Things That Make White People Uncomfortable

by Michael Bennett

We talked and realized that it’s not just a problem with college football; it starts when we’re young, when our parents push us in sports but don’t let us grow as individuals. We’re just walking around for years with no idea who we are. The same friend told me, “I’m thirty-two years old, bro, and I don’t know what the fuck I like to eat.”

College is supposed to be about intellectual and social growth, but when you play football, they don’t want you to grow.

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. It sounds like a healthy marriage. It sounds like commitment. It sounds like dedication. It sounds like passion. It sounds like everything worth rising out of bed for. 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 believe that sports has a role in changing society, from youth leagues to the pros. If nothing else, sports offers us a platform, both culturally and financially, to try to effect the kind of change that can transform entire communities and even shake up the world.

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.