Sport,Social Justice,and the Limits of Dissent After George Floyd: A Reply to Butterworth

Protest, Unity, and the Specter of Individual Conscience: For What Should Athletes Stand?

—Helen Parr: “Everyone is special, Dash.”

—Dashiell Parr: “That’s just another way of saying no one is.”

If Butterworth was not interested in what he termed the “collection of athletes engaged in activism in recent years” (p. 454), I wish to insist, respectfully, that recent moments of athletes’ tinted dissent from Black Lives Matter matter . The phrase “tinted dissent” may seem peculiar; I use it to suggest that, generally, athlete activists who did not conform to the norms, mores, and expected performances of protest more often than not believed in convictions readers of this journal would judge “good.” At issue is that these athletes made different choices about what their solidarity might look like, thereby embodying a kind of “tinted dissent.”

Keying on such examples will enable us to work through the rhetorical-philosophical complexities in and around the ways dissent challenges us to re-evaluate the character of athlete activism. These complexities seem particularly unique to sport, an insight Trimbur (2019) recently advanced, noting, “[A]t this moment, activism in sport allows us to see larger political alliances, affinities, and solidarities in a particularly useful way” (p. 253). Where Butterworth subsumed calls for unity beneath a debilitating umbrella of consensus, and in so doing glossed over the potential complexities and questions those particulars might have suggested, I examine the embodied character and rhetorical texture of Hill’s seemingly curious yet strangely compelling decision to stand for the national anthem. Such a focus aligns well, I think, with what Trimbur imagined vis-à-vis the ways “the world of sport is opening up a new counterpublic” where we might critically examine how athletes grapple with and perform in accord with or against “mainstream interpretations, interest, and norms” (p. 253).

Recent scholarship has compellingly examined, for instance, the ways Black athletes have exercised protest (in fashions material and/or symbolic), carrying out these instances of protest in “hostile spaces” in which they “challenge[d] and destabilize[d] existing power structures” (Trimbur, 2019, p. 254). From the relationship between colonial racism and the Black athlete (Carrington, 2010) to ways in which NBA player Ron Artest prompted a reckoning with Black activism in the context of fan affinity (Farred, 2014) to the creation of a Black counterculture in the wake of boxer Jack Johnson’s public struggles against anti-Black racism in Jim Crow America to the relationship of collective memory to societal projections of Blackness on a number of Black boxers during the 20th century (Runstedtler, 2012; Young, 2010), scholars of sport, society, communication, and culture have demonstrated the ways Black agency prompts rethinking about the norms and mores of sport.

The immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s horrific murder spurred another wave of athlete activism. The apparent unity in and around protests that took place across the NBA and Major League Baseball would seem to suggest a kind of fortuitous if overdue alignment of social justice goals and unity between and among players, management, and the seeming majority of fans. However, what was easy to overlook, if not outright dismiss, were those instances of dissent from the explicitly performative instances of unity. Hill’s decision to stand during the national anthem provides a case study with which to work through whether and how sincere overtures for unity on behalf of social justice may function to suffocate genuine instances of plurality. Our unwillingness to take seriously these examples of tinted dissent may prompt fissures in our own thinking both about the rich variety dissent may assume as well as the ways unity can work counterproductively against democratic practices.

For Branch (2020), Hill’s example reinvigorated the so-called stand-or-kneel debate as athletes after George Floyd now had “to explain why they chose to stand, not kneel, during ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’” (para. 3). Hill’s choice, Branch related, prompted a “barrage of online criticism and debate” (para. 12). I am less interested in the “stand-or-kneel” controversy Branch earnestly described than in working through what it means to assent to calls for unity—in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, ones wholly echoing cries for social justice—and whether, or if, such calls are examples of a logic of consensus over which we also should critically pause.

