I said to Richard, “Bro, look at the system. We can take you to different neighborhoods, whether it’s in Ferguson or Houston or Baltimore, and all you have to do is look at schools to know that Black Lives do not matter.” I told him about my mom, who was a schoolteacher for more than twenty years. She came home from work every day pulling her hair out by the roots, because she knew there was a system keeping people down, and trying to work within that system can feel like shoveling sand in the damn ocean, or beating your head against a wall in the hopes that it might crack the façade, knowing you will just end up with a concussion. We went back and forth. I said that we have to look beyond the issue of “Black-on-Black” crime because segregation dramatically distorts those statistics. If I lived in an all-white neighborhood, the murderers would be white murderers. If I lived in an all-Mexican neighborhood, there would be Mexican-on-Mexican murder. These killings also track entirely by income. Michelle Alexander, the professor who wrote The New Jim Crow, published a study on the topic. Middle-class Black kids are not killing each other, because they’re thinking about their college applications.
It was a good discussion, in many ways a great discussion, because we had it publicly and then continued it in the locker room. We utilized our platform and also were able to expand the consciousness of our brotherhood. Both of those things matter. As for Richard, he was a leading voice in the 2017 off-season, speaking out for Kaepernick and speaking out for me after my experience in Las Vegas with the reality of racial profiling that we face.
My evolution toward supporting the Black Lives Matter movement and sitting for the anthem can also come down to three names: Trayvon, Ferguson, and Kaepernick. When Trayvon Martin was killed in Sanford, Florida, I was living with my family about a hundred miles away because I was playing in Tampa Bay. I remember hearing the news and being instantly stunned, knowing this would go national. He was seventeen years old, hunted down and killed for going out at halftime of the NBA All-Star Game to buy some iced tea and Skittles, and they wouldn’t even arrest his killer. I just sat back and thought: Damn. This young boy didn’t even get to experience the world. He didn’t really get to live or have his own family or know what it feels like to kiss your wife and tell her you’ll be back for dinner, or see his kids graduate from college. He’ll never be able to show his mom her new grandkids. That experience was taken.
It hit me and many across the country so hard. The white people who weren’t on right-wing talk radio trying to somehow make excuses for his death, as if wearing a hoodie should be a death sentence, were shocked, saying, “This still happens?” But Black people were saying, “Again? Another kid?” If any other race were losing kids the way Black families are losing kids, it would be a national emergency. If a white kid had been shot by some stalker pretending to be a police officer, and the shooter at first wasn’t even arrested and then was acquitted, everybody would have lost their minds. But too many people didn’t give a damn. They didn’t care that the killer—and I don’t say his name—was a vigilante, not a police officer. They didn’t care that he hunted down this young man even after a 911 dispatcher told him to stop. After Trayvon was brought to the morgue, they drug-tested him but not his killer. People didn’t care.
Then came the 2014 killing of Michael Brown by officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, which happened when I was back in Seattle. This was the first “social media death,” where the mourning was made all the more raw because Michael Brown’s body was left lying in the street for hours, and we all saw it live-streamed: the disrespecting of his corpse and the people crying, horrified that he was being treated worse than garbage. I remember seeing this and just thinking, Do I even want a Black son? That was going through my head. It breaks my heart to share that.
Then people fought back, made history, and launched this movement. When the Ferguson rebellion popped off, our locker room came together to talk about it as a team. We had to talk about it because footage of the fires and tear gas and police in a tank was on TV in the training room. It was everywhere. There were ten small discussions happening around different lockers, and as a leader, you have to know when to bring people together. Several of us were telling others on our team that Ferguson was familiar territory, that this was not new. There may be new technology, new phones, new ways to zap these images around the world in a heartbeat, and new military hardware being used by police. But it’s the same murders. It’s the same kids being targeted. It’s little different than in the 1960s. Hell, the classrooms in Ferguson probably still used textbooks from the 1960s. Some of us were shocked that this had happened in America. Others of us were jaded. But what we all had in common was trying to grasp why this was still happening in the twenty-first century, and how the country could see us as heroes on the field and as disposable off
