What Happened to the Politically Conscious Black Athlete?
If there’s one demographic that Vice President Kamala Harris appears to have locked up, it’s the Golden State Warrior vote. Steve Kerr, the team’s head coach, gave a speech endorsing Harris at the Democratic National Convention, and the superstar point guard Steph Curry beamed in his own message of support via video. Curry’s teammate, the boisterous but relatively apolitical power forward Draymond Green, spoke up for the vice president on his podcast last month.
Outside the Bay Area, however, Black athletes have largely avoided getting involved in the presidential election. Four years ago, many of them refused to be silent about politics. This time around, silence seems to suit them just fine.
The 2020 election may have been the high-water mark for Black athletes’ political engagement. The killing of George Floyd triggered the biggest mass-protest movement in American history. Donald Trump seemed to interpret the movement as protesting him—“People are tired of watching the highly political @NBA,” he tweeted in September 2020—which became a self-fulfilling prophecy and blurred the line between opposing police brutality and opposing Trump. Dozens of prominent athletes spoke out, and a group led by LeBron James launched More Than a Vote, an organization dedicated to increasing Black turnout and fighting voter suppression.
Politics and sports collided most powerfully in Georgia’s Senate race that year. Democrat Raphael Warnock, a relative unknown, was running against Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler, at the time a co-owner of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream. As the incumbent in a Republican-leaning state, Loeffler seemed likely to hold on to her seat, but she drew the ire of WNBA players by criticizing their involvement in Black Lives Matter protests. In response, the Dream and players across the league organized wide-scale support for Warnock by wearing Vote Warnock T-shirts during their nationally televised games and discussing his platform with the media in interviews. The Warnock campaign credited the effort with triggering a spike in interest and donations. In the decisive runoff election in January 2021, Warnock narrowly defeated Loeffler to become Georgia’s first Black senator. (A few weeks later, the Dream was sold, requiring Loeffler to give up her stake.) Warnock’s victory allowed the Democratic Party to gain control of the Senate through a 50–50 split, with Harris serving as the tiebreaker. That thin control paved the way for Supreme Court Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson to become the first Black woman to serve on the Court.
The energy motivating the Black sports world in 2020 was hard to find heading into this year’s election. This was in part a microcosm of Joe Biden’s more general struggles with young and minority voters. But even as polls show Harris improving among those demographics, athletes are still nowhere near as involved as they were last time. That’s unfortunate, because the issues they were speaking out about in 2020 have not disappeared over the past four years—and Trump has not suddenly changed his positions on them.
The former president has an extensive track record of belittling outspoken Black athletes. He was a driving force behind the quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s NFL exile and even referred to the NFL players who’d protested alongside Kaepernick as “sons of bitches.” He has publicly attacked the intelligence of James and in 2021 accused him of being “racist.”
Far from being chastened by the 2020 protests, Trump—who passed a criminal-justice-reform bill in 2018—seems to have only dug in harder on his opposition to police accountability. At a rally this past May, Trump promised a crowd of supporters, “We’re going to give our police their power back, and we are going to give them immunity from prosecution.” Last week, he called for a return to “stop and frisk” policing.
Then, this past Sunday, as if on cue, the sports world was reminded how easy it is for police to abuse their power over Black men.
[Jemele Hill: The NFL’s dubious rhetoric about race]
A few hours before the Miami Dolphins’ home opener, their superstar wide receiver Tyreek Hill was pulled over on his way to the stadium for speeding. Police bodycam footage shows one of the cops getting angry when Hill refuses to keep his window open, then yanking him out of the car. Within seconds, Hill is face down on the pavement, getting handcuffed.
Hill did nothing to warrant the police tackling him to the asphalt, putting a knee on his back, and even handcuffing his teammate Calais Campbell, who’d tried to peacefully intervene. Perhaps this episode will remind Hill and his fellow Black athletes that their wealth and fame do not shield them from police abuse.
Enthusiasm for Harris seems highest among women athletes so far. This may be something of a self-inflicted wound for Trump, who largely declined to invite women’s-championship teams to the White House and went on a Twitter rant attacking the soccer star Megan Rapinoe after she criticized him in 2019. After the U.S. women’s national soccer team lost in the second round of the 2023 World Cup, due in part to a missed penalty kick by Rapinoe, Trump gloated on Truth Social about its defeat: “Nice shot Megan, the USA is going to Hell!!! MAGA.”
Women athletes who were no fan of Trump’s to begin with seem more ready to rally around a female candidate. Some WNBA players are wearing T-shirts supporting Harris. Others have vowed to get more involved. “I was already voting for democracy,” Renee Montgomery, a former Atlanta Dream player who is now a part-owner of the team, told me via text. “With VP Harris’ name at the top of the ticket, I’m ready to turn up.”
Last month, Nneka Oguwmike, a forward for the Seattle Storm and the president of the WNBA Players Association, took over the leadership of More Than a Vote. A source inside the organization, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak for the group, told me that there is more excitement because of Harris. “It definitely galvanized us,” they said. “It made a huge difference, because there was a significant enthusiasm gap between Biden and Harris.”
Black male athletes, however, including those who publicly tout their commitment to activism and social justice, have yet to show that they prioritize this November’s election as highly as they did the previous one.
Give James credit for handing the reins of his organization to a woman during an election in which women’s reproductive freedom is a potentially decisive issue. But he hasn’t yet found other ways to get involved personally, setting an example for his tens of millions of fans.
Harris appears to have made some genuine effort to connect with the sports community. Last year, she traveled to Los Angeles to see Brittney Griner play in her first regular season game after being released from prison in Russia. After the game, Harris commended Griner for her strength and courage. (Trump, on the other hand, called Griner, who had participated in BLM protests in 2020, “spoiled,” and suggested that she wasn’t worth freeing.) This past March, Harris co-hosted a reception with the Women’s Sports Foundation to honor more than 100 women in sports.
No candidate is entitled to anyone’s support. Harris can’t take Black athletes for granted just because she’s Black too. If they haven’t fully rallied to her side, she may need to work harder to win them over. Still, it’s fair to wonder what prominent Black athletes are thinking right now. They believed in 2020 that it was important to use their influence. Have they changed their mind?