The Black Lives Matter protests continue to influence the spectacle and the business of pro sports.
With many of the world's top leagues now back in action, including the NBA, football and the NFL, many sporting authorities are accommodating athletes who want to campaign for social change.
The International Olympic Committee is also in the process of reviewing its January ban on political protest gestures - including kneeling, hand signs and the wearing or holding of placards or armbands - before the rescheduled Tokyo Games take place in 2021.
Colin Kaepernick #7 and Eric Reid #35 of the San Francisco 49ers kneel in protest during the national anthem prior to playing the Los Angeles Rams in their NFL game 2016. Photo: AFP
Sociologist Professor Douglas Hartmann, the chair of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, tells Jim Mora the Black Lives Matter solidarity protests in sport reflect a change since the 1960s and even since last year.
He is the author of Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete: The 1968 Olympic Protests and Their Aftermath.
The NFL season kicked off last week with some teams staying off the field during the national anthem, athletes taking to their knees, others standing arm-to-arm and during one game all players from both teams took a knee after the ball was kicked down the field. Hartmann says the actions were a huge sea change in sport.
On May, 2018, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and all NFL team owners, except for two that abstained from voting, approved a new policy requiring all players to stand during the national anthem, or be given the option to stay in the locker room during the national anthem.
The policy also stated that players who protested the anthem while on the field would be subject to disciplinary actions and that teams as a whole would be punished too.
San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick was targeted, in particular, by media and pro-Trump supporters for his protest stance. The protests Hartmann says, continue to force issues of police brutality and social justice into the public spotlight.
“They’re definitely forcing us to continue to have difficult conversations about difficult problems and what kind of changes will need to be considering.”
Other athletes have been vocal too.
Naomi Osaka won the US Open this month, wearing masks to the court in each of her seven victories displaying the names of black people killed by police.
She also initially declined to play her semi-final match in the Western & Southern Open the week before the US Open, in solidarity with athletes in professional basketball, baseball and soccer who were protesting systemic racism and police brutality and killings.
How effective these protests will be in forcing societal change in terms of racism and policing is an open question, but the protests had definitely forced a cultural change within the sporting establishment, he says.
There are cultural and political differences between black athletes who famously raised a clenched fist at the 1968 Olympics in solidarity with the civil rights movement, and those athletes engaging in protest now.
During their medal ceremony in the Olympic Stadium in Mexico City on October 16, 1968, two African-American athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, each raised a black-gloved fist during the playing of the US national anthem. The men were seen as pariahs in mainstream America, supporters of the radical Black Panther Party.
“The IOC was immediately extremely upset about this, a violation as they saw it, of prohibitions against politics in sports and demonstrations in the Olympic context and they began putting immediate pressure on the United States Olympic Committee to expel Smith and Carlos from the Olympic Village and send them home.”
The athletes’ credentials were eventually withdrawn and the pair were forced to return home.
“I think a lot of folks in the US Olympic Committee were not supportive of Smith and Carlos to begin with,” he says.
Naomi Osaka Photo: AFP
However, those athletes expressing support for Black Lives Matter enjoy much broader support.
“These actions and conversations, not only from athletes but even the extent to which leagues and organisations are being part of them [protests] is unbelievable. Smith and Carlos were really outliers in 1968 in their speaking out and were treated quite harshly across the athletic establishment.
“That’s a big change in itself, the extent to which protest, dissension, critical thinking is allowed and even encouraged.”
The way media report such protests has also changed too. Coverage of Smith and Carlos was non-existent or overtly hostile and critical, following the orthodoxy that sport and politics would never be mixed. Now social context is recognised as part of the story.
Douglas Hartmann Photo: supplied
“What we see now is really different, where sports reporters are more and more inclined to think their job is to not only cover sport on the field but the issues in society that athletes are talking about, caring about and acting on.”
The issue of sports and politics even within the Olympic Games has never been strictly non-political, even though its committee may disagree. Apartheid South Africa, for example, was expelled from the event during the 1960s.
South Africa first entered the Winter Olympics in 1960, but was not invited to the 1964 Games, and its 1968 invitation was withdrawn when other teams threatened to withdraw.
The South African Olympic and National Games Association was expelled from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1970.
The country returned at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona.
“I think what we need to put in context here and understand here is what counts as political. So, the IOC has a long history of not wanting to be political, but also wanting to claim to be progressive on certain social issues.
“But in 1968, they saw what Smith and Carlos were doing as political because it was at odds with the US government and country… The IOC is built on nationalism, they think of nation states as critical units in the world and Olympic ceremony is built on nationalism as a natural, organic phenomenon.”
The way around the ideological dilemma was to define the anti-Apartheid movement as a moral one, as opposed to political, championing universal values of human rights and anti-discrimination, he says.
"There's semantics involved here that the IOC is constantly and historically been involved with in terms of defining what is kind of political and what is demonstration and what's allowed and not allowed."
It remains to be seen whether the IOC will change its position over protest gestures in light of US sports bodies' realignment with popular cultural sentiment and Black Lives Matter protests.
