I went up on stage, and teachers and students started asking me questions, thanking me for being there but also challenging me to think about what I was doing and whether I could do more. It was a life-changing moment for me, and I just laid it all out, pledging my support and explaining what some of the Seahawks players could do to support the efforts of this amazing community. I figured that no matter what I said, somebody was going to find something wrong with it. So I might as well be authentic and honest.
People thought Black Lives Matter was a fad or that it was going to die out. But I hope we realize that this goes way beyond just a hashtag. To me, this movement is not only about responding to police violence. Not at all. I see Black and brown people committing suicide. I see white people dying of opioid overdoses. It seems like people don’t want to live anymore. People don’t want to be in a world where they feel they’re not valued. They’re checking out early. They’re thinking, “Why live through this?” We need to give each other hope. Imagine you are walking down the street and see someone getting beaten in a shadowy corner. You immediately ask yourself, Should I help, or do I mind my own business? Do I choose silence or do I take action? That’s how I view everything. Society says that you shouldn’t get involved because it’s not your problem, but your conscience tells you that you should speak up because you know, deep down inside, that this is the right thing to do. That’s the battle we have with ourselves every day. Most people lose that battle because they think, “I don’t want to risk looking stupid or getting hurt or wasting my time. Better to just send a tweet.” But we need to do more than that, and we need to reach out beyond where it’s comfortable.
When Black people talk about Black people’s problems, the problems never get solved. I want to push white people to think about their roles, to think about how these issues affect them also, to think about how when we come together we can confront common ills that exist in all communities, Black, brown, and white, that have been left behind. We could come together or we could blame each other. But we’re not going to come together without trust, and I don’t see trust being built until white people say, “Black lives need to matter as much as white ones.”
When a white person gets involved, other people take notice—the people whose kids aren’t being killed in the streets. That’s when we will see change. This is something for all of us to organize around, wherever we stand. Where I stand happens to be in the National Football League. And when white players step up and speak out, it changes the whole dynamic. It’s been so gratifying to see white players begin to move in that direction. When Justin Britt, Chris Long, and Sean DeValve got involved in the anthem actions, it brought an entire white audience into the dialogue and shifted the conversation, even if only a little bit. That solidarity, as it grows, can change the world.
INTERSECTIONALITY ALSO MATTERS
You’re not designed to thrive by yourself.
—Maya Moore
Solidarity is the idea that we can organize around a common goal—uniting across our differences in skin color or gender or sexuality—to make a better world for future generations. It’s why I stood with the Palestinian people. It’s why I stood with the Women’s Strike for Equality, and it’s why I wore a Bernie Sanders hat around NFL locker rooms. But we will get to all that.
Intersectionality is related, but different: it’s understanding that an individual can experience multiple types of injustice, which we need to acknowledge, and that although our struggles may be different, they overlap or intersect. Intersectionality clicked for me when I thought about Charleena Lyles. She was killed because of racism, no doubt, but her life as a Black woman—not just as a Black person—is critical to understanding her death. Charleena had suffered sexual assault and violence, and she called the police in the first place because she was worried that an abusive former lover was coming back to hurt her. I understand what it’s like to be Black and feel like your life is in the hands of a police officer pointing a weapon at you. But combining that with the fear of violence because you’re a woman is something I had never experienced. I realized that I needed to understand the impact of both the racism and the sexism in not only her death but also how the incident played out afterward, when she was painted as an unfit mother—as if that justified killing her in front of her children. This understanding of how multiple oppressions can overlap is the politics of intersectionality.
Years before I knew what intersectionality was, before I even knew the word existed, I
