This year the NFL will penalize itself for past unnecessary roughness against Colin Kaepernick with a social-justice blitz.
If you were counting on the start of the pro football season this week to offer some respite from a long hot summer of nasty politicking and violent street protests, don’t kid yourself. In an act of cowardice masquerading as wokeness, the National Football League has decided to follow its baseball and basketball counterparts and bow to Black Lives Matter activists.
In June, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell apologized for the league’s earlier hard-line stance against kneeling during the national anthem. Last week the league announced that it will pay obeisance by displaying social-justice slogans in end zones and playing the “black national anthem,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” before games. Players will be permitted not only to boycott “The Star-Spangled Banner” but to sit out entire games if they feel the need.
Even uniforms will showcase the higher consciousness of multimillionaire black athletes who want to lecture the rest of us on racial inequality. Players, coaches and referees “can choose either a name of a victim or one of four preferred phrases the NFL has approved: ‘Stop Hate’; ‘It Takes All Of Us’; ‘End Racism’; or ‘Black Lives Matter,’” according to the Associated Press. “Each week, the NFL will feature the story of a victim of social or racial injustice or police brutality and tell that person’s story ‘in and around’ the games, the league said.”
Football is America’s favorite spectator sport, and the NFL has determined that many fans are tuning in for the political theater, not just the touchdowns. If Mr. Goodell is wrong about that, he’ll find out soon enough. Average television viewership for regular season games fell to fewer than 15 million in 2017 from 18.7 million two years earlier, and the initial player protests led by Colin Kaepernick were cited as a factor in the dip. The audience has since increased, but the average number of viewers last year was still 2.2 million fewer than it was in 2015.
The broader issue is the transformation of professional sports and related news outlets into platforms for espousing the latest political fads. Some of us turn to sports to get away from politics. That’s harder to do when you’re forced to navigate through articles in the sports section on transgenderism or “jogging while black” just to find out how many runs Gerrit Cole gave up last night. I watch “SportsCenter” for the highlight reels, not for monologues on “systemic racism.” My 11-year-old subscribes to a tennis magazine, and the most recent issue featured an image of a balled fist on the cover. The kid just wants to read about tennis.
“The NFL stands with the black community,” Mr. Goodell said in defense of the new policies. But Black Lives Matter activists don’t represent the black community any more than white nationalists represent the white community. The black community wants more police officers in high-crime neighborhoods for protection. Black Lives Matter activists turn criminals into martyrs and lead rallies that call for defunding law enforcement. Mr. Goodell is indulging an extremely divisive group of activists who have a political agenda that is well to the left of most Americans, including most black Americans. Moreover, he’s decided that football fans should not be allowed to watch NFL games without having left-wing propaganda rubbed in their faces for three hours.
To the extent that the antipolice rhetoric has no basis in any empirical reality, Mr. Goodell and the NFL are also playing the role of the useful idiots. It is criminals who threaten black lives, not police officers, and focusing on police behavior instead of criminal behavior does nothing to help low-income blacks, who are the likeliest victims of violent crime.
According to Peter Moskos, a criminologist at John Jay College, policing has improved dramatically in recent decades and the biggest beneficiaries have been blacks. In a podcast interview last month with the economist Glenn Loury, Mr. Moskos said that efforts to reduce police resources would be counterproductive. He called the New York City Police Department, the nation’s largest, “arguably the best police department that America has seen.” It’s not perfect, he added, “but by any quantifiable measure, the NYPD does very well. By quantifiable measures, I mean arrests have been going down, crime has been going down, complaints against police have been going down—that’s important in the current context—and use of lethal force is very low.”
Mr. Moskos provides facts and context, while the media specializes in anecdotes and unrepresentative viral videos. It’s no wonder so many people believe police shootings are commonplace when in fact they are a tiny percentage of all shootings and have fallen steadily over the past 40 years. In the name of helping blacks, the NFL is helping activists spread misinformation.
This piece originally appeared at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
______________________
Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal