People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
After Colin Kaepernick’s courageous national anthem protest caught the attention of the controversy-seeking corporate sports media, an exciting phenomenon has quickly emerged. Sports media is going through a transformation. The pundits and athletes, mostly African Americans, for now, are discussing police brutality against minorities, militarism, and other socio-political issues. They are talking about inequality in America, need for compassion, and calling for social change. And they are building a discourse with eloquence and in polemic fashion. They are going beyond the practical. It is not just the X’s and O’s and lucrative contracts but social justice stories on the screens and in print. The Sports zeitgeist is rapidly changing and it can catch fire with the rest of civil society. Many of America’s future movers and shakers, the Millennials, do not trust political leaders, but they trust sports media. Sometimes solidarity is built inadvertently. This time may just be under the umbrella of football.
Football is a quintessential American sport and a permanent fixture of our culture. For several decades, the conservative overlords of the sport had managed to intertwine football with their brand of Christianity and militarism. In fact, in…