Contradictions in Capitalism 101
With the Boston Celtics' Enes Kanter
Dear readers,
Happy Halloween to all! Here at Southpaw, we’re celebrating by boycotting the most ghoulish World Series of all time—a truly grotesque showdown between the Houston Astros and the Atlanta Braves. As it turns out, the Baseball Gods didn’t like MLB’s decision to move the All-Star Game out of Atlanta earlier this year, so they really decided to troll the libs this time ‘round by giving the series to teams from two of the states with most restrictive voting rights laws in the country (and one with a racist mascot!). Here’s Donald Trump doing the chop:
With the big guy out of office, it’s easy to forget his strange inability to move anything like a real person. While everyone else here is chopping down, Trump is sort of just sticking his hand forward and raising his elbow. He cannot even do the racist thing right.
In celebration of the NBA season being back in full swing (if there’s any more indication that baseball is in a rough place right now, compare the joylessness of the Trump video to Knicks fans losing their mind), we wrote about protest, approved and not-so-approved.
-Ian and Calder
Enes Kanter is Exposing the Limits of the NBA’s Activism. They Can’t Seem to Figure Out How to Respond.
Over the past year, the National Basketball Association has displayed a newfound tolerance for social justice activism within the league. Following the police murder of George Floyd, the league gave its players fairly broad leeway to show their support for the Black Lives Matter Movement, and in May, the league even took the largely unprecedented step of formally endorsing a police reform bill that was in front of Congress. (The bill, like so many of the Democrats’ legislative ambitions, eventually died in the Senate.) One issue, however, has remained as the NBA’s proverbial third rail: China, and more specifically its human rights abuses and suppression of pro-democracy movements in Hong Hong and elsewhere.
But this week, Boston Celtics center Enes Kanter defied the league’s de facto gag order on China and grabbed its third rail with both hands. The most surprising thing about the whole situation is that somehow, after a week of unapologetically thumbing his nose at both the league and one of the world’s biggest superpowers, Kanter is still standing.
Kanter’s protest started a little over a week ago, when the Turkish baller posted a video on social media calling the PRC’s president Xi Jinping a “brutal dictator” and denouncing the PRC’s occupation of Tibet. Two days later, Kanter, who is Muslim, posted a new video focused on the Uygher genocide and the PRC’s forced labor camps in the Xinjiang region of China. Kanter did not mince words. “Right now as I speak this message, torture, rape, forced abortions, sterilizations, family separations, arbitrary detentions, concentration camps, political reeducation, forced labor,” said Kanter in the video. “This is all happening right now to more than 1.8 million Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region in northwestern China.”
A few days after that, Kanter posted yet another video, this one targeting Nike and its owner Phil Knight for using cotton produced by Uygher forced labor. In a post accompanying his Nike video, Kanter cheekily invited Knight as well as LeBron James and Michael Jordan—two of Nike’s biggest spokespeople in the U.S.—to travel with him to the Xinjiang region to see the forced labor camps firsthand.
Kanter hasn’t limited his provocations to the digital world, either. Following each post, he has taken the court for the Celtics wearing a pair of custom high-tops adorned with a brash message related to his latest post. He really went for it after his second post, with “FREE CHINA” on one side of the kicks and a cartoon of Kanter wielding the Xi’s decapitated head rendered as the Winnie the Pooh cartoon (“#XinnieThePooh,” Kanter tagged his post).
First thing’s first, we have to hand it to Kanter: he’s being transgressive and clever (not exactly the adjectives most commonly associated with male professional athletes). For some context, Kanter is no stranger to political controversy. Since 2019, the Turkish government has issued 10 separate warrants for Kanter’s arrest, citing his connections to a dissident cleric who was involved in a 2016 coup attempt in Turkey. Kanter, who has been an outspoken critic of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has made a habit of mocking these arrest warrants online. But for all of his flaunting, he can’t go back to Turkey for fear of arrest. He’s given up something very real in order to speak his mind.
And although Kanter hasn’t made much of an impact on the court for the Celtics this year—he has played a total of five minutes and recorded a single basket— his protest has sent shock waves around the world. On Wednesday, after Kanter released his first video about Tibet, the Chinese streaming giant Tencent pulled all Celtics games from its service, effectively blacking the team out across all of mainland China. In a statement made that same day, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry summarily denounced Kanter’s comments, claiming that his remarks were “not even worth refuting.” In a response to an email about the PRC’s statement, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department (sort of) came to Kanter’s defense, writing “The United States is deeply concerned by the PRC's actions against the National Basketball Association for statements one player made regarding Tibet.” Not bad for a day’s worth of posting.
The most devious thing about Kanter’s current campaign, though, is that it seems almost tailor-made to put the NBA in an impossible political position. The league, which has built its financial future around breaking into the tremendously lucrative Chinese market, has avoided the topic of China’s human rights abuses like the plague. In the most notorious example, the league denounced then-Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey for tweeting a simple statement in support of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. In the aftermath of their crackdown on Morey, the league earned the ire of political figures ranging from AOC to Ted Cruz.
Of course, the PRC isn’t likely to pull out of Tibet or shut down its forced labor camps in Xinjiang because one NBA player told them to, but that’s not really the point. Kanter’s protest is nominally directed toward Xi Jinping and the Chinese leadership, but his real targets are those in the NBA who choose to speak out against brutality and exploitation only when it doesn’t harm their bottom lines—executives, owners, and some of the league’s biggest stars. Compare the NBA’s reaction to Morey’s pro-democracy tweets to its reaction thus far to Kanter’s videos. Kanter has, so far, avoided any real punishment. The reason is that he’s put the NBA in an untenable position: they can’t side against Kanter without exposing their newfound tolerance for social justice advocacy as a total sham, and they can’t support Kanter without pissing off their largest consumer market in the world.
Instead, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver is holed up somewhere in New York, sitting on his hands and biting his tongue. And if that’s how this story ends, Kanter can consider his campaign a success. He’s exposed the contradictions inherent in social justice-oriented capitalism. He can now go back to working on his defense.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . the stubborn persistence of “the tomahawk chop”? “The ‘tomahawk chop’ lives on in Atlanta. Now it has the World Series spotlight,” by Adam Kilgore and Chelsea Janes in The Washington Post (October 28, 2021).
. . . the NAACP’s call for athletes to avoid Texas over voting rights restrictions? “NAACP calls on pro athletes to not sign with Texas teams,” by Noah Garfinkle in Axios (October 28, 2021).
. . . the Chicago Blackhawks’ failed attempt to cover up sexual assault allegations within the organization? “With Accusations of Abuse, Kyle Beach Forces N.H.L. to Confront Its Failings,” by Kevin Draper in The New York Times (October 29, 2021).
. . . whether we’re asking the wrong things of sports executives? “Sports commissioners are businessmen, not moral compasses. Stop hoping for more,” by Candace Buckner in The Washington Post (October 28, 2021).
. . . the latest on negotiations between the NWSL and its players? “NWSL Players Association announces NWSL agreement over list of demands,” by Jeff Carlise for ESPN (October 29, 2021).