Things That Make White People Uncomfortable

by Michael Bennett

For me, it’s always been about the human interaction, pushing people to respect one another in every facet of life. The loss of a human life is the hardest on those left behind. That’s the end of everything. There are no more walks in the park. “Black Lives Matter” is saying that all of our lives have value. If a soldier loses his life, it’s just as important as Tamir Rice losing his life. We need to celebrate every life and mourn every death because behind every one is a family in pain.

It takes a lot to put everything on the line: your livelihood, your morals, your community, everything. I suspect a lot of people think, from a distance, that it’s not that hard to do, like, “Oh, I’d be on the front lines. I’d sit. I’d raise a fist. I’d take a knee.” But it’s so much easier to talk shit than to do shit, because once you are out there representing what you believe, people see the real you. Most everybody in the world wears a mask, and very rarely do people unveil who they really are. And I’ve done that. I’m naked here. So I’m going to be judged by strangers on the core of who I am, and, yes, that makes me vulnerable and it can even feel terrifying. Nobody wants to lose his job like Kaepernick and risk becoming another former NFL player who ends up broke. But if the price of employment is silence … I just can’t do it anymore.

Being born Black is a preexisting condition in this society, with a set of stressors that you can’t understand without living in our skin.

There is no self-determination without control, and there is no control without ownership, whether it’s your house, your car, or an NFL team.

People don’t realize that Houston takes in more refugees than any city in the United States. If Houston were a country it would rank as the fourth-largest refugee population on earth.

the NCAA is a gangster operation, a shakedown, and a system that works for everyone except for the so-called student-athletes. The main revenue-producing college sports are football and basketball. The main sports in this country built around Black Americans are football and basketball. The only sports in which you are not paid for the revenue you bring in are college football and basketball. This is not a wild coincidence. We tend to come from communities that are the least empowered, the most desperate for opportunity, so we get the shittiest end of the stick. It’s a bullshit system that persists because we’re too desperate for that chance at the brass ring—the pros—to organize and say no.

It gives the whole game away that college football is so popular in the SEC, where the legacy of Jim Crow and segregation is so powerful, and now they worship Black football players who make no money and are out there providing entertainment. The university people and the networks intentionally create this fake feel—they use the football field to miseducate people with a fictional portrayal of life off the field. The fiction is that because all these white student fans are cheering majority-Black teams, the dynamic is somehow postracial. It creates an illusion for both the fan and the player—the student and the student-athlete—so they don’t have to face how messed-up this country is. You’re not Black on the field. You’re a representative of your school. There’s no New Jim Crow when you’re on the field. There’s no Donald Trump. There’s no Trayvon Martin.

Players talk about how weird it is—a majority Black sport, and we’re talking about our “owners.” If you think I’m being too sensitive, go to work tomorrow and call your boss your owner in conversation, and see how that feels.

But the league and too many fans wanted to teach a lesson, not only to him but to every athlete who might want to step out of the box. Some shitty quarterbacks with the arm strength of Donald Trump Jr. were signed while Kaepernick was left at home. Richard Sherman even read off the names in an interview. There has clearly been collusion to keep him off a team. Owners are scared of the relationships Colin is building and the issues he’s raising. They are scared because his political views—that Black people shouldn’t be killed in the streets by police and should be empowered—are threatening to white society. They don’t want us to talk about this, even if it’s happening in communities where we grew up and members of our families still live. I get it, as a business owner, but at some point this conversation has to be about humanity and our shared future, not just the bottom line.

The NFL holds up as leaders players who have been accused of rape, violence against women, and even manslaughter. They’re right in front of us, playing quarterback and winning Super Bowl MVP awards. I’d much rather call a leader someone who helps his community.

Maybe Roger Goodell could understand why the treatment of Kaepernick is so unjust if he calmed himself for one second, stopped reacting to every angry phone call from an owner or a sponsor, and went to Denver or Seattle and smoked a nice legal joint. Maybe then he’d also understand why banning weed and punishing players for wanting to incorporate medical marijuana in the healing process is so absurd. Every player experiences repetitive head trauma, and they take addictive or even deadly pills to deal with the pain. If you take Vicodin, you shake when it’s time to cycle off; it’s withdrawal. But cannabis can lessen the after-effects of some of the head trauma, and you won’t need rehab when it’s time to stop. It seems cruel to deny that to players. I’m not talking about getting lit every day, smoking for

ten hours, and coming to work high. I mean if guys have concussion problems and there’s something to give them to help them feel better and decrease the swelling, it seems criminal to disregard that. It also helps players sleep after games, to unwind without pills, sleeping medication, or muscle relaxants. This is why easily 50 percent of players smoke weed. The NFL has a “reefer madness” mind-set when it comes to cannabis. They associate it with “thugs” or carelessness, but some of the greatest ideas have been sparked by marijuana. You can’t tell me Star Wars didn’t come from marijuana. And think about the iPhone. You know Steve Jobs smoked as much weed as anybody else.

But to be great, you have to continuously put yourself in the mind-set where you don’t got it. You have to think about the times you were hungry, you were struggling, you were a kid being pushed around. You have to come up with the darkest thoughts possible—I think about almost dying from my ruptured appendix and blood poisoning—and then use that to motivate yourself, every day.

“Why?” As in, Why does the world even have to be like this? If you don’t ask why, you’ll never be attacked or criticized. No one is going to go after you or your family. But if you don’t ask why, nothing, not a damn thing, is ever going to change. I think that’s the difference between philanthropy and activism. Philanthropy is this kind of life-saving work. Activism is when you ask why this work needs to be done in the first place.

When you look at Black communities it’s different. All the screaming faces on cable news were so critical of the people in Ferguson for “tearing down their community”—when in reality it’s not truly their community because most of the businesses aren’t community-owned, and the businesses that are there don’t give back. They are taking money out of the community. They’re extracting the wealth, little different from the situation in Haiti. It’s the private business version of the police writing up excessive parking tickets in Ferguson.

You can have everything in the world, but if you’re not attached to your emotions, you have no inner being. You’re just a shell. The journey is about going from being a shell to being yourself.

You look back and you’re like, “The whole time it’s been there? What has been going on? Why haven’t we done anything?” We have a chance right now for real change in how we confront racism. The question comes back to morals and spirituality: Are we going to turn a blind eye, or are we going to confront this living history so we can move forward and make society better for all people?

Our response to those scrapping to live can’t be more police, more guns, more death. It needs to be rooted in hope and community investment.

To put it plainly, we have no power because we have no wealth. In greater Boston, as of 2015, the average household wealth (assets, not income) was $247,500 for whites; $8 for Blacks. That’s not a misprint: eight dollars. If that doesn’t make you “uncomfortable,” if that doesn’t make you feel like we need to figure out what our world is doing wrong, you might need to check your pulse.

The point is not that Black lives matter more but that they need to matter as much as everyone else’s.

“Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” speaks to the fact that you can do everything right when interacting with the police. You can hold your hands up high, remember every detail of “the talk” with your parents, and still be shot.

Solidarity is the idea that we can organize around a common goal—uniting across our differences in skin color or gender or sexuality—to make a better world for future generations.

Intersectionality is related, but different: it’s understanding that an individual can experience multiple types of injustice, which we need to acknowledge, and that although our struggles may be different, they overlap or intersect.

It’s as if the sexism baked into the league is more important than the financial benefits that could be gained by treating our female fans with the respect they deserve.

The number-one factor in whether an adult goes to prison is not race or economics but whether they were in prison as a juvenile,