously reported.

BLM said it voluntarily shut down its online fundraising operations while it works with compliance counsel to get back into good standing with the states, but NLPC counsel Paul Kamenar said the damage has already been done.

"While it appears that BLMGNF has finally shut down its unlawful fundraising activities, they are still liable for its past flagrant reporting violations," Kamenar said in a statement.

"Our formal complaints filed today with the Attorneys General of California and Washington, who have ordered the group to cease its fundraising, demand a full investigation and audit of this group, and possible criminal sanctions," he added.

BLM'S MILLIONS UNACCOUNTED FOR AFTER LEADERS QUIETLY JUMPED SHIP

BLM is also out of compliance in Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Virginia due to its failure to report its 2020 finances, which were due to the IRS on Nov. 15.

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita previously told the Washington Examiner that BLM's refusal to answer basic questions about its finances fits a common and disturbing pattern.

"It appears that the house of cards may be falling, and this happens eventually with nearly every scam, scheme, or illegal enterprise," Rokita, a Republican, said in an interview. "I see patterns that scams kind of universally take: failure to provide board members, failure to provide even executive directors, failure to make your filings available. It all leads to suspicion."

Rokita said he would not confirm or deny whether his office is investigating BLM, but he said the Washington Examiner's reporting on the group "certainly cause us to be concerned."

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

BLM did not return a request for comment.

Original Location: California and Washington have obligation to investigate BLM's 'flagrant' violations, watchdog charges in legal complaints

Washington Examiner Videos

Original post:
California and Washington have obligation to investigate BLM's 'flagrant' violations, watchdog charges in legal complaints - Denver Gazette

Ashley Burch with Trayvon Martin. Photo: Courtesy of Burch

When Ashley Burch remembers her friend Trayvon Martin, she thinks of him walking around Carol City, the neighborhood north of Miami where they were teenagers together. They werent old enough to drive, so Trayvon walked nearly everywhere when he couldnt catch the bus, sometimes so far that he would call Ashley to come and pick him up. With what? she would ask. He would joke his Cadillac was in the shop the nickname he had for his bicycle.

That Trayvon liked walking was among her first thoughts a decade ago when Ashley heard how and where he had been killed. George Zimmerman, the man who shot Trayvon, had told the police that he looked real suspicious in his dark-gray hoodie on the night of February 26, 2012, idly walking around the housing development where he was in fact staying with his father and his fathers fiance. To Ashley and the rest of his friends, that was just Trayvon. It was unthinkable that normal things about her friend were now being used to characterize him as some kind of menace. We knew Trayvon liked to walk, Burch, now 27, says from Jacksonville, Florida. And he always had a hoodie on. Of course he did it was raining that night.

Burch would spend the next few days, months, and years getting angry about those kinds of details, the ones that people on TV, in the news, and in public would get wrong or twist about Trayvon Martin, as his story ballooned from community tragedy into a national conversation on anti-Black racism. They used to say Trayvon was bigger than Zimmerman and he used to play football, and I was like, No, he played ball as a child. He wasnt even built like a football player. He was actually tall and really skinny. The Trayvon that Burch knew was relatively quiet with a goofy streak. He was often scheming planning an elaborate seafood party at a friends house with no budget or permission or teasing her about being a flagette in the school marching band. They would head to the Galaxy skate rink every Saturday to cruise around to hip-hop and R&B. Burch spoke to the press about Martin at a march the family held for their son a few weeks after his death. That was one of my best friends, somebody I talked to every day, he was very nice, she said. She was immediately flooded with Facebook messages from Zimmerman supporters, who told her that her best friend was a thug.

In 2013, Burch watched Zimmermans trial from home every day. When he was acquitted, and the movement around Trayvons murder grew bigger still, with protests taking place throughout the country, she found herself angry even with Trayvons supporters. A picture went around social media of a baby-faced Trayvon in an aviation uniform at space camp. He never went to space camp, Burch would hotly comment whenever she saw it. (The photo was actually from a seven-week aviation course Trayvon attended in 2009. He had been interested in a career as a pilot.) There was a girl at Carol City who would wear a Trayvon T-shirt for months, and it made Burch and her friend Aiyanna seethe. You dont even know him, they would whisper to each other.

