Or "Keep The Next Coronavirus To Yourself"

In a development as startling as "Donald Trump's claim does not meet the standards of objective truth"

The National Basketball Association and National Basketball Players Association are planning to paint "Black Lives Matter" on the court inside both sidelines in all three arenas the league will use at the Walt Disney World Resort when it resumes the 2019-20 season late next month in Orlando, Florida, league sources told ESPN....

On a conference call with reporters Friday, leaders of both the NBA and the NBPA said the league and union were discussing several ways to use the NBA's platform in Orlando to call attention to racial equality, social justice and police brutality. Over the weekend, Chris Paul, president of the players' union, told ESPN that the league and union were collaborating to allow players to wear uniforms with personalized messages linked to social justice on the backs of their jerseys in place of players' last names.

Social justice warriors such as Commissioner Adam Silver are not immune from hypocrisy:

The NBA's concern for human rights stops right at the bank. China has Uyghur concentration camps and is preparing to crush Hong Kong and he talks of "mutual respect"? What a joke. https://t.co/KuC3WYMlg7

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) June 30, 2020

The Black Lives Matter movement may be in the process of morphing into a more generalized one for social justice. But the number one agenda item of BLM is "defund the police. It is at its core an anti-police movement. 

If messages of social justice, including opposition to police brutality, are permitted on the jerseys of NBA players, it will be fascinating to see whether messages less compatible with the league's profit motive are permitted.  Kasparov might suggest "Religious Freedom for Uyghurs" or "Free HongKong." For those individuals preferring the cryptic (and if the NBA permits any names on jerseys), there could be "Where are Fang Bin and Chen Quishi?" or "In Memoriam, Li Wenliag." Disturbingly, the possibilities are nearly endless.

Otherwise, the NBA might prohibit anything critical of mainland China, in which case the league will have decided that Xi Jinping's totalitarian regime is more worthy of respect than, say, big-city police departments in the USA. If so, we would find out that the "mutual respect" Commissioner Adam Silver talks about is the league's interest in financial gain, human rights be damned.

Share |