Southpaw #4: Exclusive Interview with Dave Zirin, Sports Editor at The Nation
The Nation’s first-ever sports editor on militarism, the legacy of the 1968 Olympic protests, and the prospects for athlete activism under a Biden administration.
Southpaw Exclusive: The Nation’s Dave Zirin explains the evolution of athlete activism
This past Friday, October 16, marked the 52nd anniversary of John Carlos and Tommie Smith raising their fists at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. The duo’s protest remains one of the most powerful political statements in the history of sports. In the midst of the Cold War, the Black Power Movement, and the Vietnam War, the protest drew the nation’s attention to the racist hypocrisy that allowed Americans to celebrate Black athletes on the international podium while brutalizing them in the streets. It was the ultimate repudiation of the idea that sports somehow transcended politics, that fans could cheer for an athlete on the field without actually listening to what he had to say about the nation that he represented. And the powers that be didn’t like it—Carlos and Smith were suspended from Team USA and kicked out of the games by the International Olympic Committee.
For nearly fifty years after the protest, Carlos and Smith remained quiet about their act of defiance. The two men grew apart, divided by fierce public scrutiny and conflicting political opinions, though their respect for each other continues. In 2011, Carlos re-emerged in left-wing politics, speaking at an Occupy Wall Street protest, where he once again raised his fist before a crowd of protesters. That same year, he chose a single sportswriter to tell the story of his protest and career. That writer was Dave Zirin.
Zirin, now in his fifteenth year as The Nation’s sports editor—he is the first sports editor in the history of the publication—is carrying on Carlos’s legacy. Across his regular columns and ten published books, Zirin has challenged sports fans to confront professional sports’ entrenched racism, militarism, and corporate greed. He has been dogged in his criticism of sports’ uber-rich owners who, in their attempts to squeeze every dollar out of their teams, have made their sports less accessible than ever to fans. “Now when many of us see the local stadium, we see a $1 billon real estate leviathan,” Zirin wrote in his 2013 book Game Over. “[This] has created a new species of fan: those who are paying for the stadiums but, unless they are working behind a counter, are unable to enter their gates.”
For his entire career, Zirin has focused on moments of outspoken political advocacy by athletes and the public backlash that these protests have provoked—and today, he has more material than ever. We spoke with him about John Carlos, the alliance between sports leagues and the military, and the future of athletic activism under a (potentially) Democratic administration.
The following transcript has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
c/o Sarisha Kurup
Dave Zirin: When I started [writing about the politics of sports], nobody was doing it. And now I do feel like there's like a community of people who have podcasts or are columnists or have blogs. So I'm glad that there's a bigger pool of people doing this kind of work right now, because it's obviously in the times we're living in. You couldn't have a more rich vein of inquiry than the politics of sports.
Southpaw Report: Do you feel vindicated in your approach to the political questions around sports, with the Black Lives Matter movement and the NBA Wildcat strikes making obvious political intrusions into sports? Do you think people are coming to embrace the way you've been writing about sports for a long time?
Zirin: I don't feel vindicated. I feel like people like John Carlos are vindicated. I feel like Colin Kaepernick has certainly been vindicated. I feel like Billie Jean King has been vindicated. So many of the athletes who laid the groundwork when it was difficult, trying to speak out and do this kind of work in the early 2000s when it was a very lonely thing to do, are vindicated . . . I'm just pleased to have been able to bring their stories to a broader audience.
Southpaw: Athletes’ careers are so short, and the ones who have spoken out about political issues have often had their careers made even shorter by the people in charge. It seems like every generation of athlete has to relearn the same lessons. Do you think it's possible to build on where we're at now?
Zirin: When you look at it historically, what gets built upon isn't so much the athletes who came in previous generations as much as it is the questions and politics that are being raised in the streets and being raised in the protest movements. That's what the athletes themselves build upon. So, the question of whether athletes are going to keep pushing forward is entirely a question of what happens off the athletic field. Athletes are not going to do this in a vacuum. There's not going to be some mass resistance movement of athletes while the rest of us sit around like it's a spectator sport.
