Why is Enes Kanter Freedom going on Tucker Carlson?
And what do his decisions say about his broader activism?
Dear Readers,
In addition to sending out Southpaw to our loyal readers, the two of us have been spending many a Sunday morning waking up early to watch Formula 1 races. We got hooked, like lots of others, from watching the Netflix show Drive to Survive, which follows the drivers and teams (it’s a big recommendation from us). Anyways, after the most contested championship battle between two drivers (Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen) in recent memory, the title was decided this morning on literally the final lap of the season after some controversial decisions early from race control gave Hamilton an edge and then wiped out his lead late.
As much as we’d enjoy waxing poetic for awhile about Formula 1 (and maybe we will in the future!) this week we’re going to chat sports stars (and one in particular) going on cable television. We’re talking, of course, about the man formerly known as Enes Kanter, doing some stupid stuff that makes us vaguely regret our former praise. Hope you enjoy!
-Calder and Ian
Enes Kanter Freedom, an attempted explanation
A few weeks ago, we wrote about Boston Celtics’ center Enes Kanter, who has been waging a bold and somewhat irreverent social media campaign calling out China for its human rights abuses and a handful of American companies—including the NBA and Nike—for their silence on those abuses. In our post, we applauded Kanter for taking a stand for human rights and, more immediately, for drawing attention to the NBA’s two-faced approach to social justice issues.
Since our piece, there have been a few … notable developments with Kanter. First off, the Boston big man officially changed his last name to “Freedom” to celebrate his naturalization as an American citizen, so his full legal name is now “Enes Kanter Freedom.” (For the purposes of not confusing our readers, we’ll stick with calling him Kanter for this piece.) Second, he’s become something of a right-wing superstar.
On November 29, Kanter appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show ostensibly to discuss his naturalization but, in a typical Tucker turn, ended up getting baited into bashing Black activist athletes who’ve spoken out about racism in America. Asked by Carlson if immigrants to America appreciate the U.S. and its freedoms more than natural-born citizens, Kanter bit hard. “People should feel really blessed and lucky to be in America,” he said, much to Carlson’s beady-eyed delight. “They love to criticize it, but when you live in a country like Turkey or China or somewhere else, you will appreciate the freedoms you have here,” Kanter continued. When Carlson asked him if his (predominantly Black) teammates felt the same way, Kanter replied, “I feel like they should just keep their mouth shut and stop criticizing the greatest nation in the world and they should focus on their freedoms and their human rights and democracy.” (We’ve decided to not even touch the irony of someone who’s had trouble getting any playing time this year telling his teammates to shut up and dribble during an appearance on cable’s most-watched “news” show.)
The reason that Carlson had invited Kanter onto his show was clear to pretty much everybody except Kanter. (That’s the charitable reading. If we were feeling less charitable, we’d say he probably knows exactly what he’s doing.) A few weeks earlier, Kanter had gone after LeBron James on Twitter for supporting the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. while staying silent about China’s human rights abuses. Considered in a vacuum, this isn’t an unfair criticism, and it’s one we’ve made before in this newsletter. But Kanter appears to see a contrived, one-sided beef with LeBron as potentially good for his brand. So he’s gone pretty over the top with it. A few weeks ago, Kanter wore a pair of shoes depicting Xi Jinping crowning LeBron, who was shown kneeling next to sacks of money. In a tweet accompanying pictures of the shoes, he wrote, “Money over Morals for the ‘King.’ Sad & disgusting how these athletes pretend they care about social justice. They really do ‘shut up & dribble’ when Big Boss says so”—an apparent allusion to Laura Ingraham’s quip from 2019 that LeBron should just “shut up and dribble.”
He also went after Jeremy Lin for agreeing to play in China, throwing some thinly-veiled racism towards the Palo Alto-born American of Taiwanese descent.
Kanter tried to walk some of his comments back in a subsequent interview with The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, but the damage had already been done. Asked by Chotiner whether he thought Americans shouldn’t criticize injustice and exploitation in America, Kanter babbled through a non-answer answer. “When I said ‘shut up,” what I meant is: get some perspective. I obviously don’t mean to not criticize the U.S. Obviously, the U.S. has racism and many other problems, but I’m saying, at least it’s not Turkey. It’s not Syria, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Belarus. So I feel like people should feel lucky and blessed to be in this situation.” When Chotiner pointed out that Carlson had clearly invited him on his show because he wanted to have his audiences hear a non-white athlete criticize Black players for their politics, Kanter merely insisted that “this is not about race,” and that “I’m so far from being racist or anything.”
From his interview with Chotiner, it seems like Kanter isn’t a dyed-in-the-wool right-wing nutjob. When Chotiner noted that some of the conservative figures that he was paling around with had very publicly villainized Muslim immigrants to the U.S.—Kanter is Muslim and was born in Turkey—Kanter tried halfheartedly to distance himself from the right’s crazy xenophobia, and he noted that had marched in support of the Black Lives Matter movement last summer. But regardless of his political orientation, Kanter’s decision to sit down with Tucker Carlson demonstrates that he’s an even more dangerous type of figure: a chump.
In general, we here at Southpaw support athletes who use their platforms to call out injustice and exploitation and, yes, even left-wing hypocrisy. But professional politics is a tricky game, and if you’re going to suit up for it, you should at least know who you’re playing ball with.
This is the issue. We don’t need all athletes to be activists, or to hold the same political priorities that the two of us do. But Enes Kanter Freedom’s purported purpose for speaking up is that he’s worried about human rights abuses around the world. He’s now been baited into becoming a puppet of Carlson’s, trotted out to explain why liberals and athlete activists are hypocrites, and to argue that America is essentially above reproach.
If Kanter was trying to send a real message to the NBA to be on notice about human rights abuses in places where they have financial interests, he’s managed to drown that out by wading into the petty grievances and not-so-subtle racism that animates Fox News. And that’s a shame, because some of what he has to say is worth hearing.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . how the NCAA’s new NIL rules are helping even small-market athletes? “The “Smaller, Everyday Deals for College Athletes Under New Rules,” by Alan Blinder in The New York Times (December 9, 2021).
. . . how to actually put pressure on the IOC? “To prevent the next Olympic embarrassment, the world needs to take a stand,” by Kevin Blackistone in The Washington Post (December 12, 2021).
. . . the possibility of a corporate boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics? “A Diplomatic Boycott Is a Start. Sponsors Should Act Next,” by Kurt Streeter in The New York Times (December 8, 2021).