After graduation, Burch left Carol City for Jacksonville, where she eventually attended Edward Waters University, an HBCU. She graduated with a criminal-justice degree, concentrating in forensic science. Now she is a probation officer. It sometimes surprises people that she works in law enforcement, if they know about her friendship with Trayvon. It makes me feel bad sometimes, you know? she says. Cause I know at the end of the day I have a job to do. As part of her position, Burch works with offenders to find drug-addiction treatment, employment, and housing. But for me to have to make the arrest I dont like that. Or when Im in court, seeing people getting sentenced to 25 years in prison. Her experience hasnt turned into political activism, however. When Black Lives Matter protests engulfed the country again in 2020, sparked by the murder of yet another unarmed Black man, Burch stayed home. She finds demonstrations overwhelming ever since attending one in Sanford held a month after Trayvons death. Everybody there had on a Trayvon shirt; he was on signs and everything. I think it was just too much too soon.

Burch rarely talks openly about Trayvon. She has tried to move on and into her adult life. But she has never changed the background of her Facebook profile: a now-infamous black-and-white photo of Trayvon in his hoodie, looking straight on, taken by his computer camera. I dont want anybody to forget about him, she says. Every year, she and friends text each other on his birthday. She wishes she could introduce him to her daughter, Skylar, now 3 years old, and imagines that he might have had his own children. He would have certainly had his own career, his own accomplishments to share. Burch says she is just now finally starting to discuss him in therapy. For this tenth anniversary of Trayvons death, she will likely head back to Miami to attend the annual peace march held by his family. It may be the first time that Burch actually visits Trayvons grave site, which she has avoided ever since his funeral. Ive been scared of how I will feel when I actually get there, Burch says. I miss everything about him. I miss his laugh. I miss talking to him all the time, just miss him being around. There are songs she cant listen to, like Tupacs Changes, where the chorus goes, Id love to go back to when we played as kids / But things change, and thats the way it is.

Burch has just a few low-quality photos of Trayvon saved from those days before everything was documented on social media, a sweet, mundane time capsule of their teenageness. One is a screenshot of the two of them chatting on ooVoo, a video-chat gamelike app they would play on forever when they werent texting or calling. Just a few hours before he headed out to a 7-Eleven on the highway for snacks, Ashley had called Trayvon, annoyed that he wasnt being responsive while they were messaging. He told her he was watching a movie and that he would call her back.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 31, 2022, issue of New YorkMagazine.

Want more stories like this one? Subscribe now to support our journalism and get unlimited access to our coverage. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 31, 2022, issue of New York Magazine.

Get the Cut newsletter delivered daily

View post:
Ashley Burch Remembers Her Friend Trayvon Martin - The Cut

The Milton Keynes Rose Trust have announced the engraving of two new pillars to be added to this civic place of remembrance in Campbell Park.

One of the pillars will be in dedication to George Floyd from Minneapolis, who, on May 25 2020, tragically died after an incident that had a worldwide impact and reignited a push for racial justice and equality.

The pillar will offer the community an opportunity to come together to reflect on the importance of togetherness and the creation of a world where an

incident such as that which ended the life of George Floyd would never be a reality again.

Rev. Edson Dube of nominators, the Milton Keynes Council of Faiths, said: "Recognising this date and the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement will be of great significance to the entire community of Milton Keynes in asserting the city's commitment to unity, equality and fairness for all people."

The second pillar to be engraved in 2022 will be to commemorate The Windrush Generation. The chosen date of June 22 1948 recalls the day that HMT Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury docks.

This ship brought with her the first wave of African Caribbean people to settle in the UK, invited to come from Commonwealth nations to help support the construction of post-war Britain. The Windrush Generation were true pioneers and contributed to the founding of the Milton Keynes we know today.

Wain Macintosh, chairman of Friends of the Caribbean said: The Windrush Pillar will symbolise the achievements, and contributions of The Windrush Generations to Britain and in particular the Milton Keynes community. It honours their legacy and stands as a historic significance of Caribbean and African culture, industrialism and values.

