In October, the Student Coalition for Critical Action at the University of Missouri circulated a petition to have a statue of Thomas Jefferson removed from campus. The petitioners found the presence of a statue of a slave owner painful. The Mizzou Republicans responded by highlighting Jefferson’s contributions to the founding of our nation and circulated a petition to keep the statue.
The statue remains on campus and is more apropos now than ever. Jefferson was aware of the injustice of racial subjugation and yet was willing to profit from it. He was an American President, but prior to that he was a revolutionary against British rule. He owned hundreds of slaves throughout his life and believed black people were inferior to white people, yet he sought to ban the international slave trade and argued for controlled emancipation of slaves. Ironically, both former MU president Tim Wolfe, who stood to profit from the work of unpaid, black athletes, and Jonathan Butler, the graduate student whose hunger strike against racism and administrative inaction during a time of racial instability on campus garnered support from members of the Missouri football team, remind me of Thomas Jefferson.
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Football is such a moneymaker for schools. Players aren’t compensated, yet the money they make for the university helps fund so much—including the salaries of administrators like Wolfe, who like Jefferson was profiting greatly from the unpaid labor, in this case student athletes. Though these football players may sometimes benefit from scholarships or popularity on campus, the NCAA spends liberally to ensure that it doesn’t have to recognize their rights. Yet, Butler, who wanted black students to feel more empowered on campus, is every bit the revolutionary that Jefferson was. His activism inspired the football players to behave in a way that the University, and administrators, could have never anticipated.
Missouri football players helped enact change. Photo via screenshot.
Frankly, I can’t predict what will happen at Missouri. I don’t know if by this time next year we will be saying Butler and the MU football players catalyzed a positive social transformation or merely created chaos at the top of the university system that will lead to nothing or further deterioration of cultural cohesion. But no matter what happens on campus, they have done us all a service: They have reminded us, leaders and otherwise, that the unlikely is not impossible, and that ignoring the perceived powerless is a risky proposition for leaders of any type. The cost of change is sacrifice. There may not be a rash of hunger strikes, but this incident most assuredly pushed other disillusioned people a little closer to taking a stand. And the same is definitely true for athletes, pro and collegiate. I don’t necessarily expect a pro team to threaten a boycott, but pro athletes have taken notice of MU’s players’ actions. Countless players across all sports who are passionate about social causes are being reminded of their enormous platform. The implied obligation is a good thing. Many of them already openly embrace that obligation. I think many more will as a result of what happened at Missouri this week.
First, one player recognized the need to take action. Soon several others joined the fight, and eventually they even drew the support of head coach Gary Pinkel. The players’ boycott was a direct threat to the moneymaking structure of college sports. Perhaps a 4-5 team does not have much motivation to play out the season. But with social justice on the line, there was plenty of reason not to play.
In American sports, football teams are abnormally large and uniquely diverse. On its face, getting players to coalesce around a single social issue and make sacrifices to achieve gains that may not even benefit them directly seems like an impossible task. Having held a prominent role in two professional player unions, I can speak to how challenging it is to galvanize a group of players to make sacrifices that are in the long term interest of their union. The Missouri players did it. It wasn’t a long boycott, but even still, the consequences of their actions were uncertain: Would the players jeopardize their scholarships? Would enough players join and remain strong in the face of public pressure? Would they be successful?
Those are scary questions for 18-23 year-old football players to answer. But maybe they were prepared to take on this challenge because they are football players. Football culture is dangerous in many ways. Players subject themselves to severe bodily harm week after week with little regard for potential long or short-term consequences. But here that “consequences-be-damned” mindset that drives a player to throw himself in harm’s way for the protection or advancement of a teammate is likely what drove the Missouri players to risk professional harm to support Butler and the Missouri students of color—the same way that players on an unranked team are confident, perhaps emboldened, and willing to give it their all when they face a top-10 opponent.
In Missouri, players had faith that their boycott could defeat injustice at the school, no matter the odds, because that is a situation they often find themselves on the field. The “no-excuses” cliché that you’ll hear in every locker room in America reflects the culture of hyperresponsibility and accountability that permeates through football. Where many fans would blame the refs or the the real world equivalent of refs, football players will point to their own early game errors as the reason for a loss.
This week, that on-the-field culture of responsibility and accountability that programs instill, and which schools benefit from, helped the Missouri players decide to stay off of the field and to stand up to injustice. Players realized that though they may be individually powerless, their collective power surpassed that of the university’s most ostensibly powerful individual: Wolfe. The players didn’t fall for the seductive notion that authority and title must equal power. Succumbing to it can be an easy trap because it offers an illusory sense of comfort to both the perceived powerful and the perceived powerless. Those at the pinnacle of any hierarchy—social, corporate, political, etc.—can easily find themselves believing in a structure where the people who have access to more buttons and levers have power over those who don’t. And those who occupy the bottom rungs often willingly perpetuate the myth that all the power lies with one person, at the top.
This phenomenon occurs because we, the powerful and the powerless alike, are predisposed to deify or vilify individuals; we yearn for simplicity, and a life where we are the protagonist, either triumphant or sympathetic. So rarely are we willing to say that things are not going well at work because “I blew it.”
Yet these student athletes weren’t willing to submit to this power structure. They took responsibility. They realized a truth that many of us avoid: We have the power to affect change at all levels—if we are willing to pay the price.
Like the 30 Missouri football players, the hunger striking Jonathan Butler, and many more Missouri students, Thomas Jefferson seemed never succumb to the allure of the mirage. Even after his term as President, Jefferson wrote to John Holmes in a letter referencing the abolishment of slavery (“the Missouri question”), “… we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” Jefferson had the power to do more, but for political reasons and his own selfish reasons he did not do enough to move the needle of racial justice.
On Monday, we saw that Butler and the MU football team, having empowered themselves, were able to move the needle, and that Wolfe lost his job and his power because he refused to give Butler his ear.
Domonique Foxworth was a former football player at the University of Maryland, who spent spent seven seasons in the NFL. He is also the former President of the National Football Players Association and former Chief Operating Officer of the NBA Players Association. He received his MBA from Harvard in May 2015.
