Things That Make White People Uncomfortable

by Michael Bennett

It reminded me of the Dred Scott case: you’re property, so you don’t have the ability to be a person first. It sends a terrible message to young people: that your employer doesn’t see you as a human being; they see you as a piece of property. We have every right, according to our union and according to the freedoms we are supposed to be honoring, to use that space to do what we like.

Whether I die tomorrow or in sixty years, if the only things about me that people talk about are the Pro Bowls and the Super Bowl appearances, I will have failed. I want my legacy to be what I did in the community and the positive changes this work might have created in people’s lives. I want people to know that I was a man of my word, someone who followed through; someone who didn’t just talk it but walked it. Records are made to be broken, but the legacy you leave can’t be broken because it’s the truth.

After that, we moved our asses to Texas. You know it’s bad where you’re living when you’re worried about guns and see Texas as a safe alternative.

Lololololol

Before Trayvon Martin’s murder brought it into some white people’s consciousness, Black families have always known, as my mom knew, that if I looked like I was in the wrong neighborhood, or if there were a case of mistaken identity, I could be put down for the crime of walking while Black.

I saw Black leaders running around, asking for justice again, for another tragedy of a slain Black man. It felt like nothing had changed from Emmett Till’s day. It felt like we were being hunted and trophied, to be mounted on someone’s wall. I have never admitted this before, but I was scared to walk home at night by myself out of fear that I could be next. For a long while, every time a pickup truck rumbled around the corner, my breath caught in my chest. This was Texas, so pickups were everywhere, which meant that for a while my heart just raced nonstop.

That work is done without the NFL having to pay a dime. To make us into brands, they have to try to break us from being individuals or rebels. It’s a sensory deprivation project. They move us, mostly, to small country towns or isolated campuses. They treat us like it’s their job to “civilize” us, to change who we are. They want these schools to be like Get Out, if it were a sports movie, and we’re handed a football before we enter the Sunken Place.

Holy shit

I thought it would be like a job interview with a Fortune 500 company, but then I walked into a room filled with a lot of older men, where it felt like Bill Cosby was trying to get me to drink a special cocktail. They gawked at me in a way I’d never been stared at in my life. I finally knew what it felt like to be objectified, the way so many women are. It was also clearly on me to impress them, to act like I was cool with the poking and prodding. I felt like they were Kardashians and I was an NBA starting center.

Your product is you, so you have to look out for what people don’t want you to say. You have no freedom to just be. You are not allowed to be successful unless you wear the mask.

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.

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.

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.

People love you because of the way you jump and run; when you lose it, you no longer mean anything. That’s the hardest part: to be so alienated from your own body that you look at your physique, feel in your bones that it can’t do what it was once able to do, and know that your value and worth in the eyes of others will be diminished. The question is, how can we free ourselves from having our physical ability be the final word on how we see ourselves?

We understand that because of technology and social media, we can play a role in shaping this future. Ten of us in a room can reach fifty million people. That’s power, and we take it seriously. We also know that this is why the big sports media networks, as well as the NFL, police and scrutinize our platform so hard. They want us to be brands, not men. They want us to keep it to sports—and I get it. It’s not us buying the season tickets or the luxury boxes, but at the end of the day, we’re human beings. We’re not just equipment.

The essence of sports is beautiful: people coming together to achieve a goal regardless of their color, race, or religion. Everything about that sounds beautiful.

But it gets destroyed by society, by valuing wealth over play; by professionalizing sports for our kids, which sets them against each other even when they are on the same team; by having locker rooms where people can’t be themselves; by caring about winning more than the process of how you get there. The glorification of those kinds of values is what makes sports toxic.

I’ve announced that every endorsement I get will now go to charity, specifically channeled into underserved communities of color. I didn’t go public with this for extra attention. I wanted to spotlight it as a way to encourage the companies that want me to endorse their products to match what I’m doing.

Everybody wants you to be who they want you to be, but then you’re not you anymore.

In the same way, if I don’t like something that’s going on in society, I’ll let you know or I’ll try to do something about it. That’s not just how you find your voice. It’s how you keep from losing your mind. It’s easy to commit suicide, quickly or in slow motion, if you look in the mirror every single day and don’t know who the hell you are.

truth. As a Black man in public view, the margin for error is next to nothing. If I were a white man, I could make a mistake. You can be someone who brags about sexually assaulting women on videotape like Trump and still become the president. I can’t drink and drive—not that I would. I can’t be riding around with guns. I can’t be caught smoking weed in my car, even though I live in a city where cannabis is legal and sold over the counter. I cannot do any of those things. Not only because it would it gut my family. It would define me forever. No matter how much work I do, no matter the message, I’d be discredited. Everything I have ever done, every bit of the work with the foundation, with food, with STEM programs, would be discredited if not destroyed. It’s a test. But I like tests like that. I have to walk the talk. I have to transcend the human temptation to do things to blow up my life.

It’s not a hip-hop catch phrase or even a slur that some coward spray-paints on a wall. It’s a word of violence. It’s a word they say when they raise their torches and rally around statues of slave owners. It’s a word that has one aim: to dehumanize us and turn us into something less than a person so we are easier to kill, easier to drag behind a truck, easier to dump into a lake, easier to shoot in the back. That’s all it is. It’s a word that erodes our humanity, a means to an end, and that end is our death.

To me this is what Black Lives Matter is all about—a movement to claim our humanity in a country that would deny it.

It’s about resisting the “New Jim Crow,” a social system that has created a parallel, separate, and unequal America, defined by mass incarceration, unemployment, and substandard food and education.

It showed me that because equality doesn’t live in this country, no matter how much money you make, what job title you have, or how much you give, when you are seen as a “nigga,” you will be treated that way.

I think their real reason for calling me a liar is that their whole worldview is built around the idea that racism in policing doesn’t exist.

This is about social injustice: the people that are supposed to protect them.”

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.

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.

After Trump attacked us, polls showed that even more people understood that the protests were about racism and police brutality, not about the president, free speech, or the flag. Even when others tried to coopt it, our message came through, and I think that’s because we were so disciplined. An organization could get out these messages even more effectively.