To put it plainly, we have no power because we have no wealth. In greater Boston, as of 2015, the average household wealth (assets, not income) was $247,500 for whites; $8 for Blacks. That’s not a misprint: eight dollars. If that doesn’t make you “uncomfortable,” if that doesn’t make you feel like we need to figure out what our world is doing wrong, you might need to check your pulse.
I also support the Black Lives Matter movement because the idea that white lives matter is a given. We see it from the faces on our money to the faces on Mount Rushmore. White lives matter so much that, as I write these words, there is a bloody fight to take down monuments to slavers who fought the Civil War to keep my people in chains. They are held up as heroes. There are three times as many monuments to Confederates in the US Capitol Building as there are to Black elected officials. If we mattered to this country, how would that even be possible?
It’s so important for me to speak out on Black Lives Matter because this movement has the potential to break through the apathy that this country has developed toward our existence. There are white people, tired of feeling guilty about slavery and racism, who direct that anger at us for fighting for equality instead of directing that anger at their own damn ancestors. They should be the ones tearing down these monuments. But for all of us, it has to go beyond statues. Black lives will matter when we back up the symbolism of tearing down a celebration of our past oppression with a true reckoning of this country’s history. I mean, the fact that I don’t know my actual honest-to-god last name blows my mind. That’s some crazy shit. Someone could be walking right past me and be my cousin, and I wouldn’t even know it. That’s how deep-rooted this is! Once we start to get to know each other’s history—all of our history—it breaks down the walls between us, because we understand that a person might be different from us, but their difference is cool. It’s something we can learn from, not something to fear.
We have to fight the numbness. People turn on the TV and see another Black person murdered, and they’re like, “What are the Kardashians doing?” We all need to say, “This shit needs to change.” If we can just get a small number of people—a small number of white people and white athletes—to shift from apathy to action, just like my teammate Justin Britt, we can change the world. That’s the kind of thinking I try to instill when I talk to kids who aren’t Black. Don’t feel guilty. Do something to make it better. Help us heal by standing—or sitting—alongside us.
But for Black lives to matter, Black people also need to know our own history. Kids are always surprised when I tell them about all the things that we have designed, written, and created, and it changes their whole perspective. I want them to know that the 3-D special effects technology used in more and more movies today was created by people who look like us. That is a mission for me: to help young people know that we have been more than athletes and entertainers. I try to make sure that I read stories to my girls about African American inventors, historians, and scientists. I need to do it because I’ve learned, when dealing with the schools my kids attend, that they’re not taught these things.
The sports world, I would argue, has a special responsibility to take a stand on Black Lives Matter. I’m for Black Lives Matter because of the memory of athletes past. Jesse Owens won four gold medals in 1936 yet was not invited back to the Olympics as any kind of honored guest until 1968. And he was invited back because the International Olympic Committee wanted him to go into the track and field locker room to tell John Carlos and Tommie Smith not to do anything out on the medal stand. What does it tell you that there was no room for Jesse Owens at the Olympics? It tells me that they didn’t give a fuck, and his Black life did not really matter even though he helped define the modern Olympics. People have said to me that, as an athlete, given the money and fame that come with this life, I have no business speaking out. But it’s not about me as an individual. If we as a people do not have fairness and equality, then we need to keep standing up, and when that anthem plays I am going to continue to sit. It’s like Jackie Robinson said: “People tell me I’ve got it made because I have fame and some money in my pocket, but I’m concerned with the mass of people.” That’s my concern as well.
I’m also for Black Lives Matter because, as I said at the start of this book, I’ll be a football player for just a few more years, but I’ll be Black forever. When I’m driving with my family down the street in a nice car in a nice neighborhood and the police see us, they don’t see Michael Bennett the college graduate, the husband, or the loving father. They don’t see the Michael Bennett who is wrapped around the fingers of his baby girls. They don’t see any of that. They immediately see a Black Man who could possibly be dangerous and possibly be a suspect, and who they should think about pulling over. Many people don’t understand that.
My mortality in the face of police violence became a reality for me on the night of August 26, 2017. I had flown to Las Vegas with Cliff to see the Floyd Mayweather–Conor McGregor fight. I am a homebody, and you will rarely see
