Former Marquette University basketball player and 12-time NBA All-Star Dwyane Wade, along with Basketball Hall-of-Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (who played for the Milwaukee Bucks while he was still known as Lew Alcindor) are among more than 50 athletes, coaches, executives and media personalities featured in a timely new book exploring the intersection of sports and politics.
We Matter: Athletes and Activism (Akashic Books, $29), by former NBA player and social justice advocate Etan Thomas, features insight and interviews about the role athletes play in commenting on everything from police brutality to Donald Trump’s presidency.
Thomas was the first professional athlete from the United States to publicly oppose George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, and his high regard for others unafraid to speak their mind is obvious throughout.
The interview with Wade, who along with then-teammate LeBron James and other members of the Miami Heat donned hoodies to honor Trayvon Martin — an unarmed black teenager killed in 2012 — touches on the importance of police officers and African American communities to “verbalize what the other side expects.”
Abdul-Jabbar, meanwhile, focuses on the need for athletes (and anyone else) to make their voices heard in the age of Trump. He calls the president’s Muslim ban, misogyny and fake news rallying cry “a tragedy” and urges readers “to combat [them] with all of our ability and all of our strength. We have to do this together: black, white, Christian, Muslim, male, female. We all have a common problem, and we have to come together to fight against this common problem.”
Thomas also writes about NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s 2016 decision to take a knee during the National Anthem, the Black Lives Matter movement and the exploitation of college athletes.
Near the book’s end, he interviews another former Buck (and Abdul-Jabbar’s teammate), Oscar Robertson, who filed an antitrust lawsuit against the NBA in 1970 that led to free agency rules still in effect today. “When things are going bad, people have a right to demonstrate and … voice their disapproval, and that includes athletes,” Robertson tells Thomas.
In an afterword, sports editor for The Nation, Dave Zirin, writes that “It’s important to remember that so much of the athlete activism that Thomas explores started as a response to police killings.” Tony Robinson, the 19-year-old who was shot and killed by a Madison police officer in 2015, is not mentioned. But the publication date of March 6 reminds us: It’s the third anniversary of Robinson’s death.
