Taking a Knee with Malcolm Gladwell

Sports have always been political, despite what some fans might like to believe. So what role should athletes play in political movements? Malcolm Gladwell joins Ben and Khalil to discuss the history of activism in sports, including his recent podcast, Legacy of Speed, about Tommie Smith and John Carlos – two Black sprinters who raised their fists in protest at the 1968 Olympic Games. 

Listen to Legacy of Speed at pushkin.fm, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Push it. Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, I'm already taking a knee.
I'm already on one knee. I don't think I've ever

(00:35):
told you this, but my entire childhood I could not
sing the national anthem or do the Pledge of Allegiance
in school because growing up in the Nation of Islam,
when I was a kid in grammar school, that was
like we were just instructed from day one, Man, you
do not do it. That was my version of taking
a knee before there ever was a Colin Kaepernick. Man,

(00:55):
I'm with you. I'm Khalil Jebn Muhammed. I'm Ben Austin.
We're two best friends, one black, one white. I'm a
historian and I'm a journalist. And this is some of
my best friends are Some of my best friends are athletes.

(01:15):
In this show, we wrestle with the challenges and the
absurdities of a deeply divided and unequal country. And today
we have the franchise player for Pushkin Industries on our show,
the one and only Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm Gladwell Outliers coming
inside with us. We are going to talk to him

(01:37):
about sports and activism and how politics and athletics. They intersect.
Let's get into it. Game time. That's right, Game time, man, Malcolm.

(01:58):
It is so amazing to have you on the podcast.
We have been, uh, we've been We've been thinking about
this moment for years now. So I'm very flattered. That's
just that's just how old I am. People can think
about me for years. We are obviously excited to actually
have you in house in studio today. Thank you. And

(02:18):
one of the things we wanted to talk about today
is about athletes, sports and politics. And maybe a good
way to start is your great podcast, The Legacy of Speed,
and it tells the story of the nineteen sixty eight
Olympic Games and the track stars, the sort of unlikely
track stars from San Jose State, and maybe maybe you

(02:39):
could give us a quick synopsis of what happened in
nineteen sixty eight in the nineteen sixty eight Olympics and
why it's it's so important for understanding sports and politics. Yeah,
it's um. In nineteen sixty eight, the you know there
there were all these great college teams. Maybe the most
iconic sports team of that era was the San Jose State.

(03:01):
San Jose State track team UM coach by gun named Budwinter,
who was this legendary sprint coach, and he takes this
gear commuter school because he has these new ideas about sprinting,
but how to sprint him run fast for a time.
He has a track team which has not just the
best sprinters in America, but the best sprinters in the world,

(03:22):
like multiple world record holders on one team, and several
members of that team are the ones who stage the
famous protest in Mexico City and with a we remember
on the stand of the of the two hundred beaters,
Tommy Smith and John Carlos raised their clenched fists right

(03:47):
as that iconic photograph. Um, well, Tommy Smith and John
Carlos were Bud Winter Runners. They were members of that
of that fable track team, and so it's like, it's
this really fascinating moment in sports. It has these incredible
cultural ramifications. So so black athletes, African American athletes, they

(04:09):
come in first and third in the two hundred. They're
wearing black leather gloves and they raise their fists above
them and it's like you said, it's one of the
most iconic images in sports. Yeah, that's right. One of
the things that and listening to the podcast and you're
visiting this moment, is is really learning about Harry Eetwards.
I'd love for you to say one more thing about
Harry Eetwards as someone who helped to make some of

(04:32):
this possible. So Edwards is also a San Jose guys.
He's on a part of that same track team. He's
a little older than the others, but he's the one
he sort of articulates a kind of philosophy, an ideology
of sports. People thought about sports as a kind of pasttime,

(04:52):
and he said, no, no, no no, what sports are a
kind of reflection of society's deepest beliefs, of its values,
of it that participating in sports can be as political
an act as demonstrating in the streets. I mean, he
was he articulately, it's a whole of sport as being
something that's embedded in the fabric of society. You can

(05:13):
study sport and learn about a society no one that
had not occurred to anyone before. As incredible as that
sounds today. So Harry Edwards goes and gets his PhD
in sociology and becomes the kind of he's kind of
the philosopher of this movement, and he's at the center.
He was at the center of the nineteen sixty eight protests.
He's the guy who's behind the scenes bringing these athletes together,

(05:36):
trying to figure out what should our response be to
you know, the does as a black athlete have a
responsibility to say something in face of the kind of
not just racial oppression at home, but racial oppression around
the world. But then Harry Edwards goes on and you
can't find a political protest involving sports to this present

(06:00):
day that doesn't have his fingerprints on it. I mean,
he's just well, I want to unpack that moment and
its legacy particularly has been an eye like yourself, come
of age. You know, we are primarily seventies babies. We
become teenagers in the nineteen eighties, and we're tennis kids.
That was our childhood sport. In some ways, that's how
we met, playing high school tennis together and in sort

(06:25):
of thinking about my own sense of like who were
sports heroes that had a political consciousness. We also grew
up in the same neighborhood as Muhammad Ali wait Muhammad
Ali is living in Chicago, or Muhammad Ali owned a
home across the street. As you know, my great grandfathers,
Elijah Muhammad. They lived on the same block. So yes,

