Sterling and Castile both lost their lives after being senselessly gunned down by police during confrontations with law enforcement in early July. Black and white athletes alike took part in this stand for social justice, and the league actually gained some measure of popularity because of it. “Just because someone says “Black Lives Matter” doesn’t mean that other lives don’t matter”. So I would greatly prefer that the players use the platform they’re given, social media, press conferences, media in locker rooms, however they want to do it, to make their political points of view be known. The shirts worn by the players did not meet that threshold, according to the league. When a handful of WNBA players failed to heed the warning and continued to wear the t-shirts, they were fined.
Advertisement
He shared with the New York Post, “I don’t see no reason to fine them”.
While the NBA’s now being praised for having the guts to pull its lucrative All Star game from North Carolina next year over the state’s discriminatory anti-LGBTI laws, the usually on-point WNBA has been fumbling over its response to powerful social protests from its star players.
League president Lisa Borders commended their “engagement and passionate advocacy for non-violent solutions to hard social issues” but expected teams to comply with uniform guidelines.
“I don’t see why there would be a reason for those ladies to get fined”, Anthony said at USA Basketball training camp in Las Vegas.
“We can not ignore the realities of the current state of America”, said Anthony, who had previously called on sportspeople to use their influence and profile to further important political causes. Seventy percent of the @wnba players are African-American women and, as a league, collectively impacted. After wearing shirts with the hashtag “Black Lives Matter” and “Dallas5” for one game, the Liberty reached what the players said was a compromise, wearing plain black shirts bearing only the Adidas logo. The players were not fined for their actions.
For those unfamiliar, players on the New York Liberty, Indiana Fever, and Phoenix Mercury took a stand in solidarity.
“I think there’s a lot of people in our league who are very passionate about it”.
“We really feel like there’s still an issue here in America and we want to be able to use our platforms, we want to be able to use our voices, we don’t want to let anybody silence us and what we want to talk about”, Liberty guard Tanish Wright said.
Many NBA players, like Lebron James and Derrick Rose, wore “I Can’t Breathe” shirts just weeks after the death of Eric Garner, a Staten Island man who died after police placed him in a chokehold outside a convenience store in July 2014. “And there’s a whole other world outside of that, and it’s way more important than what we do”.
Advertisement
A group of WNBA players are refusing to drop the ball when it comes to using their voices to advocate for human rights and against police brutality. As to where you would draw the line when it’s appropriate for a particular player to use that, use a game, pregame, as a political forum, I think it’s a unsafe road for us to go down.
