The flags at the White House were flying at half-staff this morning, President Trump was relatively quiet on Twitter, and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf was probably playing basketball somewhere getting ready for the best game of his life.
“My best basketball I don’t think has been played yet,” he told GetMore Sports in an exclusive interview in which he also said much, much more — some of which is going to make people very upset again.
With the National Anthem controversy going nowhere fast as the start of the NFL season approaches, the player who ignited an anthem firestorm in the NBA more than two decades ago is taking it all in, shaking his head and awaiting the day when reason trumps emotion in all matters involving politics, world affairs, racial injustice and religious tolerance.
He is not holding his breath.
“Frederick Douglass said something years ago and it resonated with me.
“He said, ‘I prayed for freedom for 20 years and I never received an answer until I started praying with my legs,’ ” Andul-Rauf said.
With your legs?
“My legs, meaning praying alone — no, you’ve got to have action. You got to move toward it and that’s what we do. We depend on politicians who year in and year out lie to us. They tell us, ‘we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do this’ — only to give you crumbs but to take most of it away from you. And it’s just amazing to me that we keep allowing that same thing to happen,” Abdul-Rauf said last Thursday during a Big 3 practice at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center.
The hypocrisy that governs so many facets of everyone’s lives will probably never cease, and one of the only ways to battle it is to challenge it.
That is exactly what Abdul has been doing since 1996 when he was with the Denver Nuggets, stayed in the locker room during the anthem and said it was symbol of oppression.
Nobody made a big deal about the staying-in-the-locker-room part of it until somebody noticed, and then the entire country noticed. And in the days before social media, the controversy still managed to go viral.
Abdul-Rauf eventually became a journeyman, and plied his trade in places as far and wide as Japan, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Greece and Italy when he was finished with the NBA.
Many feel he was blacklisted for standing up for his beliefs — the exact same thing Colin Kaepernick is currently experiencing.
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“It’s the height of oppression,” Abdul-Rauf said. “You’ve lived your life, most of your life as an athlete, honing your skills, trying to play at the top level and you finally get there and it’s not basketball related, it’s because you’re taking a position that doesn’t just have to do with you, but it has to do with social justice – just the oppression that millions of people are going through, not just in this country but globally.
“Martin Luther King says, ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ So what happens, what the countries are doing abroad ricochets and comes back and affects us.
“That’s the way it works. And just here, even, a lot of military – and the military doesn’t get a blanket slate just like teachers don’t get a blanket slate, but you know military personnel, you get politicians saying year in and year out, ‘Oh, they gave the ultimate sacrifice,’ but still you got them homeless.
“Don’t get proper medical care. Some don’t even have medical care, but this is how you treat those who gave their life? It’s hypocrisy,” Abdul-Rauf said.
“So they don’t understand, the stand wasn’t just about justice as it pertains to Muslims, it was about universal justice, period. But you know, they frame it the way they want to. And like Noam Chomsky says, ‘the threat of a good example.’ You’ve got a person speaking out, and they don’t
want athletes to have a voice.
READ THE ENTIRE MAHMOUD ABDUL-RAUF INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
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Abdul Rauf has his voice back, and what he is saying makes perfect sense if you can ignore the fact that he is black, he is outspoken, he is Muslim and he is an American born and raised in Gulfport, Mississippi.
Of course, lots of people will not be able to ignore that — which is why Americans live in a politically polarized country.
One day, that will end.
That day will probably not be today.