(06:45):
I didn't know that. I remember seeing him outside the
computer store where Khalil and I met, and you know,
his Parkinson's might have already begun, and he had these
fists that were the size of like Catcher's mits, and
he was just sort of fooling around. Everyone's like, hey, champage,
champ and he would just like throw a jab and
it looked like a lightning flash. Yeah. Yeah, so we
so we you know, we have these personal encounters with

(07:08):
these sports grades and and perhaps none more significant at
the intersection of sports and politics than Muhammad Ali. Yeah.
And by the time we are coming of age in
the eighties and nineties, it's just a completely different political
time and a different political time for athletes, right, Like
that made me think of Michael Jordan. So we're growing
up in Chicago. We have the great fortune as sports

(07:29):
fans to be like in middle school when Michael Jordan
starts with the Bulls and to see him evolve into
the greatest maybe athlete of all time. And you know
what a ridiculous thing to root for this team where
like they're going to win all the time, because they
have this guy, you know, Superman. But but you know,
I've been doing all this work about this killing in
nineteen ninety two where a seven year oldest shot to death.

(07:50):
And in the nineties it's actually the highest murder rate
in Chicago of all time. And you know, crack epidemic
is raging, there's so much there's this seven year old
is killed, and it's sort of like set into motion
this conversation about what to do and Michael Jordan nobody
on the bull nobody says anything. I mean, there's not

(08:11):
and there's I don't even think there's a demand to
say anything. It's so far from the discourse of that time.
You know, Michael Jordan has this famous comment right around
then when there's a Senate race in North Carolina where
he's from, and there's an arch conservative running against a
black candidate, and he says, Republicans buy sneakers too, meaning
I'm not going to say anything. And I like, yeah,

(08:32):
maybe throw this back at you, Malcolm. You know, it's
thinking about the ways that the athletes and politics actually
reflect their times, you know, rather than sort of shaping
the times. We very rapidly go from an euro where
people are demanding of black athletes like Arthur Ash or

(08:52):
cream Abdul Jabar or those sprinters in sixty eight or
Muhammad al either demanding that they be kind of complicit
in social change. And we in a space of not
a generation, I mean have a generation. Yeah, you get
you get Jordan who who you know, his alignments are

(09:13):
completely different. He's and he's able to say. I mean,
I think Charles Barkley, remember that the I am not
a role model, not a role model says, He explicitly
declines to take up that particular burden and makes and
both of them, I think are making a justifiable argument,
which is in addition to all the other burdens I

(09:36):
have to bear. Why do I have to do this?
I'm just an athlete. I you know, I got a
lot of my played already, and you want me to
battle these things that are bigger than me and outside myself.
Do I agree with that? Not necessarily? I understand it though. Yeah.
And I also it's funny because this has been but Malcolm,
it's also it's corporate test. It's not just it's not

(09:57):
just like my craft, right, I mean that even the
Charles Barkley thing that he said was part of a
Nike advertisement campaign. Like it's sort of like I got mine, Yeah,
But I mean what they're asking is to be treated
the same way a white athlete is treated. No one
asked Peyton Manning to speak up against speak out against,
you know, climate changer. More than that, Peyton Manning is

(10:20):
from New Orleans, a place with as serious of social
problems as you can find in the United States of America.
I guarantee you no one has ever said to Peyton,
how do you feel about the fact that New Orleans
has got you know, murder rates that are through the
roof and dysfunctional this and that and so. Like if
I'm a black athlete and I'm watching that, I sort of,

(10:42):
you know, I have great sympathy for them who say,
you know what, why why does Peyton get to watch?
Why does Tom Bradley get to Tom Brady? Tom Brady
get to you know, he tom Brady is rewarded more
than that. He is deified for his singular focus on
the game of football. They say, of demand or no distractions,

(11:03):
the game, you know, and everything that's all about. His
greatness is summed up by his complete and utter motion
of football. When a black athlete does that. They're like, well,
you know you're ignoring your community, You're not. At a
certain point that double standard becomes intolerable for these guys,
and Barkley Barkley and Jordan's just saying, you know, effort like,

(11:26):
I'm sick of this, and I so to see where
they're coming from. I do get the double standard. I'm
with you a thousand percent on that. I think the
difference is that Peyton Manny doesn't represent a community that's
metaphorically speaking underwater in New Orleans. I mean the country
we live in is the presumption this has Ben's I

(11:47):
think point about a corporate ethos is that Brady's an
extension of the franchise. He is the franchise, and the
franchise makes its money by not pissing off it's millions
of fans, and so the only people who really have
something to lose are the black people who see this
representative figure who has a platform and a voice to
actually say something because people are literally in the streets. Yeah,

(12:10):
I'm working on this book about Los Angeles Black Los
Angeles in the thirties, forties and fifties, and it's a
kind of meta biography of Tom Bradley, and Bradley's part
of this group of athletes that are at UCLA in
the thirties, among them Jackie Robinson. Jackie Robinson is his classmate.

