White House, Black Athletes
What it means to me to be an Eagles fan this week.
We’re all full of contradictions, discrepancies between our values and what we nevertheless enjoy. One of the contradictions that I carry - the one that tends to surprise people who meet me the most - is that I’ve been an enthusiastic sports fan my entire life. Primarily football and basketball, though I can watch and get into just about any sport once I know a bit about the players involved and the narrative context in which they meet to compete.
There’s no other team that’s lived in my heart as nearly and dearly as the Philadelphia Eagles. I don’t remember a time before football season Sundays, the camaraderie rooted in rooting for this team. Watching Eagles football with my family connected me to belonging through shared longing to win. Especially after we moved away from Philly when I was eight, remaining true to this fandom has been the thing to which I cling to remind me that I come from a place.
It feels good to have a team.
Being an Eagles fan for decades has held special meaning for me not just because Philly is my childhood home, but because my team has “the most storied legacy in the league when it comes to Black quarterback play.” If you know how Black athletes have historically been barred from and deemed unfit to play this leadership role on the field, you understand that it mattered to grow up watching Randall Cunningham as my QB1. It mattered that I watched Rodney Peete, Donovan McNabb, Michael Vick, and now Jalen Hurts shine in this position. It mattered that my team holds the record for most games played with a Black starting quarterback in NFL history.
None of that overrides the growing disgust that I’ve felt toward the sport as I deepen my awareness of self and of structures, as I reckon with more and more truth about racial capitalism and how football both runs on and serves to uphold it.
I think American football is the most blatant demonstration of American-ness that we have on public display, outside of the actions of our actual government. The use of violent physical force to drive into another team’s territory. The obvious interplay between restrictive hypermasculinity and nationalism. The imperative to play through pain as a performance of toughness. The language of those who “want it more” being the ones who win. The buying and selling of humans through “trades” between “owners.” The way that the laborers on the field are driven to injury, illness, and death to make inconceivable profit for corporations - including the sports apparel corporation for which my father worked.
I know all of this. All of it goes against my values. And yet, I wore my Jalen Hurts jersey and painted my nails Kelly Green to watch my team absolutely dominate (!) the Kansas City Chiefs in their Super Bowl LIX win back in February. I still go to YouTube to watch highlights from this game, months after the fact. I still feel a surge of love and pride in connection with this team’s accomplishment. I still feel my own remembrance of birthplace and lineage through them.
A friend of mine used to tell his adoring students, “all of your faves are problematic, including me.” And he’s right. If you’re reading this, I may be a fave of yours. And me loving football, I know, is hella problematic.
We’re called now to make choices - to the best of our capacity, whether when no one’s around or when the entire world is watching - that align with the world we want, deserve, and have the power to create. If not, we’re choosing, consciously or unconsciously, to align with the agenda of those who are showing their asses right now with every move they make because these are the last, dying breaths of a sick system. Those who think power only comes from exploitation. From vampirism.
We might look at their actions, those who are aligning with said dying system, and believe the lie that they have true power over us. But if we drop into our bodies and feel, we can touch a place of knowing. Knowing that we, in truth, have the power. Knowing that the escalation we see from them is actually the evidence that we’re winning.
They know that we know that we're all inherently deserving of living in a world in which all of us have all that we need. They know that we’re being called to act in accordance with that truth. They know that more and more of us are choosing to co-create this world. And we’re making these choices not because someone is shaming, manipulating, or threatening us into doing so.
We’re making these choices because we see and feel the truth, and because enough other people are reflecting back to us that what we see and feel is real.
I know we all have our opinions about whether or not athletes are obligated to say or do anything as it relates to politics. We have plenty of examples of athletes choosing to make explicitly political statements, or not, and the backlash that can come from either choice. And not just the male athletes.