Perhaps, then, it makes sense to begin with what is right in front of our eyes: in this case, the photograph of Hill. The posture—she is standing with her right hand over her heart and her left hand on the shoulder of her Black teammate, Casey Short, who kneels alongside Julie Ertz—is provocative in that word’s richest sense: Hill is alone in standing while her teammates kneel together. The solitariness of her stand is striking. It is easy to assent to the line of argument asserted by Charles Ross, professor of history and director of African-American Studies at the University of Mississippi, who provided Branch academic legitimacy and intellectual urgency with insights like, “You cannot sit around now in this post-George Floyd period we’re in and say, ‘We’re going to continue to take this safe position’. No. Either you have an issue with racism, or you do not” (para. 9). Branch concurred, noting how Hill “tried to have it both ways. But if there is anything certain about the anthem debate, renewed and turned inside-out in these nuance-free times, it is this: There is little room for such posturing” (para. 39). Yet surely it is fair to wonder: Why was Hill’s decision to stand (and the subsequent justification she provided for it) “safe”? The civic and moral work of the image, borrowing from Hariman and Lucaites (2007), signals a spectrum of emotions which decidedly do not encompass safety. Hill elected to stand alone, apart from teammates who provided comfort and physical gestures of solidarity for one another (Ertz and Short demonstrate an intimacy that viewers should find deeply moving). While Hill placed her hand on Short’s shoulder, suggesting the fervent desire to demonstrate earnest common cause, the photograph reinforces the sheer contrast—of awkwardness, of difference, of pain—that follows when an individual chooses not to be a part of a group.

What if serious gestures of dissent, really, individual expressions of conscience, embody the very conflict Ross and Branch seem to want to jettison? Rather than “playing it safe” (a seemingly cynical suggestion), might Hill’s stand(ing) prompt reconsideration of the ways the specter of unity on behalf of social justice can ostracize well-meaning counter-performances (that is, different) of civic conviction? To be clear: I recognize that Kaepernick’s protest and its subsequent imitations have absolutely nothing to do with the national anthem, per se. And, like Butterworth, I find the militarism in and around such ceremonies wholly out of place at athletic contests. But Branch and Ross seem to use Floyd’s murder as a kind of passkey: If athletes do not display solidarity with BLM in the modes of performative protest its adherents have sanctioned, then dissenters are chastised for playing it “safe” and “having it both ways.” What seems paramount is to examine carefully how Hill exercised her voice on the pitch and to consider more fully the explanation she provided on Twitter as part of coming to terms with the ways her dissent may reflect a nuance that, far from easy posturing, is indicative of democratic expressions of individual conscience which suggest a way through the stifling consensus found within even the most noble demonstrations for social justice. Consider, first, what Hill did, as depicted in Figure 1.

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Figure 1.

Rachel Hill stands during the playing of the national anthem while her teammates kneel in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.

I will not assert here that Hill’s stand(ing) constitutes something like an iconic image as defined by Hariman and Lucaites (2007). Such images, as they illuminatingly explained, work to “provide an accessible and centrally positioned set of images for exploring how political action (and inaction) can be constituted and controlled through visual media” (p. 5). Indeed, it may be fair to wonder, given the sheer prevalence of images circulating across the visual public sphere, whether and how any image can provide “a reflexive awareness of social forms and state actions that can lead to individual decisions and collective movements of behalf of democratic ideals” (p. 3). We are all photojournalists now. Images like Hill’s circulate ethereally over the sporting-democratic landscape, galvanizing reactions of all kinds, before fading from view, leaving us neither instructions for how to sustain our protest leanings nor cues to manage our emotional registers against outrageous injustices.

Yet such an attitude fails to take seriously the serious work all visual images do, whatever their status or stature. Space precludes a comprehensive review of the different ways scholars of communication have leaned into the “visual turn” in rhetorical studies. And, again, Hariman and Lucaites’s (2007) meta-assessment may encapsulate well why attention needs to be paid: “The burgeoning scholarship in visual culture demonstrates how rhetoric, semiotics, ideology critique, psychoanalysis, and other critical vocabularies can be used to unpack visual images that in turn can function as mirrors for refracting the many discourses around them” (p. 296). More pointedly, they acknowledge the ways images may align “powerful emotions with dissent,” providing “lesson[s] in how citizenship can be experienced and articulated emotionally” (p. 140).