(12:32):
All these really interesting. They're a very very small group
with them, and all of them face a version of
this choice in their life and in this in their
case it's many of them are. A couple of members
of this group are Olympians and their Olympics is thirty
six do we go to the Nazi Olympics? Right, same
same question that we're revisiting in sixty eight, just with
different cast of characters, and they're all asked to resolve

(12:54):
this question of what is my what is the appropriate
path I ought to take in the world to express
my anger at the way my people are being treated.
And the thing that the idea that I'm most interested
in is the mistake we make is in assuming there's
only one path and there's multiple paths. And at the

(13:19):
end of the day, you can we can look at
someone like Michael Jordan twenty years out and we can say,
did Michael actually do more for Black America by playing
the role he did than if he had been outspoken.
Not everyone has to be outspoken. If no one was outspoken,
if not a single black person of cultural authority was

(13:42):
saying anything in the nineties about anything to do with racism,
then I would say, Michael, you got a problem. But
there are people who were saying stuff, and Michael was saying,
I'm going to try and make my case in a
different way. I'm going to confront whatever demons were faced
with as a people using my own strategy, which is

(14:02):
to demonstrate that a black man can be the hardest
working and smartest man on the basketball court. Malcolm, that's
really interesting this set of choices and using Michael Jordan
as a kind of example. We know from legacy of
speed that you have some ideas about this. So after
the break we want to hear more about these choices
and how they make a difference in the larger struggle

(14:24):
for racial justice. We'll be right back after the break.
Welcome back to some of my best friends are today.
Our guest is Malcolm Gladwell. We are talking sports, politics,
activism and justice. And Malcolm, so you were just telling

(14:46):
us about Michael Jordan's choices to be the best and
the hardest working basketball player in history and that that
feels to you like also a contribution to some form
of politics. So talk to us a little bit about
some of what you learned in your work on legacy
of Speed, about the different choices that people have when

(15:08):
it comes to trying to make a difference. So we've
got we have three examples in a sixty eight Games
of how African Americans chose to chose to express their
anger at the way they were being cheated in the
way that you know black people around the world are

(15:29):
being treated. One approach is the approach that was taken
by people like Tommy Smith, which is will go and
we will make a public protest in front of the
entire world, so we're we're not going to turn our
back on the the institution of the Olympics as problematic
and troubled and racist and whatever as it is. We'll

(15:50):
go and make a stand when we're there. Second approach
is what Kreem Abdul Jabbar does. And remember Kreem doesn't
go to Kream would have won a gold medal betting
Boycott's he stays home, right. The third approach is to
go and just to behave like everyone else. Michael Jordan's approach.
Michael Jordan, Right, those are your options, um and and

(16:11):
Malcolm you cite in in the Legacy of Speed. You
cite a source for this, a book that has sort
of presented these three three choices of opposition fame. It's
the It's the Um, the famous book by by the
economist Alberto Hirshman, one of my one of my favorite,
not just mine, many people's favorite thinker of the twentieth centuries.
He writes this brilliant book called Exit, Voice and Loyalty,

(16:36):
which is really about this question. You have options. These
are the three options that are available to you. You You
can go along with it. You can you can leave.
You can you can if you don't like your public schools,
you can give up and homeschool your kid or moved
to the suburbs. You can go to school board meetings
and speak up and say I'm angry. Or you can
just keep your mouth shut and hope things get better.

(16:57):
Those are your choices, right, And there's a case to
be made for all three choices. At various point Alberto
Hirshman happens to like what he calls Voice. He thinks
that going to the Olympics and speaking up is the
right move. But he's not dismissive. I'm not going to
sit here and tell you that krime Abdul Jabbar made
the wrong decision sixty eight that was consistent with who

(17:20):
he is. He's someone who's deeply thoughtful and principled, and
he personally could not square his participation in those games
with his beliefs. And although although Malcolm you you, you
kind of do make the case against it, in a
way in Legacy of Speed, you remind us that none
of us remember that he boycotted the sixty eight Olympics. Yeah,

(17:40):
but he didn't. It wasn't lasting. It didn't make change
for him. Like as an individual it made sense, but
in terms of affecting change right like it's but I
don't think who I guess I would say to critique
my own position in it, I've now I've rethought this. Actually,
since Speed did Legacy of Speed interressing in my new book,

(18:01):
I'm much more sympathetic to those who make different choices
than speaking up. The cream had gone to sixty eight
and spent the rest of his life second guessing his decision,
then I think that would have been a tragedy. It's
not who he is, right, like, everyone has to be free.
One of the things, one of the tragic things of

(18:26):
the way we judge the angry and the dispossessed is
not only do we judge them for being at the bottom,
we also judge them for the ways in which they
try to come up from the bottom. And we create
this hierarchy of options for them, and we say, the
noblest thing for the disadvantage to do is to speak

(18:47):
out bravely, right, and the least noble is for them
to meekly go along, to be a kind of Uncle Tom.
And my point is that that's just as unfair as
the old system. You can't judge people for how they
choose to respond to everyone is. As long as someone
is thoughtful about the decision they're trying to make, I
am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

(19:07):
I mean, this is this is a really interesting dilemma,
and I'm glad we're talking through it, because admittedly I'm
taken with Bill Roden's provocative thesis in the book he
wrote several years ago called forty Million Dollars Slave, which
essentially tells the history of the commodification of black talent

(19:29):
in sports that black people for most of the history
of the twentieth century, and competitive professional sports have been
used for the purposes of creating wealth on behalf of
the owners of these sports teams in every field of
sports endeavor, and that at a certain point, their ability

