This Is What Dehumanization Looks Like

[Content Note: Racism; silencing; dehumanization.]

I don't know shit about sports, and I don't follow sports. What falls onto my radar about sports tends to be athletes doing cool things, athletes doing terrible things, and athletes who have said something controversial.

I don't pay a lot of attention to all the rest of it—which teams are vying for whatever title, deflated ball scandals, etc.

Which is, perhaps, why the juxtaposition of two of the most recent sports stories that have penetrated my awareness in more than the most peripheral way is so stark.

Last month: LeBron James and other NBA players wearing "I Can't Breathe" shirts [video may autoplay at link], for which they were scolded by NBA Commissioner Adam Silver for not adhering to "on-court attire rules," though they were ultimately not fined.

This month: Marshawn Lynch has been fined and threatened by the NFL for not participating in press conferences on command.


People who care about the human beings who play professional sports, especially the people of color who play professional sports, have long written about the exploitation of athletes—the way they are used and abused and thrown away, the way their long-term health is devastatingly compromised for short-term performance, the way opportunistic money managers take advantage of them and often straight-up steal from them.

The way they are treated like owned property, rather than people—which is further complicated by the racial disparities among the players of the biggest money-making sports (basketball, football, and baseball) and among the coaches and owners.

And here, in the juxtaposition of these two stories, we see keenly how this sense of ownership plays out: Players are coerced to speak on demand, and punished if they don't, and they are silenced if the words they speak are not what the team owners and league administrators want them to say.

Naturally, I am meant to understand, as legions of fans are eager to 'splain at me, that players sign contracts promising to abide certain rules and guarantee some level of media participation.

But maybe those contracts are garbage. Employment contracts that dehumanize people are not good contracts—whether they are for work that pays minimum wage or work that pays millions of dollars a year.

And let us be clear: Asserting the right of control over an employee's speech, over when zie talks and what zie says, is dehumanizing in the most literal sense. It asks a person, a player, to set aside parts of hir humanity in deference to a brand.

All of which is a red herring, anyway: No one was fining white NFL prayer-posturer Tim Tebow for public demonstrations of his Christianity—which, in a nation whose politics are so inextricably tied to religion, is as sure a political statement as "I Can't Breathe."

If Tim Tebow is allowed to use his playing field to petition for his life in the hereafter, surely LeBron James should be allowed to use his to petition for his life in the here and now.

Sometimes I hear people talking about how professional athletes in the Big Sports are wildly overpaid. They do make a hell of a lot of money, and it's certainly tempting to fault athletes with multimillion dollar contracts for making such exorbitant sums while many public school teachers are scraping to get by.

But it isn't athletes' fault that our cultural priorities are fucked up. And, frankly, when I think about all that money they make, I think it still ain't enough to be treated like the wholly owned property of rich white men who don't give a fuck about their humanity, beyond what their human bodies can do to entertain the rest of us.