Things That Make White People Uncomfortable

by Michael Bennett

It bothered me because my father was in the military. I love my father, but I don’t love the hatred I see growing in this country.

To me, sitting during the anthem is not being divisive. The way those Nazis and Fox News are using the flag is divisive.

It’s so much easier to put up walls.

But we aren’t machines. We are human beings, and we aren’t paid to stand for an anthem.

I lived through this last August in Las Vegas, where I was put on the ground, a weapon placed against the back of my head, and a police officer said he was going to “blow [my] fucking head off.” (I’ll be talking more about that night later, because, in this case, what happened in Vegas isn’t staying in Vegas.)

The reaction to all of this went off the charts when

Donald Trump gave a speech at a rally in Alabama that attacked us for protesting and went after the NFL for not firing us. He also described any player who took a knee as a “son of a bitch.”

In that moment I saw the part of the man that makes me feel pity: he has no ability to walk in other people’s shoes, to see the world from another perspective, from Puerto Rico to the NFL.

In a divided country, we were forging unity: the unity of people who think we can do better.

It’s a reminder not to judge someone for not speaking out but to create the space so that when their time comes, they’re ready.

The first is when Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said that players “disrespecting the flag.… won’t play. Period.”

That’s crazy to me: saying we’ll celebrate freedom by forcing people to stand. Then he explained that he was “helping” us because we “need consequences” in order to stand up to peer pressure. I’m a thirty-two-year-old man, father of three, and that’s the most patronizing shit I’ve ever heard in my life. If you think about what Jones said, it’s treating players like they’re not human beings.

hate comes at you when you make any stand. It’s the price of trying to be heard. If that’s the case, and we accept it, then it’s a waste of emotion to react to the negativity. The hate, the rage that people throw at you only has power if you let it affect you. I

What are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to just live in fear? Are you supposed to put on a mask and act like nothing is bothering you? Are you supposed to hide behind bodyguards and build more and more walls? That’s not a life.

This is why I’ve never, ever, from day one, trusted the NFL fully, because I know that the bottom line is always the business. When people want the NFL to “lead” on issues like violence against women, or racism, or even head injuries, I roll my eyes. The NFL is just another corporation, and they’ll do what they have to do. Asking them to lead on social issues sometimes seems like asking a dog to meow.

It’s about changing a system that doesn’t work for the people who sweat and bleed on that field and who the fans are paying to see. No one buys a jersey with Jim Delany’s name on the back.

I was half god, half property. But whichever half they were dealing with, I was never fully human.

You don’t want a guy who just wants to be paid. You want someone with the soul of an organizer, who believes in the connections we can build between people.

We fought for this as a team, and as long as some of us are in this locker room, it will remain a brotherhood: a political statement of a different way for a team to operate, and a break from the NFL macho “shut up and play” code of self-destruction. This team has taught me that sports don’t have to be toxic. They can be a force for good. What makes sports toxic so often is the greater society, which puts people on pedestals and lets people—from star athletes to Hollywood executives to presidents—get away with toxic behavior.

If you’re not doing what people think you should be doing, which is focusing on football and selling products, you are seen as a misfit. You are seen as different. You are seen as unconventional because you are using what you see as your platform in a way that isn’t just about getting everyone paid.

There is an active racist movement in this country. We need to confront it, and so we need to address the history of the word they are shouting. We have to talk about its relevance and discuss how we can change the way our young kids regard it, not seeing it as a pronoun or a “filler” word.

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.

As I was scrambling to safety, police pursued me and forced me to the ground. They cuffed me, as I lay on my stomach, and put a weapon to the back of my head. An officer said if I moved he would “blow [my] fucking head off.” At the same time another officer jammed his knee in my back and cinched the handcuffs on me so tightly my fingers went numb. The knee in my back made me want to squirm involuntarily, but I was scared that if I moved, that could be the only excuse needed to send me to the next life.

I kept asking, “Sir, what did I do?” and they told me nothing but “Shut the fuck up.” There was chaos around me, as the police dragged me across the pavement to the squad car, but I had never felt so alone, so powerless, as my hands and stomach were cut up by the pavement. The arresting officer turned off his body camera before he did this, for reasons that have yet to be explained to me.

Society says that you shouldn’t get involved because it’s not your problem, but your conscience tells you that you should speak up because you know, deep down inside, that this is the right thing to do. That’s the battle we have with ourselves every day. Most people lose that battle because they think, “I don’t want to risk looking stupid or getting hurt or wasting my time. Better to just send a tweet.” But we need to do more than that, and we need to reach out beyond where it’s comfortable.

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.

Why are we like this? Why don’t we care? Maybe we are so divided by tribe that we’re taught that caring for someone outside our assigned category is the ultimate sin, yet I would argue that it’s the ultimate expression of being part of the human family. You grow and come to understand that there’s so much more to this world than just your bubble. You learn that we can’t organize along the same lines that keep us divided.

Intersectionality has to be a part of our thinking if we are ever going to see change.

They are afraid of confronting their own bigotry. They are afraid of their own irrelevance.

I think we get attacked for standing up for others precisely because doing so opens an avenue for change, and change threatens the status quo and those in positions of power.

I look at my family completely differently from people who have an obsession with the gender of a child. I think, “I have three young, curious people in my life, and they can be whoever they want to be.”

I wish it didn’t take having daughters for men to realize that this is their struggle, too. It should be enough that we are all human and we should want equality.

But, as Martellus drew in his cartoon, no one says, “Stick to sports” when you are using your spare time to sell McDonald’s. Only when you try to effect change.

YOU HAVE TO FORGIVE TO GROW

You have to be uncomfortable to grow.