What, then, do we see refracted through the mirror in Hill’s stand(ing)? The image, frankly, is arresting. Hill stands with her right hand on her heart, her left hand on the shoulder of her Black teammate, Casey Short. Her pose is angled toward the flag, but she gazes down at her teammate Short, the look on Hill’s face infused with something like a pensiveness and corresponding sense of mourning, as though she feels both profoundly sad for the painful emotional struggle in which Short is mired (her pain hurts Hill) and recognizes that it is equally difficult to pin down any response which may be satisfactory to calls for social justice, when such calls assume totalizing force and preclude space for reflection, principled ambivalence, and the burdens of conscience and personal history. Lingering over the photograph, we may be compelled to recognize the conflicting nature of dissent, even as that dissent seems to embody the virtues and goals of social justice. That conflict, fundamentally, puts persons in places of profound tension: Standing for something (philosophically, metaphorically) demands one confront the risks of dissent alone. In our contemporary age, awash in the social-media mud of opinion masquerading as insight, a person will be ostracized, repudiated, denigrated by those who fervently disagree.

The strictures of unity, in other words, surely work as part of a performative politics of identity whereby to not kneel suggests, somehow, that one is on the wrong side of justice or history or morality. Unity, in this case, demands a consensus inflected by gestures to social justice that seem to supersede individual conscience, personal agency, or the requisite space to reflect on how one may perform one’s deep-seated civic convictions. It’s to say a different way that, while she is standing for the anthem, Hill’s stance in every way is with the concerns of Black Lives Matter, a commitment reinforced by her choice to wear the same t-shirt worn by every other player on the Red Stars. Yet this posture did not satisfy. Reactions to Hill’s stand(ing) seemed to confirm this. Even a cursory glance into the proverbial soup of vitriol on Twitter revealed a profound sense of reckoning: Hill had betrayed the movement and the moment. Consider:

@GSanchezJS: BS—Actions speak louder than words, and so far what we got from you is lip service. Nice try on covering your tracks, but it’s too little too late.

@CyberArsenull: If a song and a piece of cloth mean more to you than the ideals they represent, then you still don’t get it.

@nba_Jordan89: IT. AIN’T. ABOUT. THE. MILITARY.

@emcconoc: Dense AF.

@D_J_AV8: We’ve already had this convo…girl…BYE!

@ShakaStrong: I can only imagine the countless sleepless nights wondering should I kneel or stand as black bodies continue to be abused and murdered by a system that protects the perpetrators. Wish that this was the struggle I had to contend with…“diligently anti-racist” this is not.

(Retrieved from https://twitter.com/r_hill3/status/1278145465406627841.)

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Figure 2.

Rachel’s Hill’s Twitter post explaining her decision to stand during the national anthem, Part 1.

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Figure 3.

The second part of Hill’s post.

The chorus of criticism represented by the tweets above chastised Hill for commitments judged unserious or confounded: Real antiracists understand the longer conversations related to Kaepernick’s protests and the cause of Black Lives Matter and the cues and assumptions that sustain those conversations. Her utterances on behalf of a kind of athlete activism were tone deaf. But Hill’s tweet poses a dilemma for students of dissent and protest generally and her critics in particular. Imbued in her justification, thoroughly earnest as it was, was the wrestling with time and conscience that formed her decision, ultimately, to stand for the national anthem and express support for Black Lives Matter. Allusions are made to the self-examination she did before the match; the teammates and family members and friends she talked to before and after the game; the ways she strived each day to learn ways she might do better as a proponent for social justice and equality.

