Dying ember color professional#

Dying ember color professional#

In tennis, perhaps the whitest of all the sports, former US Open champion Naomi Osaka walked away from her semi-final match at the Western & Southern Open on Thursday, tweeting, “I don’t expect anything drastic to happen with me not playing, but if I can get a conversation started in a majority white sport I consider that a step in the right direction.” Professional tennis organizations USTA, ATP, and WTA issued a statement in support of her stance and postponed tournament play on Thursday. More baseball teams joined the boycott on Thursday. Major League Baseball, with only about 8% African American players, also joined in with players from the Milwaukee Brewers and Cincinnati Reds sitting out their games and the Seattle Mariners voted unanimously to postpone their Wednesday game. Major League Soccer, in which only 26% of players are black, postponed five games that day, with players from two teams, Inter Miami and Atlanta United, locking arms and refusing to play. Black men, black women, black kids, we are terrified.” As tired as white people may be of hearing it, black people are even more tired of living it.įor me, what really brought the hearth fire of hope back to life was the instantaneous support of other sports teams and athletes. Wave of postponements as US sports join Jacob Blake protests – video reportĪs LeBron James explained, “I know people get tired of hearing me say it, but we are scared as black people in America. But it wasn’t that great of surprise because 81.1% of the NBA and 88% of the WNBA are black and their families and friends don’t live in a protective bubble. That both leagues spoke out immediately was courageous, especially given the hundreds of millions of dollars involved and all the expense and effort it took to create their sports bubbles. The dying ember had been extinguished.īut then along came the Milwaukee Bucks, my old team, who announced they would boycott Game 5 of the NBA playoffs, explaining, “Despite the overwhelming plea for change, there has been no action, so our focus today cannot be on basketball.” They demanded that the Wisconsin state legislature, after months of inaction, “take up meaningful measures to address issues of police accountability, brutality and criminal justice reform.” And just like that, the ember of hope was flickering to life again. Yeah, hope in the black community took a big hit this week. Then this week, a black man, Jacob Blake, was shot seven times in the back by police, a 17-year-old was charged with intentional homicide after two men were killed at a subsequent protests, and the Republican National Convention featured speakers who, instead of voicing outrage over systemic racism and vowing to end it, complained about the audacity of ungrateful black people protesting that their husbands, sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers were being murdered by police while President Trump and the GOP conspired to take away their right to vote. Sign up for The Guardian's cutting edge journalism.