(19:50):
to use sports, say Jackie Robinson, to do something that
transforms society, is stymied in part because the financial rewards
shutting up and dribbling becomes so great that people no
longer can attach any kind of social mission to their

(20:12):
sports athleticism, and he sees this as a loss despite
what I think your bigger point is that some people
are built to do a certain kind of thing well,
even within a socially charged context. Michael Jordan may never
actually have been the right person to be a spokesperson.
I think that's probably right, and that Korean Abdul Jabbar

(20:34):
found his voice outside of the arena eventually, and so
maybe he needed to do his best there to create
that space. I'm okay with that. But I do think
that this other context is real and meaningful, and that
money matters in terms of the choices at athletes today
make about their their politics. Please, I was gonna say,
I wanted to go back to that comment and made
about Michael Jordan setting a standard for being the hardest

(20:59):
working and smartest guy in the court. And I don't
think that's a trivial accomplishment. And I say this because
I read I forgot where I read it. I was
reading through some academic journals and I came across the study,
brilliant study in which they simply they went through, I
mean thousands of hours of NCAA tournament basketball announcing footage

(21:24):
from announcers talking and just tried to just did that thing,
you know, and this has been done before. Were they saying,
when we're talking about a black player's accomplishment, what are
the adjectives we use? And when we're talking about a
white player, And it's like, and it's smart for a
white player, it's smart for a white player, and it's
athletic and it's emotional for the black player. And I

(21:45):
looked at that and I say, you know what, we
have such a long way to go even now, and
we fool ourselves that we're in this luxurious position now
where our athletes can we can ask our athletes to
debate the fine points of legislation before the Congress, and
I would say, you know what, in most cases, that
is way fucking premature, Like there is an awful lot

(22:05):
of room for someone like Jordan coming along and proving
to a lot of people who are that who are
carrying around some unexamined prejudices in their heart about what
black people can or can't do, and proving to them that,
you know what, I am both the most physically talented
person on the floor, but also the hardest working and
also the smartest. And I wonder if that contribution isn't

(22:29):
in retrospect incalculable. I'm gonna put another spin on that study,
which and thinking about it, which in another read of
that is that sports is inherently political, right, you can
say that it's it is like, you know, this pure
just you know, space where people compete and it's outside
the realm of politics and sociology and all these other

(22:52):
things that if we're even when we're you know, you
just describe the even even the lens that people through
see sports, it's racialized, it's politicized. And you know, I
think a lot about the Olympic Games and sort of
the idealization of human achievement. You know, excellence and to
think about that kind of excellence without thinking about all
of our failings and hypocrisy, like they go hand in hand,

(23:14):
right or or I think about baseball, I sort of
did writing about baseball earlier in my career and thinking
about a kind of the gauzy way that that baseball
is imagined as sort of Americana and you could only
sort of see it as this kind of uh, you know,

(23:35):
pre racialized past, like a lot of baseball literature to
sort of escape racism, imagine something like, you know, like
shoeless Joe needs to imagine nineteen nineteen in some corn
fields when it's not racialized. It's so wrapped up in
some idea of American exceptionalism and some dreamy idea of

(23:56):
America that not, you know, it's it contains all of
its hypocrisies. It's like you have to sort of start
digging in there. What's absent, what has to be excluded? Ye,
you can't see the two without without you know, without
grappling with these with these issues, I mean, and the
whole thing is heightened by the fact that thirty years ago,

(24:19):
sports was just one of a number of different areas
in which we conducted a national conversation. Now it is
the only area that's interesting. It's the only mass it's
the only mass media phenomenon left is that in politics,
and politics is like, that's impossible. The only way we
can have honest conversations. It strikes me about these things

(24:41):
is basically it's basketball and it's football. So it's like, well,
these things are these things are freighted. Now, Yeah, that's
a really interesting transition to just talking about contemporary moment
and particularly the NFL U and I have two things
I want to bring up here. One is that just
your point about the weight of racist stereotypes that still

(25:04):
animate sports commentary in live sports today. We all just
witness how the contest between the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen
Hurts and Patrick Mahomes, the first two black quarterbacks to
square off in the NFL, is itself part of this
historical context that the role of the quarterback. We talked
a lot about Brady Peyton Manny, the role of the

(25:25):
quarterback has always been the brains of the team. And
here for the first time in history, not because we
watched it, but because we talked about it, because it
was part of the story because the media kept coming
back to it. What does it mean that we now
have these two outstanding black quarterbacks in the Super Bowl? Yeah,
it's I mean, it's uh, you know so the question,

(25:47):
the question is, was that another kind of watershed when
it's to your point. It's to your point about that
media now in the study that right, if we were
some if we were in some other version of America
in the future, this would not have been a media frame. Yeah,
I think that's right. I think but perhaps the most
famous black quarterback which I think we should talk about

(26:09):
is Colin Kaepernick in light of more recent times around
this question of sports and activism and one of the
things that's crazy about Colin Kaepernick. I'm pretty sure this
is true that Harry Edwards, who advises the guys in
nineteen sixty eight, also advises Colin Kaepernick. He's advising Colin
Kaepernick in twenty sixteen. Yeah. Like it's both inspiring and