The Milton Keynes Rose Trust hope that future generations will be able to look back on these Pillars as symbols of their communitys commitment to be a place where all people no matter what their race, feel welcomed and appreciated.

Chairman Debbie Brock said, The Milton Keynes Rose is a place for everybody a space that is welcoming and can speak to

Francesca Skelton, Milton Keynes Arts and Heritage Alliance Chair, said It is so important that the Milton Keynes Rose, our wonderful shared place of commemoration, is dedicating two new pillars supporting the Black Lives Matter movement and celebrating The Windrush Generation.

"Milton Keynes is enriched both by its diversity and by our shared and unifying purpose to build a peoples city committed to inclusion, justice and equality.

Fundraising for the new Pillars begins with a Corporate Pancake Race at Campbell Park on

Any donations will be welcomed here.

You can find out more about the Milton Keynes Rose and to see details of all existing pillars here.

Read the rest here:
New pillars to be dedicated to Black Lives Matter and the Windrush Generation at Milton Keynes Rose memorial - Milton Keynes Citizen

Image credit: ryanbphotography / Shutterstock

Following the acquittal of Trayvon Martins killer in 2013, Alicia Garza, Patricia Cullors, and Opal Tometi launched what would become a global movement centered around the hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter.

Eight years later, the movement has some key accomplishments to its credit.Policies that attempt to hold police officers more accountablehave been passed in state legislaturesaround the country; a number of city councils havereduced police budgets,removed police from schools, and madetactical rule changesto police departments in an effort to reduce instances of police brutality. These are meaningful victories that contribute to the goal of creating a society in which Black lives matter. These victories also align with thepolicy platformscreated by the Movement for Black Lives.

Yet policy change is only one piece of a larger transformation that the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) is working towards.

As scholars like LaGina Gause andAlvin Tilleryhave argued, this movement is best understood as one of a number of new social movements in America.Such social movements primarily focus on broad societal and cultural change rather than specific policy gains. Indeed, the national and regional chapters of the formally organized Movement for Black Lives emphasize eradicating white supremacy, engaging in cooperative economics, and developing a more just society among other goals that are not primarily policy focused. In addition to the many policy changes precipitated by the movement, how can we evaluate the societal transformations caused so far by the broader Black Lives Matter movement?

In Deva Woodlys Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements, she details the way that the Movement for Black Lives has started to develop and articulate a set of ideas, policy proposals, and political infrastructure to seize back the grounds of politics.

First, the movement has helped usher in a political environment in which much larger proportions of Americans, in particular white Democrats, are concerned about racism and believe that more work needs to be done to achieve racial equality.For example, according to anEconomist/YouGov pollfrom June 2021, 71 percent of Americans, including 95 percent of Democrats, viewed racism as at least somewhat of a problem, and 62 percent of Americans believe that the police operate in racist ways. Moreover,majorities of Americans now agreethat Black people experience discrimination, that Black people are treated worse by the police, and that Black people face employment discrimination.

Second, the movement has helped unearth the submerged state by making visible and legible the repressive and oppressive actions of the state, thereby influencing public understandings of how state power effects Black lives. Importantly, aYouGov pollconducted in August 2020 found that 60 percent of U.S. adults believed that systemic racism should be addressed by the 2020 presidential candidates.

Third, the movement is helping displacethe colorblind narrativepervasive among many liberals by articulating why an understanding of anti-Blackness must be central to all efforts for equity. This is evidenced by the popularization of anti-racism and the broader understanding that, as Ibram X. Kendi states, it is not enough to be not racist. Rather, people need to actively work to create a racially just society.

In sum, the Black Lives Matter movement has helped shift the public consciousness such that people are more aware of racial inequality and systemic racism, and are more involved in the active efforts needed to achieve racial equalityjust as Woodly argues in her book.