Time, in other words, provided Hill with a necessary crucible and corresponding trope through which to contemplate how her expression of tinted dissent might look. This allusion to how the protest might look—or appear—is not to reduce her act to self-serving motives. Instead, Hill enacted a conviction informed by reflection, history, and relationships hewn from difficult conversations and expressions of genuine vulnerability that always inform acts of dissent. Rather than trying to have it both ways, her decision to stand, as conveyed in the texture of the photograph and her apologia, impressed and constituted a principled response to the spontaneous, demonstrative expressions of solidarity on behalf of Black Lives Matter that happened beyond the pitch. Her response, in other words, certainly echoes the spirit of the ways sport may produce what Trimbur (2019) praised as the kinds of “grass-roots level on up” conversations that “necessarily” must be “inter-class, inter-racial, intergenerational, cross-genders, and cross-sport” (pp. 258–259). But my difference from Trimbur, and by extension Butterworth, may be characterized like this: Because Hill did not kneel, and this decision to stand stemmed from bonds of kinship and threads of values whose ends suggested such virtues as duty, honor, service, and sacrifice, and because the solitariness of that stand(ing) seems to suggest a kind of principled rebuttal to the suffocating performance of unity that can obscure examinations of a richer, more nuanced pluralism, I wonder whether and if we may not be squarely facing the ways unity’s gate has swung after Mr. Floyd’s murder, because we generally like the direction it most recently has taken. To be clear: This in no way is to suggest that the breadth of expressions of solidarity with BLM, as these were given voice and resonance in the texture of nonviolent marches and demonstrations over the summer of 2020, in any way are diminished by or made less than because those expressions were made from a cast different from Hill’s. Instead, her stand(ing) proffered a complementary frame, really, I think, an essentially agonistic one, to the extant narrative concerned with athletes, social justice, and protest. If Butterworth rightly asserts that the “presence of the anthem and flag in the U.S. sporting context is predicated on the inherent lack of unity that defines U.S. democratic culture” (p. 463), might it also be advanced that Hill’s standing for the values of an informed, thoughtful patriotism—and a corresponding history and set of commitments—signals we should pay careful attention when cries for unity swing the other way, wrapped in the guise of social justice which can seem totalizing in its specter and assertions?

While Butterworth is right to suggest that the spirit of sports and the impulses of agonism revel in competition and a corresponding, necessary, sense of conflict, the impulse in his article, which leveraged the metaphor of rivalry as a means by which to work through the realization of community (as opposed to unity) belied a curious naivete. This naivete perhaps was best reflected towards the end of the piece, when he maintained,

To the extent that we can think of unity as contingent and provisional, we may be better suited to navigate political conflict. More than a call to rebuild the foundation of American political theory, such a shift of attitude mandates that we see demands for unity as implied threats to social justice. (Butterworth, 2020, p. 466)

Butterworth seems to want citizens to find common cause in giving voice to “shared burdens” (as cited in Grant, 2014, p. 586). This collective work would serve the seemingly noble end of “acknowledging the unavoidability of conflict [as part of navigating] the contingences of democratic life and [thinking] of decision making as a process instead of product. This returns us to the idea of competition as an invitation to collaborate, ‘to strive’ together” (p. 466). Yet just like the commitments to deliberative democracy Butterworth rightly takes to task, so too is a commitment to rivalry, abstracted from the particulars of context and ideology and conviction, just as wanting for its failure to provide a comprehensive heuristic through which to make sense of stern registers of disagreement. Rivals may not wish to annihilate one another as adversaries do, but neither are commitments to trust and shared sacrifice and genuine recognition forthcoming, either. Fans of the St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs have baseball in common, but economics, history, and identity mean that any kind of “striving together” is little more than gestures to things unseen.

If behind seemingly (not so) innocent calls for unity lie proverbial boogeymen who forsake the potential of “ongoing contestation” (Butterworth, 2020, p. 465), what should we make of acts of dissent that seemed bubble-wrapped in gestures of unity qua justice. The opening day ceremonies of Major League Baseball on July 24, 2020 (opening night was held on July 23rd), where no fans were present and the national anthem still was played, provided examples of the ways protest could raise questions about the slipperiness between and among calls for unity, solidarity, and community. Two images provide amplification of this tension. Players for the Cleveland Indians, for example, elected to stand for the anthem and place their right hands over their hearts and their left arms over the shoulder of teammates standing beside them. The Washington Nationals, on the other hand, kneeled during the anthem, bowed their heads in what may be read as a gesture of repentance as they gazed on the black cloth each player held in his hands across the kneeling line made by the team. Both teams, it needs to be noted, proclaimed support for Black Lives Matter. My aim in considering these images here is not to question the choices either team made as part of determining how each would observe Opening Day in the long shadow cast by the murder of George Floyd. Instead, I’m genuinely curious: Are these examples of “unity” that, with Butterworth, preserve the importance of pluralism that define democratic culture? Are these images more fittingly examples of “community”? Perhaps most importantly, how should these examples be reconciled—or not—with the example of Rachel Hill?

