On Ferguson, stop telling athletes to 'shut up and play'

On Sunday, five St. Louis Rams players did exactly what scolds have demanded of demonstrators outraged by the non-indictment of officer Darren Wilson: They protested peacefully. During pre-game introductions, the Rams' Tavon Austin, Stedman Bailey, Kenny Britt, Jared Cook, and Chris Givens walked on to the field with their arms raised in the "Hands up, don't shoot" pose, signaling their support to the protesters barely 10 miles away in Ferguson, Missouri.

It was a simple gesture, an acknowledgement that they, too, saw something wrong with a white police officer killing an unarmed black man, and then facing no consequences. Protesters nationwide have struck the same pose in the months since Wilson killed Michael Brown. But since it came from athletes, the act infuriated those who want their sports to remain free of politics.

The St. Louis Police Officers Association fired off a gloriously tone-deaf statement blasting the Rams' gesture as "tasteless, offensive, and inflammatory." Joe Scarborough of Morning Joe fame likewise called the act a "shame," insisting that there was no evidence Michael Brown had his arms in the air when he was shot.

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"'Hands up, don't shoot' is a lie," he wrote.

Scarborough, as is often the case, got it wrong. Sixteen of 18 witnesses interviewed by the police said Brown did indeed have his arms up when Wilson shot at him.

More troubling is the suggestion that athletes' opinions don't matter. The belief that they should "shut up and play" is really the belief that athletes are lumps of meat whose sole worth is in entertaining viewers. In the worst example, Bill O'Reilly brought out the world's biggest dog whistle by claiming the players — all of whom are black — weren't "smart enough to know" what they were doing.

Yet being an athlete shouldn't preclude you from having a voice. "Asking them to just 'shut up and play' is like asking a human being to be paint on the wall," John Carlos, whose Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics remains perhaps the most iconic instance of athletic dissent, told The Nation of the Rams' gesture.

Carlos' act of defiance is just one example in the long tradition of athletes protesting social and political injustice. Muhammad Ali refused to fight in Vietnam. Following the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Carlos Delgado would not stand for "God Bless America." More recently, the Phoenix Suns donned "Los Suns" jerseys in protest of Arizona's nativist immigration law, and the Miami Heat wore hoods to honor Trayvon Martin, another unarmed black teen killed under dubious circumstances.

In every instance, critics whined that the athletes had broached the bounds of their public roles.

But athletes should speak out specifically because they have outsized platforms from which to air their opinions. The bully pulpit of a national TV audience, combined with an unceasing viral news cycle, ensures they will be heard, and heard widely. The fact that a seconds-long gesture by five football players has led to a week of discussion bears this out.

This is particularly salient for black athletes speaking out about issues that directly affect black communities, since sports have long provided an avenue around systemic racial obstacles that black athletes otherwise may have struggled to surmount. This is why Curt Schilling ranting about evolution (which he is perfectly entitled to do) is different from Dwyane Wade defending the Heat's hooded symbolism by noting that many players "[grew] up in the kind of environment that Trayvon was in."

On Ferguson, the "shut up and play" crowd further argues that protesters are hurting their own cause of racial justice. The Rams were "actually offending those they should be converting," Scarborough claimed, because they had embraced an isolated incident that, in Scarborough's view, never even involved hands going up.

However, what those admonitions miss — or willfully ignore — is that the gesture goes well beyond Ferguson. Though it arose from Brown's slaying, it has come to serve as a potent symbol of protest over systemic, disproportionate police violence against African-Americans. It is not only about Brown, but about Eric Garner, who was choked to death for selling loose cigarettes by a cop who will somehow not face any charges; about Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old with an air gun cops killed on sight; and about the fact that police killings are higher than they've been in two decades, and that hundreds more of such killings go uncounted every year.

The Rams' Jared Cook acknowledged after Sunday's game that the team's protest was concerned with more than just Ferguson.

"No matter what happened on that day, no matter how the whole situation went down, there has to be a change," he said.

The "shut up and play" scolds either believe athletes have no place discussing ugly realities, or they want to avoid considering those realities entirely. The NFL has a troubling history of acting as if its athletes' brains don't matter. There is no reason why others should act the same way.