During this period of attacks on democratic institutions like voting rights, election administration, and a free press, combined with declines in political trust, civic knowledge, and beliefs that government can be responsive to the citizenry or that ordinary citizens can create positive change, it is more important than ever for the people to be reminded that democratic authority rests on their shoulders. BLM obviously energized a large subset of the public both because of powerful, sustained activism work through local chapters and related organizations, and through protests and other demonstrations. Indeed, the protests of 2020 were labeled thelargestandbroadestprotests in U.S. history. Importantly, many of these people were protesting for the first time.

Precipitating such massive protests is impressive in and of itself, but even more important is the capacity to build sustainable organizational structures.

Unfortunately, it is unclear whether a meaningful number of people who attended protests during the summer of 2020 were brought into these organizational structures in a way that could sustain their activism. Congruently, there is often a disconnect between understanding the systemic nature of racism and other forms of oppression, and knowing what to do about it. Take, for example, the findings of Jennifer Chudys research onracial sympathy. She has found that there are many white Americans who are concerned about racial inequality, understand that it is a structural problem, and want to address the problem. However, when asked what actions should be taken, or what actions they themselves are taking, they tend to emphasize private actions like educating themselves and confronting individual acts of prejudice over actions that could change power structures through influencing political actors or institutions.

This is troubling because, while changing individual behaviors and gaining more knowledge are important, meaningful change can only occur if people are engaging in sustained work that disrupts the power structures that create and perpetuate a system in which Black lives do not matter.

How can BLM activists and other allied individuals and organizations capitalize on the outrage they are precipitating by bringing first-time protesters into the fold? Moreover, how can they help people who are concerned about racial inequalitymotivated to do something about it and already thinking structurallyto also act structurally?

Hahrie Han, Elizabeth McKenna, and Michelle Oyakawa offer one answer to this question in their new book,Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in Twenty-First Century America.They argue that grassroots action will be most powerfully sustained when the outrage felt by demonstrators is harnessed by organizations that develop relationships and equip people with the skills and knowledge they need to bring about the change they want to see.

In their analysis of successful grassroots organizations, the authors identified four congruent actions that helped organizations engage their constituencies and translate that engagement into achieving their strategic goals. Each organization first grounded constituents in a constantly expanding network of relationships. Organizational leaders then equipped constituents with the knowledge and skills to be independent strategists. Thirdly, constituencies were both persistent in their goals and flexible to changing realities. Finally, organizational leaders developed and cultivated bridges across identity groups. Developing these self-governance traits allowed each organization to strategically exert power in dynamic political environments.

The Movement for Black Lives has either already implemented these actions, or is well positioned to do so. A connected and expanding network of organizations and relationships already exists. The leaderful model of the movement allows for constituents to act independently, creating a growing group of local leaders who can independently wield power. The decentralized nature and leaderful structure can help maintain commitment to both localized and national goals, while also being adaptable to shifting political realities. Like other new social movements, the broader Black Lives Matter movement is grounded in newly concrete identities, especially ones that stress intersectionality. As such, the movement has very successfully bridged identities which, as Han, McKenna, and Oyakawa argue, broadens the strategic choices available to movement leaders.

In less than a decade, the Black Lives Matter movement has already made a transformative political, cultural, and societal impact.

Yet, the continued frequency of police killings, the protection of white individuals who perpetrate gun violence, and the ever-growing power of anti-Black sentiment in motivating right-wing politics, are just some of the signals that far more work needs to be done for Black lives to truly matter in our society.

By continuing to develop the organizational infrastructure of a decentralized, leaderful movement that emphasizes intersectionality, and by incorporating lessons from recent analyses of other successful grassroots organizing efforts, the Black Lives Matter movement can continue to seize back the grounds of politics and translate its massive people power into greater political power. Moreover, it is much more likely that constituents will not just think structurally but also act collectively to challenge oppressive power structures when enmeshed in a community of leaders committed to creating a society in which Black lives matter.

Click here to read an excerpt from Reckoning, courtesy of Deva Woodly and Oxford University Press.

Maneesh Arora is an assistant professor of Political Science at Wellesley College and an affiliate of theTaubman Center for American Politics and Policyat Brown University.His research focuses on race and ethnicity politics, public opinion, campaigns and elections, and experimental andsurvey methodology.

Read more:
The Promise of Black Lives Matter - publicseminar.org