Having seen a lot of poverty in the United States, I’d say that the difference between here and Haiti is that the opportunity for a better life in Haiti seems so much more narrow. But there are parts of the United States where conditions are similar; we just choose not to see them. Last year I went to South Dakota to run a football and health clinic for the Lakota Sioux tribe. As in Haiti, I saw poverty, pain, and an absence of investment. But also as in Haiti, I saw resilience, a culture of family, and a deep belief in the power of spirituality. It’s humbling to see that kind of resilience and spirit alongside the loss they have suffered and continue to suffer. The past isn’t past for the Sioux. The people I was with are fifty minutes away from any access to fresh food. They live on the Badlands, which is literally bad land: land that can barely grow crops. These people have an incredibly close relationship with the earth, yet their lives are built around processed foods. I saw dangerously overweight kids. It was impossible to avoid the contrast: poverty and malnutrition in Haiti mean starvation, while poverty and malnutrition here mean early-onset diabetes and obesity.
It’s also near impossible for them to find banks to deposit their money. They are isolated from every potential lifeline to hope, but their fighting spirit remains. The Sioux spoke to me about the confidence they feel from the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock. It was a movement to keep their earth unpolluted, and they faced down tanks and tear gas to do it. Win or lose that fight, the confidence they gained from waging it isn’t going away anytime soon.
I see all this pain, and strength in the face of it, and I wrestle with how to increase my philanthropy and also build the bridge I described, between philanthropy and activism. I’ve announced that every endorsement I get will now go to charity, specifically channeled into underserved communities of color. I didn’t go public with this for extra attention. I wanted to spotlight it as a way to encourage the companies that want me to endorse their products to match what I’m doing. This has been far more difficult to accomplish than I thought it would be. I’ve sat across the table from company reps to talk about improving what they give back, and they look at me like they’re malfunctioning robots, saying, “Does not compute.” It has shown me that even companies that talk a good game aren’t really invested in communities. Too many will do just enough for public relations and then shut the door. The only difference between them and Enron is smarter accountants.
The goal is to pressure companies to make them accountable for how they operate, and how they profit, in our communities. You look at some of the grocery stores and businesses in Black neighborhoods. You look at what Chris Rock calls “the Black mall” and compare it to “the white mall,” and you see the gap. As Rock says, “There ain’t nothing in the Black mall. Nothing in the Black mall but sneakers and baby clothes.”
Much of that is because a lot of white communities have a business association to invest in their neighborhoods, parks, and infrastructure. Look at a suburban kids’ football team, and that team has ten logos all over the uniforms. When you look at Black communities it’s different. All the screaming faces on cable news were so critical of the people in Ferguson for “tearing down their community”—when in reality it’s not truly their community because most of the businesses aren’t community-owned, and the businesses that are there don’t give back. They are taking money out of the community. They’re extracting the wealth, little different from the situation in Haiti. It’s the private business version of the police writing up excessive parking tickets in Ferguson.
As athletes, we have a tremendous untapped power to hold accountable the Fortune 500 companies that sign us to endorsements. Instead of our signing nine-figure deals with Nike, imagine if we started from the point that Nike owes our community money: a $200 million trust aimed at—to use just one example—eliminating food deserts in the United States, and then we work with them on administering it. If athletes came together to demand these kinds of investments in exchange for our sponsorship, it would make all the difference in the world. I think about the number of community gardens that could be thriving with that kind of investment.
The problem is that we might be the face of Nike or Adidas, but we exert no say, and don’t try to exert any say, in the direction of the company beyond what colors or design we want on our products. We are just an extension of the Nike brand.
That’s why it makes me so uncomfortable when people on the business and accounting side of my life ask, “How are you building your personal brand?” It rings so ugly in my ears because a brand is a product. A brand is a thing. A brand is something to be sold. It tries to define who a person is by what they are selling. The brand becomes a symbol in their mind of who you are, leasing out your integrity so it is associated with their product. You are supposed to get some shine from their image as well, like, “Oooh! That person is a Nike guy.” But sneaker companies make their shoes in China, pay low wages, and then lie about how people there are lucky to make a dollar a day. There is no integrity