The thing that's interesting about this moment is that you are seeing athletes build on what's happened before. Think about how electrically daring taking a knee was a couple of years ago. And now what's interesting is who doesn't take a knee. Like Meyers Leonard in the NBA Finals—that becomes a more pressing question than who is taking a knee. You've seen a lot of this dissent from recent years get absorbed, so then players have to push the envelope even more, hence the wildcat strikes that you saw after the police shooting of Jacob Blake. So I do see it building upon itself in a pretty powerful way. You have athletes in the WNBA, pushing whether or not Kelly Loeffler [a Republican Senator from Georgia] should be able to own a team because of her hostility towards the Black Lives Matter movement. That's building on what came before.
I think it'll certainly have fits and starts. Some of these lessons might need to be relearned. But fundamentally, the starting point happens off the athletic field. And I think this moment we're living in right now is one where athletes are building on what came before, and that's an important thing, too. Colin Kaepernick took a knee over four years ago. So, this younger generation of athletes—those who were 16 or 17 in 2016—has been raised thinking of Colin Kaepernick as a hero of the game. And now Jaylen Brown is quoting Angela Davis at press conferences. It's a bold new world.
Southpaw: What are the limitations of athletic activism? Athletes are, by and large, millionaires, and many of them are members of the highly-visible celebrity class. But on top of that, they’re workers. Given this tension, do you think that athletes are well-positioned to be activists?
Zirin: I think it starts by understanding who athletes are. Even though we saw some of this over the summer, they're not movement soldiers—they're not the people who are going to be the foundation of social struggle. Some of that has to do with them being celebrities, some of that has to do with salary, and some of it has to do with the fact that to be a professional athlete, or even a college athlete, takes a level of focus and blinders [such that] they’re only seeing what's happening on the streets and in society when it explodes. People at an activist level and on a street level, they can see things simmer. You see that less when you're trying to train for a nine-month season and get yourself in absurd physical shape for the grind that is to come.
But athletes are also the great amplifiers—they have a unique place in society to amplify what people in the streets are saying because they have this multibillion-dollar global platform. It's one of the few places where you have somebody who is likely from an economically disadvantaged background. The center of our most famous sports involves Black athletes. How often are people from those socioeconomic and racial backgrounds actually given a microphone to say what they think about the world? Is it distorted by money and celebrity on some level? Sure. But it's also very connected to communities that don't normally have a voice. And that's what makes them different from, say, George Clooney speaking out. It's a very specific kind of celebrity that's different from other kinds in our societies. I think that's what makes it so interesting. The people who've run sports have always known this, which is why that platform that we're talking about is so heavily policed . . . If you look at it historically, there's always been that element where [owners and leagues] want these athletes to be outspoken to sell the sport, but they only want them to be outspoken within limits, because the political reach that they can have is often very much at odds with the billionaires who run sports.
Southpaw: I think we saw those limits very clearly in the NBA bubble and the WNBA bubble. What does a league look like where you have owners who will allow for some kind of real social activism beyond the limits of something contrived? Is that a paradox?
Zirin: The people who run the sporting world are trying to sell their product. And to me, there's no doubt that there were reasons the NBA put Black Lives Matter on the court and slogans on the back of players' uniforms . . . They had two objectives. One was to win the argument among NBA players that they should go in the bubble in the first place, because there was a previous prevailing sentiment [among players] that by continuing the season, they were distracting from the movement in the streets. And the second thing is that these [owners] are very smart people. Adam Silver's very smart, and he understands the value of woke marketing or woke capitalism or whatever you want to call it, and [of] appealing to a younger generation that's more multiracial and less tolerant of intolerance.
When you have a sports league that gives more room for players to speak out, you run the risk of them absorbing dissent and performing a political root canal on the teeth of these protests—on the canines of these protests. So, for example, taking a knee in the WNBA does not have the same effect as it did a few years ago, precisely because it's approved by management. But that's why the players went on strike after the police shooting of Jacob Blake. As some of the players communicated to me, they felt like chumps. Here they were in this bubble—a figurative and literal bubble—feeling like, ‘We've got Black Lives Matter on the court, and it's not making a lick of difference.’