It seems important here to be clear about a couple of things. First, I am not subscribing to the mistaken thinking demonstrated by Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler, co-owner of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream who, in response to the league’s early July 2020 pronouncement that it would be “dedicated to social justice with games honoring the Black Lives Matter movement,” projected what might be characterized most generously as a tortuously circular defense of free speech and repudiation of so-called “cancel culture” (Deb, 2020, para. 1). “This isn’t about me,” the Republican Senator pleaded. “This is about every American’s right to speak out…We have this cancel culture that is threatening America and the foundation of it is that American are afraid to speak out because of the cancel culture. And I am not going to be silenced by it” (Deb, 2020, para. 18). The Senator’s understanding of free speech is dispiritingly thin. Second, it remains worthwhile to consider thoughtfully what I have termed here the “conflicted limits” of dissent as these limits are stretched and tested within the crucible of sport. Butterworth’s insistence on sport’s agonistic spirit—rival competitors who fundamentally hold one another with a sense of mutual regard—may be the right model by which to think about question of community and the lens by which to scrutinize calls for unity. But could it also be that acts of social justice brimming with cries of “unity” can work to proffer a specter of unity which, paradoxically, advances a kind of passivity?

If, as Grano and Butterworth (2019) wrote, there has never been and never should be a curtain of separation between sports and politics, it seems the case now that the politics of dissent is richly complicated by the stature, standing, and platform which athletes occupy, a reach and notoriety unlike anything in the history of modern sports. This seeming celebrity status does not mean, by the way, that athletes should “shut up and dribble.” Instead, the onus seems most put-upon students of sports and social justice: How should we discriminate between and among political performances on the sporting pitch, court, and field? In particular, what should we make of gestures of dissent that seem not expressions against an entrenched status quo but instead poke at hegemonic manifestations of social justice cloaked in the garb of unity? Jackson and colleagues (2020) maintain what seems a healthy pluralism; likewise, Butterworth (2020) embraces the spirit of the agon as that spirit may suggest opportunities for intellectual striving. If the sincerity of these commitments is beyond doubt, less clear is what it means to take seriously the telos of the intervention Jackson et al. imagine. If the special issue brought to the “surface original critical questions in new emerging contexts,” it nevertheless must be faced squarely that persistent attention to the ways “communication and sport serve to uphold, challenge, contest, and negotiate dominant narratives within sociopolitical structures” (Jackson et al., 2020, p. 442) may create conditions whereby scholarly judgments that express reluctance to participate in such a chorus may be pushed aside. Like Hill’s solitary stance, scholars who raise questions around issues of judgment and professionalism, decorum and conviction, may find themselves standing, curiously, alone.

George Floyd, Sport, and the Conflicted Politics of Protest

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator?

Among many features, what made Professor Butterworth’s article so important to this moment for scholars of communication and sport was the pressure it put on all of us to think critically about the limits of unity. As he wrote, the essay was “less about Kaepernick than it is about the collective response to his activism. As we all seek communicative avenues to pursuing social justice within and through sport, it is clear that uncritical demands for unity fail to account for or resolve the legitimate causes of disruption and dissent” (Butterworth, 2020, p. 467). Might, then, the flip side hold as well? That is, what should we think about—how should we judge—overt, relentless demands for the pursuit of social justice as these conflate the myriad of values that drive the entertainment-sporting juggernaut? Judgment, of course, was central to the essay introducing the special issue on sport and social justice. For Jackson et al., in fact, at stake was nothing short of the very judgment of a field of scholarly inquiry, one inflected by a disposition they characterized as attempting to center scholarship around a “meaningful communication and sport with the intent to displace, decentralize, and disrupt” (2020, p. 441).

Butterworth and Jackson and colleagues undoubtedly recognize, honor, and respect modes of scholarly inquiry characterized by different dispositions and emphases. Such pluralism should be among the hallmarks of scholarly activity. And yet unity may be a cruel and rather unforgiving tonic. That is, if causes for social justice are ones we “all [should] seek” (Butterworth, 2020, p. 467), what kinds of limits may be placed on critical examinations of sport that seek not to emulate dispositions in keys of social justice, but instead strive to ask difficult questions and advance difficult judgments about “mobilization, protest, and dissent and of activist-oriented scholarship” (Jackson et al., 2020, p. 440). These questions, importantly, would not give countenance to anti-Black racism but might contest the suffocating limits of unity wrapped in cries for social justice. But can we embrace the potential and possibilities in such dissent or would we ever-see it clothed in the mindless militarism and faux-unity that have become easy targets in recent scholarship. Said another way, after George Floyd, dare we stand with Rachel Hill?

