Michael Bennett on Political Activism in Sports

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: As we’ve seen tonight, America is a nation divided, but football is a unifying passion. Michael Bennett is an NFL star and Super Bowl champion. In the wake of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Bennett decided that he would no longer stand during the national anthem. He joined the protest made famous by black players like Colin Kaepernick, who started a national conversation by taking the knee during the pre-game anthem. Michael Bennett joined our Michel Martin to discuss that and his new book, “Things That Make White People Uncomfortable.”

MICHEL MARTIN: Obviously, the “take a knee protests” are the thing that makes some people deeply uncomfortable. And so I wanted to ask you a sort of start by talking about how you decided to take a knee.

MICHAEL BENNETT, NFL PLAYER, AUTHOR “THINGS THAT MAKE WHITE PEOPLE UNCOMFORTABLE”: I think a lot of times when you make a stance or you make a protest about certain things, there are going to be certain people who are going to — you’re going to have backlash, but you got to be able to withstand the criticism. I think the criticism, a lot of people can’t deal with it. When you play sports, you get criticized every single day. Everything you do is about criticism. And when you’re taking a stance, people are going to criticize because they don’t want to see change. And I think taking a knee was really about changing the trajectory of life and changing the trajectory for our kids and changing it for everybody that we saw an issue with. It wasn’t just about the police brutality. Maybe for some people but overall, it was about humanity, it was about how can we change humanity and create a better place for our kids.

It was about being living ancestors and trying to find something that we can — that our kids could look on and see that the people before them were really courageous and they wanted something different.

MARTIN: OK. But talk to me about you, the you part of it, because I think a lot of people are familiar with Colin Kaepernick and they’re familiar with Eric Reid, and they’re familiar with how it started with them. What made you, Michael Bennett, decide that you were going to participate?

BENNETT: I think it was a reaction to society. Reaction to what was happening around me. The reaction to, you know, police brutality. The reaction to women’s rights. The reactions to the border, reactions to equality, and with water, just pure equality for people.

And I think for me, there’s a lot of different issues, but the one that probably was more publicized was Charlottesville. Seeing all that and you’re like, where do I play a place in that? What can I do with my platform? How can I inspire young kids? Just like we all look at things that happened in the past, we look at, you know, Jim Crow, we look at the Holocaust, we look at slavery, look at all these different things and we’re like, “well, I would do that if I was there, this is what I would do.” But this is that time where we’re supposed to be doing things that we said we would do because then you will look back and be like, “I have a lot of regrets because I saw something happening but I didn’t have the courage to speak.”

MARTIN: What’s your understanding of the people who are vehemently opposed to the protests that the players were involved in? What do you — where do you think they’re coming from?

BENNETT: I think they’re coming from a place where they see things as good as it can be for society. I think it’s good for them. They think it’s good the way that America is. They don’t really understand what it’s like to be something other than themselves, like they haven’t taken the time to really dig deep down inside their spirit and spend time with somebody in the opposite position. I really don’t want to make it like, “oh, they don’t know, this, that.” But I just want to take this time to, if they read the book or they get a chance to spend time with other people, really take that time and break down that barrier of, like, I already know what’s happening. Allow yourself to build that bridge to somebody else who’s the opposite of you. And that’s what I really want the people who I think don’t really understand what’s happening with the protests. They just need to be able to build a bridge and then they’ll have a better understanding of what it’s like.

MARTIN: You were never afraid that you would get fired per the suggestion of the president?

BENNETT: There are things that you have to be able to stand upon and what you believe on because, at the end of the day, it`s not just for me or just the community. It`s also for my children because my children are going to judge me on not how many touchdowns I score, not what I do on the football field. They’re going to judge me on what kind of man I was and did I stand up for what I believe in and I can never tell them to do things that I wasn’t willing to stand upon. And I think that’s really what it is, it’s really the children. So if I lost my job for something that I believed in before them and society, I think my kids would understand that. And I think that’s what’s the most important thing because you can’t really take your trophies with you. You can’t really take that. All you can take is your legacy, the legacy, what you leave behind is the only thing that really matters.

MARTIN: And you know which is interesting too because you have a whole menu of involvements in things that don’t get as much attention. I mean you’re involved in S.T.E.M. education, particularly for girls. You’ve been involved in a lot of international, you know, relief and educational efforts. Does that frustrate you, that those kinds of activities don’t get the same level of attention?

BENNETT: No, that’s — to me, that’s what I was saying. Like I’m not doing things so I can get, like, a clap. I’ve been in the stadium. I’ve been in the big games. I’ve been in things. And I understand that at the end of the day, it’s not really about how people perceive it. It’s really how you are willing to help people and what you really feel. Like when you are somewhere and you’re helping somebody and you’re doing stuff for people, you’re not really doing it for yourself, you’re doing it for them. And I think that’s really ultimately the goal. And I think for me, that’s always been that. So I understand that there are certain things that people are not going to want to talk about because people don’t like my politics, they think I’m pro-black, they think I’m this, they think I’m that.