(26:33):
also like, man, is there only one like guy like this?
It's like, is there really that little like active? Going
back to the same guy, Yeah, Yeah, he's the Yoda
of professional sports. Well he's a Bay Area guy, so yeah,
a lot of that is about that. Um that, well,
there's several you know, there's a friend of mine. I'm
gonna I'm gonna kind of tacitly name drop. I have

(26:54):
a very fancy finance friend who went to a The
height of that Bernie made off right, No, no, no, no, no.
The height of all this was that some meeting with
a number of NFL owners and my friend is not
a football fan, not even know the slightest thing. She's
not even from this country. She comes back to me
and she says, who is this guy Kaepernick keeper something? Oh,

(27:19):
they were talking about him at this this It was
like a you know, a little reception um and she
said the things they were the kind of she came
back completely appalled by the kind of race racist language
being used to describe this person who she'd never heard of.
She didn't know a different which I kind of always
knew that NFL owners were bad in that sense, but

(27:44):
that was like, Okay, this is a completely un This
is a completely objective observer who's dropped into a candid
situation with a bunch of owners and they are they
are talking shit about college years after. The whole thing
is not two years ago. This is not twenty seventeen,
two years ago, and they can't you know, they hate

(28:05):
this guy, which I had not. I have to say
I was a little surprise. I didn't realize the extent
to which there was a continuing animus towards him. And
just to remind listeners that in twenty sixteen, in the
wake of several police shootings of black men, Colin Kaepernick
decides during the playing of the national anthem during a

(28:26):
game to nil, to not stand. And this is sort
of triggers this this animus that you're describing. Yeah, and
by the way, I mean, there's so many things that
arens about the Colin kaepernthick in retrospect, it's not inherently
disrespectful to the national anthem. To kneel is a respectful position.
You're not on your cell phone, You're not like, you're

(28:48):
not listening to music, You're like so like he's respecting
the moment so much that he's using it to make
what he believes to be an even more important statement.
You know, I you speaking of a friend who had
this experience recently with the racism of the NFL owners
towards Kaepernick. In twenty seventeen, one of my students teaching
at the Kennedy School. I have a lot of really

(29:10):
influential students, and one of them was working for an
owner and therefore made a recommendation that they talk to me.
They're like, you know, my professor is a race whisperer.
Maybe you guys can learn something from him. You're gonna
be like, like, Harry, you're a juniors. That's this is
my coming out moment. That's what I am revealing here.
So you want to let you know that Harriet Edwards

(29:33):
is not the only game in town anymore. So I
meet with about four people, all of them African American men,
and some are corporate, some are union, but all of
them are earnest and thoughtful. And what I tell them
is essentially, how absurd is it that we wrap American
patriotism and militarism into sports athletic contests in the first place,

(29:56):
And secondarily, um, what does it mean for an employer
to require this genuflection to American patriotism as a condition
of work? And that the best option going fall word
is to either remind everyone that it is not a
requirement to take a position that as an employer, while

(30:17):
we have this tradition. It is not a condition of
your employment or to stop it all together, because, as
I said to them, I would never expect to go
to my workplace, whether it's Harvard or some other university
or college, and as a matter of daily ritual, I
have to sing the national anthem. I mean, it's actually
absurd when you think about it. Of course, it didn't

(30:38):
actually happen that way. But what did happen was, for
a time, as we all know, there was some general
acceptance that some players would kneel, some players wouldn't kneel,
and they sort of ride out the storm. Yeah, all right,
we're going to take a break and we'll be back
with more from Malcolm Gladwell, here's what I'd love to

(31:10):
do with you, you guys, which is, if you're Colin
Kaepernick and you're doing it again, do you do it differently?
I'm wondering whether did he And I don't remember enough
of the specifics of the case, but I'm wondering whether
is there a way he could have explained himself before

(31:30):
he took any action that would have made his protest
more meaningful and more widely and less divisive. Yeah? Is he? Yeah? Yeah?
You go ahead, No, no, no, and no, because well,
well it's not it's not just my own politics. Um. Look,

(31:51):
it was the early days of the Trump administration, and
so everything we know now means that whatever we thought
was the limits of white supremacist rhetoric, white nationalist organizing
only matta ostasized since that moment. And at the end

(32:12):
of the day, you know, what Trump was doing was
like fire that bastard and stoking up the political base
was really just speaking to millions of NFL white fans,
both in the stadium and on television, who were feeling
even more powerful and legitimate in their discomfort at best

(32:35):
and hatred at worst towards Kaepernick. So I'm not sure
there was any explanation that was a substantive, thoughtful, rich, factual,
logical critique of policing that would have changed the outcome. Okay,
second question for you, Khalil, since you're on a roller,
does it make a difference if Kaepernick's really good? Yes,

(32:58):
I do think it makes a difference. I think it
makes a difference later, not initially, I think he would
have suffered the stigma of being this radical, bad for
the team's image, bad for the politics of sports and
White America. But I think he would have gotten picked
up shortly after the dust settle, maybe a year, maybe

(33:19):
two years. But if he was considered one of the
top five quarterbacks in the NFL, I think he would
have gotten a job. So if Patrick Mahomes takes a
knee in twenty twenty three, what happens? Hmm? This is
funny because first of all, he works for a team
that does the racist, fucking tomahawk chalk chalk, So so

