Here is what folks have been writing about this:
Bill Reiter, CBSSports.com: “After the 2019-20 NBA season paused for a second time Wednesday, this time shorter but for reasons of racism rather than a worldwide pandemic, few things are clear. Not what happens next, or when. Not whether change can be made from a bubble or whether this season will ultimately finish. But this, at least, feels certain: The notion that sports and politics will ever be separate again has passed. The idea that athletes — and usually, here, it’s Black athletes who are expected to ‘shut up and dribble,’ ‘shut up and play,’ ‘shut up and entertain’ — should compete in sports but not over the real struggle in American life has ended. Four years to the day Colin Kaepernick first took a knee, the Milwaukee Bucks used their feet to make a statement, walking right off that court and taking with them, for the moment, the NBA playoffs. Why? That one has to ask says much about the person, but here goes anyway: Because another unarmed Black man had been gunned down by police officers. Because Black people in this country, rightly, feel hunted and hated, feared and stalked — unable to feel safe on the streets of a free country; and unable to feel any certainty that when the next Jacob Blake adds his name to too long a list, there will be enough people who care to make even a small inch of progress.”
Brian Phillips, The Ringer: “Much of California was on fire. An awesome hurricane was ravaging the Louisiana coast. The coronavirus, which has killed 180,000 people in the United States, was not contained. The streets seemed overrun with armed militiamen. The police were still targeting Black people. In North Carolina, at the Republican National Convention, the president and his supporters—whose job is to take these crises seriously—were instead playing a kind of game, trying to frighten people with fake emergencies while running away from the real ones. In Florida, a group of professional basketball players—whose job is to play a game—looked at the state of the country and responded seriously. If they couldn’t solve the real emergency, they could do more than the country’s leaders seem willing to do: They could ask you to see it.”
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