Eric Reid’s Simple Gesture by Mark Anthony Neal

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Eric Reid’s Simple Gesture by Mark Anthony Neal

Eric Reid’s Simple Gesture by Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
As players, coaches, and fans stood for the national anthem at Bank of America Stadium, prior to the game between the Carolina Panthers and New York Giants, free safety Eric Reid did exactly what many expected he would: he took a knee. Reid, had been unemployed since the end of the 2017 season and was recently signed by the Carolina Panthers. Given that Reid was the first player to join Colin Kaepernick in taking a knee on the sideline to protest the police killings of unarmed American citizens, it was no surprise that he continued his civic duty before the game. The biggest surprise, perhaps, is that more players didn’t take a cue from the headlines and join him.
In the days leading up to the Sunday NFL slate, hundreds of protesters, many of them women, had been arrested during a week of demonstrations directed at the confirmation process of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was confirmed by the United States Senate, despite the fact he had been accused of sexual assault by several women; charges that were largely under-investigated by the FBI.
The protests in Washington D.C., along with the ongoing protests around police brutality (days after Jason Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder for shooting Black teen Laquan McDonald 16 times), voter disenfranchisement, and draconian immigration policies, offered yet another moment of alignment, particularly among youth organizers, trying to imagine a better future for themselves in opposition to what Daniel Bessner and David Austin Walsh call a “gerontocracy.”
Since the initial Kaepernick protest, the NFL has been flummoxed in its efforts to make sure their players – the product – remain above the fray with regards of controversial political issues. The NFL has been largely undermined, not by the players, but by President Trump, who has taken every opportunity available to incite his base by misrepresenting the players’ gesture during the National Anthem as a protest against the American flag (a constitutionally protected act).
The NFL, is perhaps so sensitive to taking overtly political stances, that they have shifted their traditional support of Breast Cancer Awareness Month – where players often wore pink cleats and gloves in a dramatic show of support – to #CrucialCatch, a year-round effort to bring awareness to all forms of cancer. While #CrucialCatch is a laudable effort it obscures that fact that the NFL’s previous support of Breast Cancer Awareness was specially tied to making their male fans more aware of the potential impact of the disease on the women in their lives.
After the game, Reid was quotedas saying “Everybody in this [locker room], everybody who watches this game [and] everybody in this country knows what we’re talking about. It’s the truth. You can’t deny it. We’ve just got to do more to make this better.” On this particular Sunday, “make this better” had resonances well beyond the football stadiums where so much animus has been directed at so called “ungrateful” and unpatriotic” players. It would have been a powerful gesture if more NFL players had joined Eric Reid, and took a knee to show solidarity with survivors of rape and sexual assault, and the protesters in Washington DC.
And here’s the irony, Reid was likely only signed by the Carolina Panthers, because the team has new leadership; David Tepper purchased the team from original owner and team founder Jerry Richardson, who was forced to sell the team by the NFL because of his own sexual misconduct in the workplace. Richardson is of the ilk of powerful, wealthy older white men, whose interests Justice Kavanaugh is expected to protect. That Richardson was “punished” by receiving more than $2 Billion for the sale of the Panthers speaks to the limits of real accountability for many of these men.
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Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Professor of African & African American Studies and Professor of English at Duke University, where he is Chair of the Department of African & African-American Studies and Director of the Center for Arts, Digital Culture and Entrepreneurship (CADCE). Neal is the author of several books including Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic and Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities, and co-editor, with Murray Forman, of That’s The Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (now in its 2nd edition). Neal is host of the weekly video podcast Left of Black, produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center for International and Interdisciplinary Studies. Follow Neal on Twitter at @NewBlackMan and Instagram at @BookerBBBrown.

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Published on October 08, 2018 08:00

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