(33:46):
I think he might actually not make it out of
the stadium alive. I mean, to be consistent with his
own with his own team and stadiums politics. Uh, that's
a good question. I mean, the NFL has already affirmed right,
so that Roger Goodell, whether whether truthfully or just performatively,

(34:07):
said Colin Kaepernick was right. We should have backed him
up on this. So does that make a difference in
twenty twenty three amongst other owners and the politics today,
It's hard to say. You know, you know, Malcolm mcclear.
I've been thinking about this in terms of Drew Brees,
the quarterback for the New Orleans Saints who recently retired,

(34:27):
because he was in the news because he spoke at
the Republican Congressional like gathering, and you know, thinking about
like one man, I sort of always liked Drew Brees,
you know, just as an idea. And if I had
known this about him, you know, how would I have
felt differently? Because I knew we were going to have
this talk about athletes and politics and making a choice

(34:48):
as an athlete of coming out for something is going
to alienate a lot of people no matter what, no
matter which side you come out on. So his his
activism is actually on the conservative side. And then I
was reminded that he spoke out after Colin Kaepernick took
a knee, and initially he came out and said, you know,
you have to respect the flag. I have parents who

(35:09):
fought in grandparents who fought in World War Two. And
he got all this backlash from fellow from his teammates,
and he came back out again and said, listen, I
spoke to my teammates and they corrected me. You know,
they kind of schooled me. I learned something that idea
that a community, you imagine a team of people talking
of different races, and that they're they're kind of educating

(35:31):
one another as a kind of. I mean, this is
where sports is the metaphor for society. You think about
that as society where like people can make change in
that way. I like that part of it. Yeah. So
were the Christian right historically stayed out of politics, right,
They didn't touch it, and we this was something that

(35:54):
in retrospect lots and lots and lots of progressive types lauded.
We thought that was good. And then they got super
involved in politics, and there was all manner of hand
ringing and such from liberals who said, what are they
doing to their religious purpose? They're calling their institutions their
legitimacy by mixing God with with with Mammon. And Um,

(36:20):
I'm wondering. So if I was going to play um
devil's advocate here, Um, why wouldn't we think the same
way about sports? What is wrong with the assumption that
something is lost when someone takes sports and mixes it
with contemporary political issues? This is the slavery avery argument argument? Right,

(36:43):
Slavery Area is the head of the Olympic committee in
sixty A. Right, who's American? Who's so racist that he
gets the nicknames slavery? Slavery? Avery? Argumentum? Although I think
that there's a there's a way of doing this with
expressing it with more nuance, which is um. So let

(37:03):
me go back to this book I'm writing. One of
the things I'm really interested in why Tom Bradley fascinates
me is that Tom Bradley is someone who grows up
in nineteen thirties Los Angeles with a grievance and essentially
waits fifty years to express his grievance. Super interesting. He
basically hides it inside and says, Okay, I could I

(37:25):
could stand up and I could make a big fuss
about this in nineteen forty four in on Central Avenue.
But I'm never going to be elected mayor of Los
Angeles if I'm doing that. I'm never even going to
get out of Central Avenue if I'm doing that. So
what I'm going to do is I'm going to hide
it inside, and I'm going to wait and wait and
wait and wait and wait and wait and wait until
I think it's appropriate to speak up. Now, he turns out,

(37:46):
he waits until Rodney King to say anything. But and
what's the specific grievance that he says? Remind us his
grievances with the LAPD okay, because he becomes a police officer, remember,
and spends the first half of his career as a
police officer. And I, you know, a lot of what
we're doing is we're asking athletes. The issue is not

(38:09):
whether athletes or people in positions of cultural prominence use
that platform in one way where or another for the
good of their people or for society. I think everyone
we're all in agreement they should do that. The issue
is when should they do it and how should they
do it? And I here's another of my little worries.

(38:29):
One of my little worries is that we're way too
focused on people speaking out immediately and not respectful enough
of someone who might be playing the long game. The
one thing we let people in positions of privilege do
is play the long game. The white guys get to
play the long game, right, They play the multigenerational game.

(38:50):
And everybody's fine with that. Black guy stands up and
wants to play a multigenerational game, and everyone's like, oh,
you've betrayed your people. Why have you said something? And
you're twenty three years old, Like bullshit. Find me. Find
me a privileged white person who is expected to speak
out in a sophisticated political manner the age of twenty three.
It does not exist. What I love about this, Malcolm

(39:13):
is like my my love of mj of Michael Jordan.
He's about to come out. He's gonna sell, He's gonna
sell the Charlotte UH team and he is he's a radical.
Take his two billion and give it to an HBCU
and it's a new Michael society. But two quick things.
One Malcolm too, you ask your a question about the
Christian right. Um, I actually reject the premise of the question. Um,

(39:36):
religion has always sad. Yeah, yeah, and so so you know,
the social Gospel tradition obviously is from the left position.
But there's never not been a time when religious leaders
didn't care about politics and speak to it as such.
The other thing is, you've now given me so much hope,
so much anticipation, such a strong belief now that Sasha

(39:59):
and Malia Obama are the generational change that we that
we want to see. That the yes we can of
Barack crou saying Obama of keeping that little angry black man,
that that that Lucius alternate ego inside, keeping that angry
black man inside all this time, even through all the
shit of Donald Trump and the madness of this country,
it's still inside. And what it's really about is his

(40:22):
two daughters. They are multi generational. This reminds me of something.
I want to come back to Harp on this point
because I think it's a really important one. Years ago,
when I was doing my book Outliers, I had this
fascinating conversation with someone who had studied the rise of
Jewish lawyers, and he made this really interesting argument. He

(40:44):
was like, and it's the argument I make in the book,
which is that was a three generation phenomenon. The immigrants
came and worked in the garment industry, their kids became
merchants of one kind another, and it was their kids
who went to law school. So it was three generations
to go to a public city college kind of law school.