The distortion of celebrity tells us that these folks are suited to lead because they’re talented at a craft, and their selling of that talent has made them wealthy and famous. That’s not it. Never has been and never will be. Celebrity voices don’t matter more than ours. But the words and actions of very visible people do have a unique reach and reverberation.
I don’t want to be famous. I don’t want anyone to be famous. I think fame constrains both the famous and their fans. And yet, I recognize that, while a celebrity’s responsibility to life and love and truth is no different than anyone else’s, it does play itself out with countless eyes on it.
We can choose to ignore celebrities, yes. I would love to live in a world in which celebrity as a concept didn’t exist. But while it still does, people who experience it can choose to work consciously with the reality of their prominence.
It matters to me that Super Bowl MVP quarterback Jalen Hurts, star wide receivers AJ Brown and Devonta Smith, and 25 other players on the team – over half of the full roster, all Black men save for one – chose not to go to the White House this week to celebrate their Super Bowl victory.
When asked before the scheduled visit if he would attend, this was our team leader Jalen’s response. What does your body feel in his silence?
It also matters to me that our record-breaking and gravity-defying running back Saquon Barkley chose not only to go to the White House, but to play golf with Trump in New Jersey the day before the team visit and fly with him to DC.
It matters that, when people were upset about this, Saquon told them to basically kick rocks.
It matters that Jalen and Saquon made these choices, and that we as fans of this team get to see and feel the contrast. Which of their responses feels grounded in the truth of this moment, and which feels like a defense against feeling?
The difference, to me, is crystal clear.
Here we are. In this place and time. Those of us who live in the US, and those who don’t. What’s happening here matters to all of us regardless of where we live, because of the role that the US has created for itself. The dictatorship that the US has manufactured and lorded over the rest of the planet.
What did the Honorable El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz say? Something about chickens coming home to roost?
People were up in arms when he said it then, and I’m sure there are those who would be up in arms about this sentiment now. And yet, Brother Malcolm was, per usual, telling us the truth. When you are the chief purveyor of violence around the globe, can you really be surprised when that violence shows up at your door?
Did we really think that we could be the dictator of the rest of the world and never be vulnerable to dictatorship ourselves?
We may have thought it, but our bodies know better.
The myth of this country tells us that this could never happen here, could not possibly be happening here. Even as we bear witness to all of the material evidence. Even as we recognize this administration as an extension and amplification of what this government has always been, rather than an aberration. Some part of us still wants to believe that this is just a blip that can be fixed through the established “democratic” channels, that we can vote our way out of this and go back to having “normal” presidents again. Presidents who will still be dealers of unspeakable violence, against their own citizens and (especially) around the globe, but who perform their role in such a way that keeps us content to play ours.
All illusions are falling away now. You feel it. Do you choose to trust what your body feels, or to cling to the myth?
Going to the White House, shaking his hand and taking photographs with him, signals to the world that you choose the myth. With this choice, Saquon Barkley and the other Eagles players, coaches, and staff (and, of course, the owner!) who went to DC to schmooze with this administration are telling you that you shouldn't believe your body about what it knows to be true.
And I would argue that they made this choice in large part because they’re not resourced to feel what their body is telling them. It’s evidence to me of a nervous system that’s not equipped to hold the weight of the truth, because the vulnerability that this would require is not something they’re able or willing to practice.
Celebrity severs us from our home within our bodies, siphons our life force, if we are not vigilant in remembering the truth of who we are. It does this not just to the individual celebrity we see crashing out in public, but to the fans who are so thirsty for them, who worship them, who feel they need them in order to be themselves, who defend them at all costs as if they are defending themselves. Who can no longer tell the difference between the body of their favorite star and their own.
Athletes are made to be masters of their bodies. This means that they must both be finely attuned to their bodies, and consistently override their bodies’ signals of pain in order to perform. We’re taught to praise the ones who numb and ignore physical distress in order to play through it. We can’t, then, be surprised to see one of the best doing just that. Ignoring pain to play his position in the game.
