Letter: Football players must be allowed the same right to protest as the rest of us

To Dr. Glenn Mollette,

In your letter on Oct. 2, you said that if we allow players to protest during the national anthem (which is an inalienable right granted to all Americans by the First Amendment), that there is nothing stopping them from throwing games in protest, as well as other more dramatic forms of protest.

This is a traditional slippery slope fallacy, in which it is argued that if A is allowed to happen, B-Y will also happen until finally Z, the absolute worst situation imaginable, is reached (I stress “imaginable” here). However, this kind of fallacious and illogical argument shifts the attention away from the issue at hand: protesting the police brutality and institutionalized racism that is flowing freely in the undercurrent of our society. What you propose is ignoring politics, ignoring the inequality and targeted racism that is a reality for many of our fellow Americans here and now, in favor of a good time. If you truly “totally support free speech,” your argument might be a little different.

Arguments such as these devalue the inalienable rights of United States citizens. All Americans, regardless of race, economic status, gender, orientation or anything else, have the right to protest. This includes protests in a public forum or protests at work. The idea of a protest is to bring issues to national attention.

Privately owned teams and their owners have certain rights to stifle protests from players, but what this comes down to is our values as inhabitants of the United States. If owners suppress the voices of some Americans (the players they employ) through threats of withholding pay or terminating contracts, they suppress the voices of ALL Americans. Let’s call this what it is. What is proposed is reminiscent of slavery — what is being suggested is that players must answer to their owners (not ignoring the irony of this statement) and do not have the ability or the right to act on their own volition, whether in protest or not. As members of a united society who are granted the same equal rights by the same constitutional documents, we have to understand that if one of our fellows is silenced, we all are.

Arguments like these also fail to acknowledge the reality that the NFL and most other U.S. sporting organizations follow the same pattern of the Roman concept of “bread and circuses.” In ancient Roman society, the patricians (the ruling/governing class) provided the plebeians (lower classes) a palliative in the form of the gratuitously violent Coliseum games, where they were provided with food and all the gore they could stomach. While the plebeians were distracted with their government-funded food and entertainment, that same government was free to make all of the changes to policy that they wanted. Needless to say, this pattern of behavior worked. But you know what happened to Rome, right?

The NFL (and other television programming) isn’t provided by the government necessarily, but it does provide the American public with a superficial appeasement: a space to relax and tailgate, drink a 44-ounce Bud Light and “enjoy athletic competition, a hot dog and a fun time” with buddies after a long week at work. But many of the people participating in this behavior are inherently privileged in that. Some don’t have the ability to watch the games in person (because they are outrageously expensive), or even on television. Some fans can’t afford team merchandise (also outrageously expensive) or the costs of tailgating, barbecuing or throwing an extravagant Super Bowl party. Even the luxury of walking into a grocery store with the ability to buy all of the food you need or want is not a luxury enjoyed by all Americans. What these protests seek to accomplish is to give voice to the voiceless.

Some fans and players, while they love their country and their fellow Americans, are speaking out against the injustice and inequality that many of our brothers and sisters face every day. Politics belongs here as much as in any other space in our society — in this space, they are heard and seen around the world, while most protests are ignored or dismissed as “fake news.” Politics, or the exercising of our rights as Americans, belongs in all public spaces and acts as our defense against tyrannical, anti-American values.

When you say that sporting events are a place to escape, you are absolutely correct. Indeed, they are a place of refuge from the brutal, violent, racist, discriminatory nature of our political sphere. They are a distraction from the injustice we need to be fighting to end and from the rights we need to be fighting to protect — and they shouldn’t be.

Tori Cárdenas

Student