Hands Up: Don’t Shoot!

Now comes “Hands-up, Don’t Shoot,” a protest featuring Tavon Austin, Stedman Bailey, Kenny Britt, Jared Cook, Chris Givens and Tre Mason, the receiving corps of the NFL’s St. Louis Rams, who reminded fans about the killing of Ferguson’s Michael Brown. It takes moral courage to stand up in corporate America for what’s right in the face of the overwhelming power of the state. Now these players belong in the Hall of Fame that counts.

Precedents for Black American athletes include Tommie Smith and John Carlos, Mexico City, 1968 Olympics, who raised their fists in solidarity with their brothers and sisters; Lebron James and the Miami Heat (below), dressed in hoodies, in a gesture of support for Justice in the Trayvon Martin wrongful death. Folks always forget that a Black American, MLB player Curt Flood of the St. Louis Cardinals, sacrificed his career to upend baseball’s reserve clause, a clause that kept players attached to teams as if they were mere human chattel.

But no man stood taller when it came to resisting and facing down the Capitalist Establishment than Muhammad Ali. He was the most famous athlete if not the most famous person in the world back in 1967 when he refused to be drafted because, as he said in the immortal words:

Though banned from boxing for more than three years during his prime, Ali won his case in the Supreme Court of the USA back when the court was composed of more even-tempered jurists.

Capitalism’s corporate masters send out the white cops to shoot the black man and create chaos with divide and conquer techniques so that the hoi polloi inevitably calls for order as property goes up in smoke and protesters block the arteries of commerce. For this act of disobedience always condemns the demonstrator despite the righteousness of his cause. And as the folk begin stockpiling pitchforks, the elite lock themselves up in their gated communities and send out the thin blue line to protect them from fate (shudder).