Is there ethical (sports) consumption under capitalism?

On Damar Hamlin and the responsibility of the consumer.

Dear readers,

Welcome back to Southpaw! We’re excited to start the new year with all of you. On that note, if you have any thoughts about what you’d like to see in the newsletter this year — topics covered, people interviewed, general ethos — feel free to let us know by leaving a comment or replying to this email. 

We wish we could begin with a happier edition, but the story dominating the sports world this week has been Damar Hamlin, who collapsed on Monday during a nationally televised football game. Happy reading. 

-Ian and Calder

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Will the “ethical consumption” debate come for football?

The possibility of life-threatening violence hangs over every football game, but rarely does it intrude so directly into the run of play as it did this past Monday. For nine minutes, Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin lay motionless on the field at Cincinnati’s Paycor Stadium as the Bills’ medical staff tried to restart his heart, which had abruptly stopped after Hamlin tackled an oncoming player. Thankfully, the medical staff succeeded, but their success did little to blunt the emotional blow of Hamlin’s collapse. For several minutes, the ESPN broadcast captured Hamlin’s teammates crying, praying, and embracing one another in a rare display of on-field emotion. When the two teams finally returned to their locker rooms, even the broadcasters seemed to let out a sigh of relief.

A week later, Hamlin’s condition has improved, and it mercifully seems like he will be alright. (He reportedly spoke with teammates via FaceTime on Thursday morning.) But regardless of Hamlin’s condition, the incident shed light on two ethical quandaries that are inseparable from professional football. 

The first is whether the NFL is willing to tolerate the death of a player in order to preserve the integrity of its product — i.e., football as it is currently played, with all its attendant dangers. The answer to this question is obviously yes, and it shouldn’t have taken Hamlin’s collapse to convince anyone of this fact. For decades, the NFL’s blithe response to head injuries has signaled that the league would sooner let its players die than change the game to make it less deadly. The fact that it took the NFL nearly an hour to officially postpone the Bills’ game after Hamlin’s injury merely confirmed this suspicion. The league’s attitude is the same, regardless of whether players die before halftime or twenty years after their retirement: the game must go on.

But the more interesting question is whether all of us — the people who consume the NFL’s products — bear some responsibility for what happened to Hamlin. In other realms of our economic life, consumers have begun to grapple with different forms of this question under the broad heading of “ethical consumption.” For instance, many coffee drinkers have stopped buying coffee beans that were produced using forced labor, and even major companies like Nike have made half-hearted efforts to weed “unethical” products out of their supply chains.

But as “ethical consumption” has gained a foothold in the economic mainstream, many on the left have grown skeptical of its claims to moral superiority. The most common leftist refrain (and the inspiration for a popular meme) is that “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” — that all consumption in a market system entails an implicit acceptance of exploitation, cruelty, and even real violence. Believing otherwise, some argue, unfairly shifts blame from the corporations that underwrite this exploitation to the individual consumers who are relatively powerless to change it. As the lefty journalist Malcolm Harris recently explained, “Most anti-capitalists currently understand consumption to be strictly personal: politicizing consumption only serves to marginalize leftists as picky eaters within mainstream society and welcomes capitalism’s salespeople at the same time.”

Yet for some reason, the professional sporting world has largely managed to escape scrutiny under the rubric of ethical consumption. If you accept that professional sports are commodities, and that the production of those commodities entails pretty overt violence — as Hamlin’s collapse makes clear — then it would seem obvious to ask whether consuming those commodities is “ethical.” (In the New York Times this week, sports columnist Kurt Streeter made the classical ethical consumption case against football in a column titled “We’re All Complicit in the NFL’s Violent Spectacle.”) As a result, there has yet to be a serious counter-discussion about whether there is such a thing as ethical sports consumption capitalism, or whether the consumption of sports, like the consumption of all other commodities, should be depoliticized altogether. 

We don’t have good answers to these questions. Obviously, we believe that there is a political dimension to sports fandom, as we’ve written about extensively before. At the same time, we’re not sure what finger-wagging at fans — à la Streeter — actually accomplishes, especially when the only institution that could make football less violent has shown itself to be entirely unwilling to do so. At the end of the day, what this approach often boils down to is a vague exhortation to “keep the reality of violence in mind,” as if some mass consciousness-raising activity among fans will actually mitigate the threat of that violence. Meanwhile, asking fans to actually vote with their feet — i.e., to boycott the league until it takes meaningful actions to protect players — is a pretty fruitless approach so long as the NFL maintains a de facto monopoly over professional football.

Ultimately, fans (or, better yet, consumers) will have to decide for themselves where to draw the lines: on this side of coffee beans, or on the other?

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RODNEY’S ROUNDUP

Do you want to read about...

. . . the recordings that capture how doctors saved Hamlin’s life? “‘We’re Going to Need Everybody’: Recordings Captured Response to N.F.L. Crisis,” by Ken Belson, Alan Blinder and Robin Stein in The New York Times (January 5, 2023).

. . . more sports media fails? “Why Coverage Of Dana White Slapping His Wife Has Been So Disastrous,” by Patrick Redford in Defector (January 6, 2023).

. . . the NBA’s 50-point boom? “As the N.B.A. Gets ‘Loose,’ 50-Point Games Are Surging,” by Victor Mather in The New York Times (January 6, 2023).

. . . an update on Trevor Bauer? “Dodgers cut ties with Trevor Bauer, star pitcher accused of abuse,” Chelsea Janes and Gus Garcia-Roberts in The Washington Post (January 6, 2023).