Culture
When it comes to political expression, does the NFL have double standards?
Following a victory over the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday, San Francisco 49ers defensive end Nick Bosa interrupted several teammates’ postgame interview with NBC’s Melissa Stark to point both index fingers at the front of his white baseball cap. The words “Make America Great Again” were stitched in gold capital letters.
Presumably, the goal was to show support for former president Donald Trump, who used the slogan as a campaign rallying cry. He won in 2016, lost re-election in 2020 and has adopted the message again this year in his bid for a second term.
Nick Bosa crashed the SNF postgame interview wearing a MAGA hat pic.twitter.com/Rj0T0XpcWB
— NFL Memes (@NFL_Memes) October 28, 2024
Bosa has every right to support whomever he chooses. As the saying goes, it’s a free country. But the display — and the intentionality behind it — was curious considering the NFL has gone to great lengths over the last eight years to stop players from making political expressions at games.
In 2018, two years after Colin Kaepernick first protested police brutality against Black and Brown people by silently taking a knee during the national anthem, the league modified its pregame policy. In a vote that received 30 yeas and two abstentions, the owners required players to stand during “The Star-Spangled Banner” or remain in the locker room until its conclusion.
The vote, and news that players could be fined or suspended for noncompliance, prompted an immediate grievance from the NFL Players Association, and the league and union ultimately agreed to a standstill that kept the new rule from taking effect.
Still, it was a surprising vote from the owners, not only because the protests basically diminished with only a handful of players still kneeling, but also because several owners told me the night before the vote that there was no need to reignite the controversy.
When the change was approved, I asked Packers CEO Mark Murphy about it.
“We can’t have Trump weaponizing our league,” he told me.
Trump had been particularly critical of the demonstrators, going so far as referring to them as “sons of bitches” and calling for the termination of their contracts. Never mind that Kaepernick had chosen his ultimate form of protest on the advice of former Green Beret Nate Boyer, who told him taking a knee would be more respectful than sitting during the anthem.
Many could not focus on the message because of the messenger. My hope is that the same mistake is not made with Bosa. His actions are his actions. His personal beliefs are his personal beliefs. But if the goal of the NFL is to keep political expressions off its fields, then Bosa should face some type of discipline.
The NFL’s uniform rules state that players can be fined more than $11,000 for wearing unauthorized logos or branding, which would certainly cover a campaign slogan.
Failure to take some sort of action would suggest the presence of a double standard and raise the question of whether the league is more comfortable with a White player using its national spotlight to endorse a presidential candidate than it is with Black players demonstrating against systemic racism.
The league did not return emails and texts seeking comment.
As for Bosa, I’d have more respect for him if he stood 10 toes down in his beliefs. During his postgame meeting with the media, he literally switched hats and refused to discuss his demonstration.
“I’m not going to talk too much about it,” he said, “but I think it’s an important time.”
This is not the first time Bosa has created a stir with his personal beliefs. Before being drafted, he regularly praised Trump, calling him and Ronald Reagan GOATs (greatest of all time). In 2016, he referred to Kaepernick as “a clown.” He scrubbed his social media accounts in the lead-up to the 2019 draft because they included posts that could be construed as insensitive or offensive. San Francisco general manager John Lynch specifically asked him about some of the posts before the draft, including one he “liked” that contained homophobic and racist hashtags.
He appeared remorseful at his post-draft news conference, saying: “I’m sorry if I hurt anybody. I definitely didn’t intend for that to be the case. I think me being here (San Francisco) is even better for me as a person, because I don’t think there’s anywhere, any city, that you could really be in that would help you grow as much as this one will. I’m going to be surrounded with people of all different kinds, so I’m going to grow as a person. I’m going to be on my own. I’m going to grow up, I’m gonna learn a lot of new things. It’s exciting.”
It sounded good, but now it appears he was acting for the cameras.
That said, my issue, for lack of a better word, is not with Bosa. He is who we thought he was. He’s not the only player to support Trump. Tom Brady, the golden boy of the NFL during much of his career, did interviews with a Trump hat clearly visible in his locker ahead of the 2016 election. Trump and Brady both mentioned their friendship, and Brady said a Trump win would mean “a putting green on the White House lawn.”
The concern is whether the NFL might show it has a double standard when it comes to political expressions by players. Kaepernick gets blackballed for fighting for social justice, and Bosa gets, what? Ignored by the league and applauded by far-right supporters who otherwise demand that athletes, specifically Black athletes, stick to sports?
If the NFL chooses to fine Bosa, it would likely announce its decision Saturday, as part of its regular cycle for on-field fines.
Then again, double standards are business as usual in the country’s most popular and powerful league. Commissioner Roger Goodell is known for being heavy-handed with players and soft on owners. Michael Bidwill (Arizona Cardinals), Robert Kraft (New England Patriots), Jimmy Haslam (Cleveland Browns) and Woody Johnson (New York Jets) all have engaged in behavior that appears to violate the league’s personal conduct policy — which is supposed to hold owners and executives to a higher standard. However, none has been publicly disciplined by the commissioner.
I’m not holding my breath that any action will be taken against Bosa. The writing is on the wall, and it’s penned in Black and White.
(Photo of Nick Bosa: Michael Owens / Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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