(41:05):
Not it was four generations to go to the ivating schools.
And his he was making his argument about about black people,
and he was saying, the mistake we make is when
we judge the success of our inventions is we forget
that even even the Jewish community in America was a
four generation phenomenon to get to the upper uh ranks

(41:26):
of the of the of and this is white people, right.
I mean, at a time when there actually were highly
functional public institutions helping lower middle class white people get ahead.
So it's like the deck was stacked in favor of
that group, and it was still four generations. And so
let me give you another example. So I look at
someone like Steph Curry and I see, uh, well, Steph

(41:48):
is it is it We're at least we're I don't
know about his grandfather, but at least his father del
is like a guy who made a fortune in the
National Basketball League, who had every So Steph grows up
with every advantage in the world. And what we're now
seeing from him, that level of maturity and grace and

(42:08):
even at a very young age, is something that has
that has got decades of roots to it, right. And
maybe it's Steph's kids who are the ones who run
for public office and who make a difference, who have
the benefit of two generations of And that's why it's
again another reason why and do that thing you just
mentioned about MJ is real? Why do we care? Why

(42:33):
should MJ have to speak up at twenty five? I mean,
I'll just say there is room though for black conservatism.
There is room for individual notions of capitalistic success, meaning
that one way to interpret some of this behavior is
that I don't have a social obligation. My individual success

(42:57):
is a cruce to me and me alone. And maybe
at best I do like the white guys do, which
is to say, I'm going to give away a little money.
It's going to be good for my reputation, but everyone
else has to work just as hard as I do. Yeah,
so I don't I don't want to overread Michael Jordan's
um choices here because the jury is still out. Yeah. Right,

(43:18):
I would add the phrase right the words right now.
I don't have a social obligation right now. Once you
add right now, then it changes the whole kind of
m valence of the of his choice. Yeah, Hey, Malcolm,
I want to I want to end with a kind
of playful social experiment and sort of pose a question

(43:41):
the way you were posing to us. And and so,
you know, even even the Colin Kaepernick energy and the
NBA after George Floyd, you know, sort of embracing Black
lives matter institutionally, which is a very different thing, maybe
a fifth choice, you know, or it was sort of
co opted by the institution but that that energy has
has sort of waned it's past, and so we're in

(44:02):
this moment right now, as you just said, like what's
going on right now? And let's imagine, like we're three
smartish guys, Um, if we could be a kind of
Harry Edwards to a professional athlete right now, who would
we pick what would be the protest thing we would
want them to do? And you know what cause and

(44:24):
why or wouldn't it be effective? Like can we each
sort of imagine one? And I could even start, you know,
since you guys are just posing this coming now. Okay,
So so mine mine is John Morant, and I've been
really fascinated by by sort of you know, he was
suspended by the NBA because he flashed a gun, and
you know, rather than rather than sort of criminalizing him,

(44:47):
it was sort of addressed as kind of um, a
mental health issue and sort of an information issue that
it's sort of like, you know, the fetishizing of guns
in the country, you actually have to sort of you know,
get some counseling about this. That seemed really kind of
like productive in a way, like like that that they
would counter sort of this our culture around guns. Um.

(45:07):
And I was like, man, what if this young athlete,
this young superstar sort of took on the idea of,
you know, of of changing our gun culture. And it
seems it seems like it wouldn't work because he would
in all the ways that you just said, Malcolm, like
this young twenty year old a kind of like sophistication
and the time he would have to put into it

(45:28):
away from his craft, which is all encompassing. But it's
like there is sort of this hopeless, hopeful aspect in it.
I like that, actually, yeah, I mean that would be
a productive Who's next? You are? You are? Yeah? All right,
it's mine. I want when the NBA's collective bargaining agreement

(45:49):
runs out, I want Lebron to stand up and say, guys,
we're done, walk out of the room, start a new league.
There's just no reason. You understand that, Like, there's nothing
tying all of these players to the owners. It's bullshit.
It's complete bullshit. You have a group of owners who

(46:10):
are profiting massively off this game that they are basically
doing almost nothing. I mean, in fact, they're probably actively
thwarting it. So there's you. You don't think that if
Lebron makes one phone call to his people at CIA
or there and just say, Okay, help me out here.
Let's find some arenas. Let's if eighty five percent of

(46:32):
the players opt out of the NBA, the NBA ceases
to exist. Let's start our own franchises, let's all take
a piece of the action. Let's cut a new deal
with the television networks. Like, I want to ask you this, Malcolm,
because you chose something that is not is not necessarily
fighting for larger social justice, but fighting for one's own
labor rights? Does that? I sort of in my mind

