NBA commissioner Adam Silver launched his league right back into the bright, hot, diplomatic spotlight at the end of June when he doubled down on his public capitulation to the Chinese government. In an interview with Time, Silver boiled down China’s horrific oppression of Uighur Muslims and its brutal treatment of Hong Kong protesters to a simple difference of opinion between pals.
“They have a different view of how things have been done, how things should be done,” Silver told Time. “And hopefully, we can find mutual respect for each other.”
It’s a terrible look for a league that has been at the vanguard of player empowerment, at least symbolically. The NBA will even let you wear a social justice statement on the back of your jersey a few times a year, so long as that statement doesn’t say “Free Hong Kong.” The organization’s support for human rights, very predictably, ends in front of its cartoonishly large bank vault.
Silver’s hypocrisy regarding China is stunning in its cognitive dissonance. If you won’t bow down to the business demands of President Trump at home, you can’t then cower before an authoritarian government abroad. But Silver is a politician at the end of the day, and he knows China holds the keys to a vast overseas fortune.
It’s a reminder that for all their self-proclaimed liberalism, Silver and the NBA will only support political protest as long as it doesn’t affect their bottom line. It’s a cowardly and wholly inadequate position that has been pushed by some of the league’s most prominent figures, including its most politically motivated coaches and players. But if they want to live in a world in which athletes and coaches aren’t merely told to “stick to sports,” they’re going to have to speak up on China soon.
The demand that players stick to sports, which became a popular refrain in the debates surrounding Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the national anthem, appears to have been cast aside in recent months. That’s a good thing, too, since sports and politics have been intertwined ever since naked Greeks were racing each other in the first Olympic Games. From Jackie Robinson to Megan Rapinoe, what happens on the field is inseparable from the cultural and political movements happening off of it.
The United States has its own set of problems, which the NBA rightly has no problem addressing. After the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, for instance, Silver declared that “racism, police brutality, and racial injustice remain part of everyday life in America and cannot be ignored.”
But basketball fans can’t let the NBA’s principles end where the money bazooka begins. If you really think politics and sports are connected, you can’t let China’s actions slide under the rug because they are occurring on the other side of the world.
China is systematically wiping out an entire ethnic minority as we speak, in the process constructing the largest system of concentration camps seen since World War II. It has violently cracked down on protesters in Hong Kong, and it is beginning to unravel speech and protest freedoms in the region.
The NBA cannot continue to ignore this for the sake of the almighty dollar, much as it has tried, especially because it has shown it isn’t afraid to speak up about injustice elsewhere.
Let this be a valuable lesson, then, to those who weren’t before able to see the permanent conflation of the things that happen outside the white lines and those that happen inside them.
At the end of the day, taking a knee beats bending the knee.
Cory Gunkel is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.
