Black History Month and the Impact of Sports

Today is February 1st and today starts Black History Month. Starting today organizations will honor their legendary Black Athletes. I chose the photo above for this post because the Golden State Warriors released their ad for Black History Month and the theme is beyond 28. They are not limiting their programing to just February. 

While working on my "refresh"/ reboot of this blog, I went back to read some of my older posts just to remind myself about what I have written. In May of 2017 I wrote a post about Tebow, Kaepernick and the hypocrisy of the NFL. It's not at all shocking that 3 and a half years later we are still dealing with these issues. In the last year we have had Black Athletes being told to "shut up and dribble" and the myriad of other variations of the exact same statement. 

This is from my post in May:
Now on to Kaepernick, he is being black balled by the league for standing up for his beliefs in a non-violent way. Yes it wasn't how most people would have done it but he did start a conversation that needed to be started. He also put his time, money and career on the line for his belief in the Black Lives Matter Movement and trying to draw attention to how time and time again there seems to be senseless killings of blacks by the police. Now I'm not making this post political in any way, it is about sports after all, yet Kaepernick is now black balled by the league and no one will hire him because he is a "distraction"

Please understand that my quote "Yes it wasn't how most people would have done it" is not my opinion, and I always believed that kneeling is respectful and we all know that if it was a White Athlete who started kneeling that more then likely the response would have been much different.

Back to today: In the past week there have been two separate cases in the hockey world surrounding racism one in the NWHL and in the NHL. The NWHL has recently been exploding due to Twitch and the fact that major networks are actually giving women's sports the due that they deserve. The Metropolitan Riverters have in the past few weeks been dealing with a bit of controversy around the fact that a few of their players support Barstool sports which has a history of being racist, transphobic and pretty much all the things you shouldn't be in sports. The NWHL came out with a statement that was pretty strong and I am happy that they are creating programing for their athletes to be anti-racist. Honestly the NHL needs to do the same thing; this past week the Rangers placed Tony DeAngelo on waivers because of an altercation with a teammate. He wasn't put on unconditional waivers for being racist against his teammate K'Andre Miller which come on DeAngelo has a history of this so why give him more lee way. Why are we still rewarding racist behavior in sports. 

I don't have the answers and I don't know how to fix these issues that are still prevalent but I do know that I cannot be quiet about these issues and that one voice grown to many can and will bring change. We have seen change we have seen more and more leagues bring more awareness to what is going on with the Black Lives Matter movement and how we need to be anti-racist.

I hope you enjoyed this post and keep following my love affair with sports.