White House adviser Jared Kushner said NBA players are “very fortunate” to have had the ability and financial means to simply decide not to play in Wednesday’s playoff games in response to the shooting of Jacob Blake.
During a Thursday morning interview on CNBC, President Trump’s son-in-law said that the players are lucky that they are in “the financial position where they’re able to take a night off from work without having to have the consequences to themselves financially. So they have that luxury, which is great. Look, I think with the NBA, there’s a lot of activism. And I think that they’ve put a lot of slogans out.”
Kushner also urged the players to focus on “actual reform” before touting Trump’s record on criminal justice.
“But I think that what we need to do is to turn that from slogans and signals to actual action that’s going to solve the problem, and if you look at President Trump’s record, people are talking about social injustice: He passed historic criminal justice reform. They talked about how there’s wealth inequality: He passed opportunity zones to bring more access to capital in the black and minority community,” he said. “We talk about education. He’s fighting for school choice so that people in the inner cities and failing schools can go to better schools.”
The NBA canceled the three games scheduled to take place on Wednesday after the Milwaukee Bucks had already announced that they would not play in their game against the Orlando Magic. Other teams slated to play later that day also voted on whether their games would take place.
Players around the league expressed their frustration regarding police brutality following the shooting of Blake, a 29-year-old father who was shot several times by Kenosha police officers on Sunday, around the time the league made the decision to reschedule the games. Blake is still alive, but his father says he is paralyzed. The shooting is under investigation.
Blake is the latest victim in a string of incidents this year involving black Americans being injured or killed by law enforcement officers. Millions of people turned to the streets amid the coronavirus pandemic to protest the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor.
The NBA allowed players to write social justice messages on their jerseys, and similar messages appeared courtside during the NBA’s season restart in Orlando, Florida.