(46:55):
I make a distinction between those two. Yeah, Well, I'm
going back to Khalil was mentioning William Roden's book. So
if that's the problem, let's solve the problem. Lebron can
do it. As far as I can tell, there's a
circular leader, a lot more create ativity and leadership and
intelligence in the player of community right now than in
the owner community. So like it. Let's go. Yeah, And

(47:16):
in a way, by by him being much older and
more experienced and even at the tail end of his career,
it seems much more likely they could have done it.
The last time the CBA was up. A couple of
years ago. I actually, Malcolm, I'm giving you big ups
for that. I really like that suggestion, and I think
I think taking back you're the man, You're the man
to be the kind of like in your new role
as the Air Apparent areawards. That's that's I'm gonna I'm

(47:40):
gonna pass that on. Um Well, I think these are
two fabulous suggestions, and two is good enough for now. Malcolm,
we are it does not work like that, all right,
all right, So here's here's mine. Here's mine. Here's mine.
So I think Serena and Venus Williams the team up
to fight fight climate change on the basis of putting

(48:01):
an end to on labor practices in the fashion industry
or the fast fashion industry, which is to say that
the extractive way in which we are producing a shit
ton of clothes that are not meant to last, that
are clogging up the Earth's landfills. They have the platform,
they have the capacity. I just think this is a

(48:22):
really rich space for them to own since they're already
in the fashion industry, and it could go a long
way to dealing with some of the issues that are
related to fast fashion. Yeah. Oh, this was really terrific.
Thanks so much, Malcolm. We had a lot of fun
talking to you today. Thank you, Malcolm. Thanks guys Man Khalil.

(48:46):
It is so interesting that Malcolm is working on this
book about Tom Bradley, los Angeles's first black mayor, and
that even that that book, that story is related to
our conversation about athletics and politics. Yeah, yeah, you know,
it's interesting. Malcolm in the podcast Legacy of Speed as
obviously building this into a bigger story and this interesting

(49:08):
framing about these choices that people make. Bradley obviously makes it,
and so many of the people we talked about from
Tommy Smith and others about exit voice or loyalty and
thinking about yeah, thinking about the costs a voice, like
when you stand up in protests, yep, a glad Wellian move,
a glad Wellian move. Yeah. So one of the things

(49:29):
maybe we didn't talk a lot about was the cost
like when you do protests, and most people know about
Colin Kaepernick, he takes a knee, there's there's this backlash
and essentially doesn't really get to play in the NFL again,
and he accuses and many people of the owners of colluding.
So he's never signed that's right, And of course we
learned something today, a little bit of breaking news about
how the owners really feel about him. Yeah, but this

(49:51):
isn't the first time, right. The long story that we
explore today also includes Tommy Smith and John Carlos. Yeah. Yeah,
most people don't know about the cost of what happened
to them for protesting, you know, so they're kicked out
of the off the Olympic team, they're sent home, and
for the rest of their careers they suffer financially. They
they are not able to flourish, even though they're two

(50:11):
of the best track stars ever in the history of track.
That's right, and in fact, I mean best I know.
They actually don't ever have running careers past that point.
Tommy Smith goes on to do some coaching, uh much
later on. And John Carlos, interesting left I met in
Harlem many years ago, you know, who was sort of
still telling the story. He had a memoir come out,

(50:32):
and we know, of course what happened to Muhammad Ali,
so you know there are real cost to voice. Yeah.
I was thinking too. You know, Malcolm says this thing
to me earlier about um, you know, do we expect
too much of athletes? And you know, it got me
thinking about all of us, like, what do we expect
from all of us, right, you know, in the face
of injustice, whether we all have an obligation to say something,

(50:53):
to do something, and that that athletes as their platform increases,
whether whether they can do even more, whether they have
more obligation and in some fundamental way, I still think yes.
And you know, you know he said about you know,
do we expect more from black athletes than white athletes?
Maybe so, I don't think that's right, but but you know,

(51:18):
in terms of what's going on in our country's it
sort of falls on black athletes more. Yeah, And I
just have one final thought on this point. You know,
when an athlete with a megaphone of platform, whether it's
Michael Jordan or Lebron James or Serena Williams for that matter,
is not it chooses not to use voice, it sends
a powerful political market signal that the issue is actually

(51:41):
not important, and people weaponize that silence to say, these
other people are radicals and they're miseducating the public. This
is not really an issue. So there are costs and
real ones to how we move forward in a society.
All right. So here's what we're gonna do. Any athlete
that you just named, MJ Serena, anyone, we are going
to give them a platform right here, they can come

(52:03):
on our show and we will do this. The offer
is out there in the world, that's right, open invitation
to some of my best friends are all right, all right?
Love you, love you man. Some of my best Friends
Are is a production of Pushkin Industries. The show is

(52:25):
written and hosted by me Khalil Gibran Mohammed and my
best friend Ben Austin. This show is produced by Lucy Sullivan.
It's edited by Sarah Knicks with help from Kishel Williams.
Our engineer is Amanda Kawang, and our managing producer is
Constanza Gayardo. At Pushkin thanks to Leita Mulad, Julia Barton,

(52:48):
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brilliant Avery R. Young, from his album Tubman. You definitely
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(53:08):
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(53:30):
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