The short-lived player strike in the NBA was meant to send a signal of outrage about police shootings of African Americans and other aspects of “systemic racism.” As LeBron James, the face of the NBA, put it in a tweet, “We demand change.” It’s not at all clear, of course, how not playing sports contests will lead to racial justice, nor did the players present such a theory of change. But there is a means by which highly paid athletes can do something about causes they care about: They should make a personal sacrifice by continuing to play and should then divert a portion of the earnings they would otherwise forego to charitable efforts to reduce police violence and improve the prospects of the black children who admire them.
In the NBA, about 75% of all players are black, including most of its biggest stars. Their earnings are substantial. The average NBA salary is more than $7 million a year, while stars such as LeBron James, Russell Westbrook, Kevin Durant, and James Harden all earn more than $37 million annually. The highest-paid player, Stephen Curry, earns more than $40 million per year. Each of these players is in a position to help their hometowns financially.
Some have already done so, and their past actions reveal a focus, not on police–community relations but other issues. Most prominently, LeBron, to his great credit, has established the LeBron James Family Foundation, which, with $40 million in assets, has focused its giving on his hometown of Akron, Ohio. Its major promise is the I Promise School, a public school to whose budget James adds. According to the New York Times, its students had previously been identified as among the worst performers in the city’s public schools but have gone on to show promising academic results.
If LeBron is basketball’s greatest player of all time, he’s following in the footsteps of football’s greatest, retired Cleveland Browns’ running back Jim Brown. As with James’s organizations, Brown’s group, “America-I-Can,” focuses not on directly combating racism but on personal development: “The program goal is to help enable individuals to meet their academic potential, to conform their behavior to acceptable society standards, and to improve the quality of their lives by equipping them with the critical life management skills to confidently and successfully contribute to society.” Its work is exactly the sort of program in which those who want to “reallocate” police funding are championing: effective education, mental health, and other social services. Implicit in Brown’s program, like LeBron’s efforts, is the belief that this remains a country where anyone with the right skills and attitudes can rise and thrive — as both of them have done.
Which is not to say that there are not charitable ways to address the problem, rare as it might be, of police overreaction and unjustified shooting. There are actually professional police reform groups that undertake practical training for those who lead police departments. Consider, for instance, the nonprofit group Police Executive Research Forum, a group that has influenced effective reformers such as former New York Police Commissioner William Bratton. Its research actually focuses on the sort of situations so much in the public eye currently, including a report on how best to improve community relations in the troubled Minneapolis Riverside neighborhood, where rioting broke out in the wake of the George Floyd death.
I got to know the organization’s longtime leader Sherwin “Chuck” Wexler in the late 1970s, when he was in the Boston Police Department (with Bratton) and helped to start its Community Disorders Unit, which focuses especially on incidents of violence directed at black families moving into previously all-white neighborhoods.
Among the perps involved in Boston’s racial violence in that era was Mark Wahlberg, then a Dorchester street punk. Wahlberg was convicted of assaulting a Vietnamese man around the time when Asians were first moving into Dorchester and served 45 days in jail. In 2014, he unsuccessfully sought a pardon for the crime, arguing he’d become a better person, as demonstrated by his gifts to charity. Charity, Wahlberg rightly learned, should not be a self-interested transaction — a lesson the NBA players should heed.
If the players are serious about their causes, then it’s good news that their union has agreed to remain in its Florida “bubble,” keep playing, and thus continue to accrue outsized earnings. At least one player (and not one of the league’s biggest stars) has already announced he’d donate his playoff earnings to charity. As NBC Sports put it back in July, “Jrue Holiday isn’t just talking social justice, he’s putting his money where it matters.” The New Orleans Pelicans player said he’d donate as much as $5.3 million to help black-owned businesses in New Orleans hurt by the COVID-19 lockdown through the new Jrue and Lauren Holiday Social Justice Impact Fund.
The gift is no slam-dunk, however. His team ultimately did not make the playoffs, the earnings from which he was dedicating to the foundation. Let’s hope that other players will pick up the slack. Of course, they’ll have to hope that the businesses they help not only get to reopen but don’t get looted in those “mostly peaceful protests.”
Howard Husock is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