This is not unique to football players, not unique to Saquon. He just gets to have his choice projected across our screens, his photo op used to try to convince you to keep playing.
We’re all clinging to the myth in one way or another. We wouldn’t be performing business as usual otherwise.
The version of me who witnessed the Eagles win the Super Bowl in 2018, during Trump’s first term, would be a mess right now if I mapped this week’s happenings onto that timeline. 2018 Amissa would be so up in arms about Saquon going to the White House, so dysregulated and deeply hurt, so angry at him. She’d also be placing Jalen and the other players who didn’t go on a pedestal.
This time is different. And I’m different, too. Aren’t you? Don’t you feel how much your own awareness of truth has expanded since then?
Today, I observe their choices not to demonize or glorify them. I do so to recognize what my own body feels in response, what my own body understands of what they’re communicating, what my own body knows about who is or is not living in the same reality as I am. What my own body knows about who’s reflecting what I know to be the truth of this moment back to me, and who is not. To ultimately bring me back home to myself.
I read 2018 Eagles Super Bowl Champion safety Malcolm Jenkins’ piece about Jalen’s choice, what he imagines it will mean for his legacy, the magnitude of the moment.
And I thought about how Jalen’s decision, and the conversation around it, places him on a timeline of Black athletes who have used the power that comes with their prominence in this way.
I feel fortified in my own knowing through his choice. Through his refusal to lie to me. Through how his silence communicated that he sees the same thing that I see. Every time we do this for each other, regardless of the scale or the level of our visibility, our collective truth rings out louder and louder. Jalen’s choice does not hold any more meaning than the choices you’re making every day in your spheres of contact and impact. And I feel fortified by you, too.
The harder truth for some of us to acknowledge is that there has always been reason enough to decline this invitation, regardless of which person occupied that office. For as long as athletes, artists, and other celebrities (even those activists who become movement celebrities) have been invited to the House that theft of life and land built, there has been reason enough to decline to align oneself with this nation-state. Only now has it for most of us become this blatantly obvious, this explicit, this urgent.
What I know to be true is that, whatever material consequences I might face for telling the truth, there’s nothing they can do to touch the core of who I am. My energy is eternal. So is yours. We may suffer in the material. We’re experiencing and witnessing a great deal of suffering in the material. They will administer material punishment to try to keep us in fear.
But our material suffering pales in comparison to the internal turmoil that Saquon Barkley and those mired in a similarly sunken place carry as they perform the lie, as unconscious of it as they are. But his X post makes it obvious to me. He is not well in his soul. And the recognition that he’s not well does not release him from the accountability that he holds to get into right relationship with himself, with his fellow human beings, with the planet. I hope, for his sake, that it’s not too late. But we don’t need him in order for us to do what we’re here to do.
Too many celebrities, like so many of us, have been seduced by the lie that they can accumulate their way to safety. Too many Black celebrities have swallowed the lie, gorged themselves on the lie. The internalized lie then tells them, over and over, that aligning with the ones who seem to have the most power is their ticket to immortality. And this is not about individual blame. The structure forced us all into giving up our life force to those who wish to drain us for profit. It’s the ones whose bodies stand to generate the most profit who are most at risk of becoming the very entity that drained them. Their infected brains must then keep believing the lie, even as their body knows the truth.
Be conscious of who it is in this life - your real life, not just the people you see on your screens - whose grounding in the truth they feel in their own body reminds you to remain in yours.
All of us are capable of good, all of us are capable of harm. All of us make choices every day that necessarily harm others within this crumbling lie of hierarchy. And all of us make choices every day to enact the truth of the love that we all are. All of us are someone’s fave, all of us are problematic.
Will I continue to watch this sport, to contradict my values and what I know to be true, to cling to what feels like home, like belonging, like my team?
How are you holding your own contradictions as we live through the fall of the veil, the dissolution of the illusion?
Keep feeling your way through it. I’ll keep doing the same.