What are NBA players trying to accomplish with a walkout? The answer is important

Early Wednesday evening, players on the Milwaukee Bucks decided to walk out on Game 5 of their NBA playoff series as a protest of the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man in Kenosha, Wisc. Soon, two more NBA games were postponed, then a slate of WNBA games and some Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer contests. The NBA hopes to resume the playoffs Friday or Saturday.

As expected, the players are being criticized for their walkouts, just as athletes often are when they take a knee or wear social justice shirts or speak out on anything besides sports. “What exactly are you expecting to accomplish?” the doubters asked again this week.

It’s a good question, actually, and it’s one we all should ask. Including this editorial board.

It’s long been imperative to members of this board to stand for justice and ask hard questions about police shootings. We did so when Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Mo. We called for increased use of police body cameras after the killings of Eric Garner in New York City and Walter Scott in North Charleston. We demanded transparency and a reexamination of policies and staffing in the wake of Keith Lamont Scott’s shooting in Charlotte and Akiel Denkins in Raleigh.

We also said that unrest over those and other police shootings have exposed how our cities and country have fallen short in addressing inequality in housing, jobs and education, and that we need to make headway against deep-rooted inequities and, yes, systemic racism.

But as police shootings maddeningly continue, our voice is sometimes not as consistently loud as it could be. While we expressed support and hope for the protests in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, we didn’t write in the days after he was killed. We mentioned Breonna Taylor during those same marches and protests, but only in a few sentences. This week, when Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back by police in Kenosha, we wrote nothing.

There are factors that go into those kinds of decisions. We wonder, with any potential editorial, how interested North Carolina readers are in news events in other states. We also wonder if calling again for change - in this case, police policy and accountability – loses its impact when you do it for the umpteenth time.

In other words, we wonder the same thing that skeptics ask - and that protesters, including athletes, surely ask themselves: What exactly are you trying to accomplish? There’s no simple answer, for any of us. Maybe it’s to be heard and to prompt change. Maybe it’s make sure people don’t become numb to a wrong that keeps happening. Maybe the answer is you don’t know if you’ll accomplish anything, but history is full of people who decided they couldn’t stop trying.

On Wednesday night, a group of NBA players did just that, boldly. They called for specific justice - that the officers involved in Jacob Blake’s shooting be held accountable. They called for state legislators and members of Congress to address issues of police accountability, brutality and criminal justice reform.

Yes, they are all things athletes and others have called for before. But this week, these athletes reminded us that even if there doesn’t seem to be much left to say, there’s always at least one more word:

Enough.

This story was originally published August 27, 2020 at 12:20 PM with the headline "What are NBA players trying to accomplish with a walkout? The answer is important."