Southpaw: On the question of the differences between past and present athlete activism, you’ve written a lot about anti-military and anti-war protests in sports. In the Sixties, protest against police brutality and violence against Black people inevitably took on the issue of American military involvement overseas—in Vietnam or in Iraq, for example. Today, though, athletes are tying themselves in knots to make sure that the public knows that their protests against police violence are not protests against militarism, for fear of appearance of being “anti-troop.” Meanwhile, the leagues are profiting from alliances with the military, and military fighter jets are still flying over stadiums before games. Is there any possibility for a vocal anti-militarist protest in sports, or has the right completely won that fight?
Zirin: I don't think they've completely won anything. I was impressed [by] the number of players who did speak out against George Bush's war in Iraq in the early 2000s. It wasn't organized in any coherent movement, but players from Steve Nash to Josh Howard and Nick Van Exel, Adelius Thomas, Etan Thomas, or MMA fighter Jeff Monson all spoke out. And these players found their voice at a time before social media, when it was a lot easier to silence those voices. But those voices existed nonetheless. Now, if there was a new round of imperial war, would players speak out, or would they just go along with the military? That would be the challenge that they would face. And it would be an interesting challenge, because they would be going against management, as opposed to some of what we're seeing now, where there's a management-player alliance to say something soft about police violence. That would be a bridge that today's political athlete would certainly have to confront bravely because they would inevitably incur a backlash for speaking up.
This is something that [author and journalist] Howard Bryant has written about really well: the ways in which pro-militarism—and, in the post-9/11 era, what's referred to as “copaganda”—have worked side by side in a lot of stadium celebrations. Now that you have players challenging the copaganda, it might be an inevitability that they challenge militarism as well. But I'll tell you this—since we've seen these Black Lives Matter protests in sports, I've seen less of the pro-military stuff. It's almost as if management doesn't even want to drag that third rail out to the middle of the stadium because of what it could incur.
A lot of athletes, professional and otherwise, who have taken a knee have felt a real rage at being called anti-military. Oftentimes, their rage comes from the fact that they have family members in the military, and they feel like fighting against police violence has nothing to do with the military. That was Colin Kapernick’s line. When he took a knee, he said this isn’t anti-flag or anti-military. But when [basketball player] Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf took his knee [in 1996], it was about imperialism. And he said it was against the flag. So you wonder, what would happen if, when players were accused of being against the troops, instead of saying, “No, I'm not,’ they said, ‘Well, I'm against the troops killing people in the Middle East.” Or, “Yeah, I am against the idea of people in poor high schools feeling like their only way out is to join the military.” I think that would have a very powerful and polarizing effect, not just on sports fandom but on the community of activist athletes themselves.
I did a book with John Carlos, one of the ’68 Olympians. He showed me a lot of the hate mail that he got after raising his fist during the anthem at the Olympics, and what I thought was so interesting about reading his hate mail was that this was really ugly stuff—it was profoundly racist, there were death threats all over it—but nobody called him “anti-troop.” This is ’68. The U.S. had hundreds of thousands of personnel in Southeast Asia. Here, a Black revolutionary is raising his fist during the anthem, and yet it doesn't connect in people's minds to say, “You're anti-military.’ People called him anti-American, but not anti-military. That's very much a post-911 phenomenon, that if you dare protest, you're somehow slandering the troops themselves.
Southpaw: What happens when—if—we have Democrats in charge of the country? If you look at the past two Republican administrations, we’ve seen the Iraq War, which, as you mentioned, was an animating factor [in protest movements], and now we have Trump, who's so clearly a bigot that it's easy to set up an opposition movement against him. It's not quite so simple when you have somebody like Barack Obama or even Joe Biden in office. Do you think if Joe Biden wins, all of this fizzles?
