Bend the knee.
Last Sunday was the five-year observance (can’t really call it an anniversary, can we?) of the death, murder, publicground ‘‘lynching’’ of George Floyd.
So last week I reflected. As many did. Reflected on the incident and the response. But, more important, on the nothing changed of it all. The racial hijacking of a movement and the reckoning of America wanting its country back.
Sports, if we take it back to May 2020, played a large role and had a lot to say during that cry toward freedom. Athletes and many of the organizations connected to sports had a voice. They sought change. Change, if we are sincere, mattered to them more than the Black lives that we all were fighting to have meaning.
Then the calm after the storm hit. Floyd’s murder, even with Derek Chauvin’s sentencing, moved further and further into our backgrounds. People got back to being who they were pre-2020. Humans got back to being inhuman. Sports got back to the business that is sports. America got back to being America.
Messaging disappeared. Emotions subdued. Black Lives Matter removed from courts and field visibility. DEI and woke and civil-rights initiatives be damned. Voices silenced.
All hamsters back on the wheel. We’ve got games to play. And play we did. Played we were.
Meanwhile, killings by police officers across the country rose from a little more than 1,000 in 2019 to around 1,200 in 2024. Police officers killed Black people in America at nearly three times the rate they killed whites, roughly at the same ‘‘balance’’ as before Floyd’s death. Prosecutions for the officers of those shootings have not changed during that same time period. Studies and data show that fewer than 2% of fatal police shootings led to indictments. Let alone other ways we have died during police engagements.
Then, we screamed. Today, we’re back to silence.
LeBron James, then, in the moment, asked openly on Instagram: ‘‘Do you understand NOW!!??!!?? Or is it still blurred to you??’’ They did. For a minute.
Colin Kaepernick, also on IG, made statement in the moment, saying, ‘‘When civility leads to death, revolting is the only logical reaction.’’ A then-16-year-old Coco Gauff gave a speech at a BLM rally in her hometown of Delray Beach, Florida, protesting for, as she said, ‘‘the same thing that [my grandmother] did 50-plus years ago.’’ Carmelo Anthony became the embodiment of a modern-day Black Panther. Megan Rapinoe continued to kneel after the ‘‘fad’’ was over. The WNBA walked around with impressioned bullet holes in their T-shirts.
Even NFL commish Roger Goodell admitted a few years later, ‘‘We, the National Football League, admit we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest. We, the National Football League, believe Black lives matter.”
Kumbaya. We wish.
The societal and political misinterpretation of the reaction and response to Floyd’s death has been at the least expected. According to a recent report from the Pew Research Center, 72% of U.S. adults today say the increased focus on race and racial inequality after Floyd’s killing did not lead to changes that improved the lives of Black people and 49% express doubt that Black people ever will have equal rights with white people, up from 39% in 2020.
The impassioned words of Dr. Valerie Williams-Goss — ‘‘We cannot expect Black people to change society’s racist attitudes or stop the police from killing innocent Black people. How can we expect the victims of these crimes or their communities to do it alone? If white society does not take a stand, it will not get done. White people need to step up, show outrage at the violence and support the Black community that offers the world so much. We need to go to our leaders, connect with our white constituents and push for change. We need to be on the front lines. While it is a ‘Black issue’ to people of color based on the impact, it is not an issue for Black people to change on their own. It is not up to the families of innocent people of color who are murdered to fight this battle. It is up to the rest of us. Instead of saying how bad we feel, we need to do something’’ — still ring hollow.
Five years later, change is running in the opposite direction. America hijacked the assignment — or let’s say it ‘‘allowed’’ the assignment to be hijacked. Sports is quiet now. Proof that ‘‘shut up and dribble’’ rules everything around us. Bubbles burst, as they all do.
Five years ago, we used sports as central to our fight against inequity and injustice. What we needed to do was make sustainability as much a priority as removing Confederate statues. I used the words ‘‘hijacked’’ in this column three times for reason. Because that’s what terrorists do. Especially when it comes to movements that use mirrors instead of guns or politics.
In Kaepernick’s RIP George Floyd Instagram post, he wrote: ‘‘The cries for peace will rain down, and when they do, they will land on deaf ears.’’ Love or hate him, agree with or choose to misunderstand him, one thing should be bipartisan about those words back then: The man knew.