There isn't a friendlier place for a pro football player and social justice activist like Michael Bennett to visit on his book tour than at Democracy Now! During a lengthy interview with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, Bennett made several outrageous remarks while discussing his highly controversial book Things That Make White People Uncomfortable.
Bennett knows from first-hand experience how to make white people uncomfortable, physically. As a spectator at the 2017 Super Bowl in Houston, he allegedly over-powered a female, senior paraplegic stadium employee. The football player who identifies as a feminist was indicted by a Houston grand jury on the felony charge of causing injury to an elderly person. Democracy Now! never brought it up in the interview.
Nor did they give a fair representation of the Trump-Waters controversy. In typical left-stream media partisanship, the hosts asked Bennett for his take on President Trump making headlines for threatening Cong. Maxine Waters. There was no mention of her calling on people to harass his supporters. Bennett responded:
"I think—I don’t know what to say to a person who lacks the empathy and compassion for other people. And you’re putting people in danger by calling out Maxine Waters. You know, people are looking up—she’s a beautiful being. She’s a person who cares about people of color, and she wants to make a change. ... He doesn’t have the ability to be able to confront these issues and have an intellectual conversation with other people."
One of Bennett's most stunning remarks about making whites feel uncomfortable was this one:
"(White people have) been so comfortable with seeing immigrants taken. They’ve been so comfortable with seeing, you know, people being killed by the police. They’ve been so comfortable with victimizing and raping when it comes to the #MeToo movement."
Goodman drew another inflammatory comment out of the Philadelphia Eagles' defensive lineman with the question, "Why are the overwhelming majority of owners—or, I don’t know what you call them, but owners, football owners—white, most of them billionaires, but—and 70 percent of the players are black?" Making reference to the charges of black, millionaire athletes claiming they are "slaves," he replied:
"Do you really want me to answer that question? I don’t know. Post-colonialism? I don’t know what to tell you. I mean, it’s a lot of things. I think the business is built on that. It is a business that’s been the same for a long time. And I don’t know why it’s like that. It’s just the league that I grew up in. It’s the way that things have always been. And everything has always been white-owned and minority-worked. So, I don’t know how to change that, you know."
Bennett said there had been a drought in athlete activism since the days of disgraced sprinter John Carlos and Muhammad Ali. He called their actions "magnificent" and praised the current crop of protesters:
"And I think my generation of athletes, we’ve come back onto that moral compass stage, and now we have young kids being aware of the situation. And it really started from the empathy and compassion of the players in the NFL, whether it was Colin Kaepernick, Malcolm Jenkins—the list can go on of a lot of guys who stood up for what they believed in."
The Democracy Now! interviewers were impressed with the Jan. 15 cover of The New Yorker magazine, an artist's creation of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Kaepernick and Bennett all taking a knee together in protest. Possibly unaware the NFL has banned anthem protests, the interviewers asked Bennett if he would take a knee as a new member of the Eagles' team? He said the dissidents will try to be "more creative in finding ways to protest and be more peaceful."
Bennett said Kaepernick's story "is just a pure tragedy." The NFL took his football career away "for all the wrong reasons." He said it was "devastating" for players to watch Kaepernick go unsigned, that "It took the air out of a lot of people’s chest, because we loved him for how he was doing this thing and how he was doing it in a peaceful manner."
Peaceful yes, but also disrespectful.
