unitedliberty.org
Prior to Sunday’s game against the Oakland Raiders, the St. Louis Rams’ receiving corps took the field in an unusual way.
We’ve seen unusual before: Ray Lewis’s extravagant pump-up dance, LeBron James’s throwing baby powder, whatever the hell you call that scary, intimidating stuff Brian Dawkins used to do.
This was different.
The Rams receivers came on the field with their hands raised above their heads, in the hands-up-don’t-shoot gesture that has been a staple of demonstrations around the St. Louis area since police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on Aug. 9.
In my opinion, what Stedman Bailey, Tavon Austin, Jared Cook, Chris Givens and Kenny Britt did was a nice, relatively subtle way to show solidarity with the protestors in the area.
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Not so for the St. Louis Police Officers Association, apparently.
That organization quickly crafted a statement condemning the five Rams who took part in the display.
The SLPOA releasing a statement at all just seems like a bad idea. As far as I can tell, it just brought more attention to the athletes’ silent protest, at least on a national scale.
In addition, the SLPOA called “for the players involved to be disciplined and for the Rams and the NFL to deliver a very public apology.”
In a brief moment of clarity during what has been a twisted, ineffectual year for the NFL, it has declined to discipline the Rams receivers.
Asking the NFL to punish players for making a stand and furthering a cause is not only stupid, it’s downright backward. Punishing members of the community for silently, respectfully supporting the community would be an egregious breach of personal liberty.
But upon diving deeper into the statement, it only gets worse.
According to the statement, SLPOA business manager Jeff Roorda said, “It is unthinkable that hometown athletes would so publicly perpetuate a narrative [in which Wilson murdered Brown in cold blood] that has been disproven over and over again.”
Here’s one problem: the narrative that Roorda refers to hasn’t been disproven even once.
The grand jury simply determined there was not enough evidence to support a trial against Wilson. That is not proof of the absence of wrongdoing.
Somehow, Roorda’s first error was not the worst part of the statement.
According to the statement, as the Rams and their fans “‘sit safely in their dome under the watchful protection of hundreds of St. Louis’s finest, they take to the turf to call a now-exonerated officer a murderer, that is way out-of-bounds, to put it in football parlance,’ Roorda said.”
Aside from the poor attempt to put a football spin on his long-winded, oddly articulated statement, Roorda is making an unfair assumption here.
See, the killing of Brown is just the most recent situation in which a police officer has killed an unarmed African-American man. Although the hands-up-don’t-shoot gesture has been adopted particularly for this case, it does not only apply to Brown.
To assume that the Rams receivers are calling Wilson a murderer is too large a leap, the type of leap too many people made when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists with their heads bowed as the Star-Spangled Banner played at the 1968 Olympics. The Black Power salute and movement overall did not mean power over others; it simply meant self-determination, autonomy in one’s own life.
The hands-up-don’t-shoot gesture may have started in protest to Brown’s killing, but it now represents a protest to the societal problem we have, in which people aren’t treated equally.
I don’t want it to be the case, but I know that I have benefitted from white privilege.
I don’t want it to be the case, but I’ve seen my Latino and Black friends watched much more closely by police and store security guards.
If athletes making a gesture like the hands-up-don’t-shoot pose is one way to shed light on the issue and encourage change, I’m all for it.
And if I’m right that the SLPOA’s statement just brought more attention to the athletes’ gesture, I guess I’m all for that, too.
Tim Carroll
Senior Sports Editor