I began this essay keen to respond to Butterworth’s analysis on the limits of unity within the crucible of sport. That analysis rightly underscored that the sharpest critical tools should be applied to understanding the dynamics of power, positionality, and consensus. Like commitments to deliberative democracy about which Butterworth is also skeptical, unity can be wrapped in suffocating abstractions for their “own sake without taking account of the cause[s] of political division or their variable forms of legitimacy” (Butterworth, 2020, p. 456). Questions of legitimacy should invite rigorous and diverse kinds of answers. Wenner’s reflection on the field is instructive: sport is “an appealing and seductive cultural artifact and scholars can be blinded not only by their enthusiasm for and affinities with sport but also to where they are actually standing in their scholarly inquiry” (Wenner, 2015, p. 257). Butterworth shows well how we might take seriously the potential of the agon and how this potential, inflected by the vitality of rivalry as modeled in sport, might promote a kind of doubling-down on genuine contestation, thereby forsaking the easy unity that asks so little of us.

As I noted above, so much about Butterworth’s analysis is astute, informed, and pointedly correct. And, in truth and respectfully, it is not hard to argue against ossified cries for unity that re-inscribe the privileges generally accorded white men. The recent spate of athlete-activism perhaps is the embodiment of the kind of utopia Trimbur (2019) so eagerly imagined, given as it has been to the “dual actions of generating dissent and creating possibility [to] provide hope in a moment of intolerant politics [which] are crucial in a moment of otherwise despairing social conditions” (p. 262). Future research should embrace this moment, giving attention to the performative dynamics of this recent activism and the ways it has prompted reckonings not only with anti-Black racism but with the very fundamental (and fundamentally flawed) insistence that protests within and across sport must, on behalf of a misconstrued unity, ascribe to what Franklyn Haiman once observed in the late 1960s as among the common method by which to discipline protests (though surely the Foucauldian gesture was not part of his article’s impulse), reminding students of dissent that such methods of discipline and objection hinged on the idea that, “in an orderly society, there must be prescribed and proscribed times, places, and manners of protest” (as cited in Martin & McHendry, 2016, pp. 97–98). And future research also may consider the ways dissent across the sporting landscape shows itself as counter-intuitive gestures of unity for social justice. Such examinations may serve to remind us of the difficult, necessary challenges a commitment to substantive pluralism places before us.

As I was finishing this essay, Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man and father of six children, ages 3 to 12, was shot in the back seven times by police officers in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in late August, as he was trying to get into his vehicle. The shooting left him paralyzed below the waist (Eligon et al., 2020). Within days of the shooting, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly drove across state lines from Illinois with an AR-15 assault rifle to protect businesses and counterdemonstrators from the peaceful protests in response to Mr. Blake’s shooting. Rittenhouse killed two persons and wounded a third (Bosman & Mervosh, 2020). The media response quickly shifted focus from the horrific police shooting of Mr. Blake to Rittenhouse’s homicidal acts. When this shift occurred, players in the WNBA and NBA went on strike, electing not to play scheduled games over a three-day period (Weinreb, 2020). Major League Baseball teams also chose not to play (ESPN News, 2020). The unity of these responses is both remarkable and inspiring. Isn’t it? And I remain convicted to ideas whose shape and weight I cannot fully hold yet seem important to try to name, or at the very least to ask: How best to make distinctions between and among such calls for unity? Is there something easy about chastising Robert Kraft and Jerry Jones and praising Angel McCoughtry and Nneka Ogwumike? What, finally, should be the place of our dispositions as we strive to generate scholarship that wrestles against the comfort of our political convictions? If conscience compels us to strike out on our own, turning our backs not only on our legislators but even on our friends and neighbors and colleagues gathering under the umbrella of protest, whose clamorings for “social justice” seem recently to have assumed a kind of totalizing logic, what, finally, does it mean to take a stand?