Zirin: Great question. I think we have to remember that this round of athlete activism didn’t start with Trump in office. It started in 2011 and 2012 with the killing of Trayvon Martin. Actually, it started with the opposition to Donald Sterling and the threat of the Golden State Warriors and the Clippers to go on strike unless Sterling gave up control of the team. And then, after Trayvon was killed in 2012, you had the Miami Heat players led by LeBron and Dwayne Wade posing in hoodies, and the Black Lives Matter movement as a whole explodes under Barack Obama.
Now, there’s a critique of the movement that could be made, that it did not specifically target Barack Obama as part of the problem. It generally focused on police and local governments, and I’m not sure if that aided the movement, but the bigger issue is that you did see struggle. Colin Kaepernick takes his knee in August of 2016, and that’s months before the election where Trump shockingly was elected, where people thought it was going to be Hillary going in. We can see this struggle happen under a Biden administration, because I don’t think the struggle is going to stop, but it’s something that is going to be largely determined by what happens in the streets. That will then reflect into the world of sports. If, under a Biden administration, there are volcanic social protests and it doesn’t reflect into the world of sports, you could color me very surprised.
Southpaw: In this dialectic between players and public officials, Trump and the right have almost been shooting themselves in the foot, because their responses to even the most mild form of player protest has been so overblown that it actually builds sympathy for the movement. My worry is that if we have a softening of the opposition under a Democratic administration which is able to successfully co-opt the language and symbolism of the movement without adopting its aims, we’ll also witness decreased support for the movement from liberal moderates who no longer see support for the movement as opposition to Trump.
Zirin: That’s always a looming threat when you have Democrats in office. They were once called “the graveyard of social movements” for a reason. The question is going to be whether or not the streets are able to protest and not be absorbed by these administrations. If they do, I think athletes will pick up the baton, because they really are getting a sense and a taste of their own power right now. ◼
Go Deeper:
Dave Zirin on . . .
. . . Detroit Pistons owner Tom Gores’s stake in a predatory prison telephone company: “If the NBA Stands for Racial Justice, What About Tom Gores?” in The Nation (October 12, 2020).
. . . a plan for Major League Baseball to match their words with their deeds on racial justice: “Making Black Lives Matter On and Off The Diamond” in The Nation (September 30, 2020 with Peter Dreier).
. . . how the NFL turned the the Black Lives Matter movement into a branding opportunity, and how a women’s tennis star re-wrote the narrative: “We've Entered the Era of 'Branding for Black Lives'” in The Nation (September 14, 2020).
. . . John Carlos’ 1968 Olympics protest and the shape of his life afterwards: The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World, available from Haymarket Books (originally published May 2011, with John Carlos).
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . the significance of a Lakers championship in the year of Black Lives Matter, the NBA bubble, and the death of an icon? “It Had to be the Lakers,” by Ross Andersen in The Atlantic (October 11, 2020).
. . . the weird backstory behind Dan Gable’s Medal of Freedom and Trump’s even weirder love of all-things wrestling? “A son-in-law's letter to a senator leads to president awarding wrestling icon Dan Gable the Medal of Freedom,” by Cody Goodwin in The Des Moines Register (October 14, 2020).
. . . the glut of mediocre student-athletes that’s overwhelming the Ivy League’s sports-industrial complex? “The Mad, Mad World of Niche Sports Among Ivy League-Obsessed Parents,” by Ruth S. Barrett in The Atlantic (October 17, 2020).
. . . Billy Beane, ‘Moneyball’ hero, becoming what he always wanted to: a shady businessman? “Billy Beane Finally Gets What He Wanted: Out of Baseball” by Ray Ratto in Defector (October 13, 2020).
. . . whether any amount of high-profile COVID cases will stop the college football season? “Nick Saban Is Being Tested for the Virus. The Runaway Train of College Football Keeps Rolling” by Kurt Streeter in The New York Times (October 16, 2020).
. . . if activism in the WNBA could affect Kelly Loeffler’s Senate race? “Could the WNBA help flip the Senate?” by Mary Harris, interviewing Professor Amira Rose Davis, in Slate (October 13, 2020).