The NBA Needs to Decide Whether It Stands for Something or Not
The league has tried to position itself at the forefront of social justice. Some people didn't get the memo
The NBA has a major problem on its hands.
Chamath Palihapitiya, the owner of the NBA’s Golden State Warrior said he does not care about the state of the Uyghurs in China.
The interview is from the All-In Podcast.
The Uyghur genocide is real, it’s happening, and it’s horrific. But when Palihapitiya, the owner of and NBA team, says that he doesn’t care about it, that’s a problem. Perhaps his comments come out of ignorance, since he says that China is not a dictatorship. But either way, he said it.
The NBA was at the vanguard of protests surrounding the shooting of George Floyd in 2020. NBA players walked out of games on August 26th after the shooting of Jacob Blake even though ultimately there was no wrongdoing found in the action’s taken by the officer who shot him.
The NBA-subsidized WNBA of course is extremely active in-left wing politics, going so far as to allowing Atlanta Dream players to wear shirts on the court campaigning for the opponent of Senator Kelly Loeffler, who was their boss as one of the owner’s of the team.
The NBA, of course, is also the league that went after Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morley for making an accurate statement in support of the protests in Hong Kong.
The NBA very selectively decides who can have political speech and who can’t.
One of the few players who gets it is Celtics Center Enes Kanter Freedom.
It probably isn’t a coincidence that Freedom fled Turkey to come to the U.S. to live a better life and so he could speak out against the brutal regimes in Turkey, China, and other places.
For somebody who’s family fled Sri Lanka to Canada as refugees when he was five years old, Palihapitiya sure has a funny way of understanding that violence against ethnic minorities is a problem in repressive regimes. And these are some of the things happening to Uyghur’s in China right now:
Government policies have included the arbitrary detention of Uyghurs in state-sponsored internment camps, forced labor, suppression of Uyghur religious practices political indoctrination, severe ill-treatment, forced sterilization,[16] forced contraception, and forced abortion. Chinese government statistics reported that from 2015 to 2018, birth rates in the mostly Uyghur regions of Hotan and Kashgar fell by more than 60%.
So is the NBA going to punish Palihapitiya for his idiotic remarks? Of course not; they will almost certainly say nothing about it because NBA Commissioner Adam Silver cares more about opening the Chinese market than he does about over a million ethnic minorities being detained or worse. But at some point, the NBA needs to decide whether it stands for something or not. Taking action against Palihapitiya and working to disinvest itself from China would be a good start.
It is NOT about social justice, it is all about the dollar!