So automatically there’s not going to be companies who want to work with somebody who has a voice like mine, who has an opinion like mine because, for me, I hold a certain amount of integrity on things that I believe in and so that they know when you talk to me, I’m not going to sway all of a sudden because you want to share a certain message.

I’m going to say what I said before, and I’m still going to stay with it. And if you want to work, we can work. If not, then move on because it’s about the people. It’s not about — it’s about the individual person, it’s about the group, it’s about the collective.

MARTIN: But one of the other interesting things about this book is how you talk about women and how important it is to you to not just stand up for and support women, but to be understood to be standing up and supporting women and their aspirations, women, and girls in their aspirations. And I, you know, I think there are people who will find that surprising.

BENNETT: I think a lot of people find that surprising. I think they don’t really get it. They don’t get it. Like I think they will never get it because they’re only going to see me for one thing and they’re going to see me just playing football and not anything else. They won’t see me as a father. They won’t see me as all the other stuff. But to me, it goes back to my daughters, just, like, there’s a time in your life when I say being uncomfortable, for me, to be — I’ve been comfortable with the way things are happening to women, or this and that.

It wasn’t until I had my daughters and really started to, like, really understand, like, oh, this is what — OK, this is different. If I had a son, I think it wouldn’t have allowed me to have the growth that I have had because it opens up another side of your brain to being able to listen, like, “OK, let me listen because I really don’t listen.” And I think that helps you grow, and I think my daughters have done a great job and also my wife. My wife is a powerful being of her own and it’s incredible to be around that much girl power all the time.

So it’s like important that men speak up for women and show that women have value just as much value as us. And I think that’s something that a lot of people aren’t willing to do, because they want to keep it a certain way.

MARTIN: You are very candid about a lot of the things that players feel but don’t often express. And I want to go through a couple of those things. One is where you say in the book, particularly being a college player, you talk about being “half God, half property. But whichever half they were dealing with, I was never fully human. Is my being nerdy of interest? Do they celebrate things like that have happened in the life of my community? You come to find out painfully that the answer is less no. Then, why should we care?” I found that sort of fascinating being like “half God, half property. Tell me about.” Like how did you come to that understanding?

BENNETT: It’s funny. I was really — it came — I was writing a poem one day, and I was writing this poem about the great athletes and I was like half God. And I started thinking, as I was starting the book, and it’s just half God, half property because you are — to some people, you are a God because the things that you do, the things that you could do with your body. But to other people, they see a sense of ownership in you. And I think in college, that happens a lot. They see you but they also say, “well, we pay for your scholarship, we do this for you.” They don’t see you as a human. They never can connect to the humanity in you, whether you have a child, whether you have a family. They just want you to perform.

There’s a sense of people feel that they own you. And you evenly worry when you talk about football and teams, they say the owner. It’s like that word holds a lot of weight, you know, it’s like, the capacity to think that you’re — somebody owns you, it just makes you feel less than. You know what I’m saying?

MARTIN: So on the one hand like the waters part when you walk in, right?

BENNETT: Yes.

MARTIN: But then still, you’re told what to think, you’re told what to study, right? You’re told how to express yourself. When did you start to think, this is not right? Like how did you start to think, wait a minute, this is not right? Because some people will think, well, so what? I mean that’s the price you get for being famous. You get to be famous, you get to have the big show, and you get to —

BENNETT: But that’s what they’re forgetting is that that’s really not fame. It’s you in your adolescence. You’re an amateur and you’re really trying to figure out who you are in life, and what you want to be, and how you want to get there. And all of a sudden, people don’t see the value in your growth. They don’t see the value in you. So they stunt your growth as a person, because nobody sees the value in what you can be and how you can be that.

So it’s like, yes, they part the doors open, they part the sea for you when it’s game time, but when the season’s over, what everything goes down to is all you have is you and the way that you look, people are going to judge you on that. And when college people get injured, they just kind of get washed away.

And if you’ve ever been a part of a tribe, then you know human beings are a tribal people. And all of a sudden, you’re part of a tribe and then once you become injured, you get isolated, it starts to wear on you and there’s a lot of people that happens to.

MARTIN: You also talked about how suiting up every week, really not even every week, even at practice, you honestly consider death.

BENNETT: Yes.

MARTIN: That death is a possibility.

BENNETT: Yes.

MARTIN: Would you talk about that? I don’t know that a lot of fans really think about that.

BENNETT: I don’t think people — it’s that, you know, and I talk about that. It’s like you love something and there’s a deal with the devil almost. Because one wrong hit can leave you paralyzed, so it’s a lot of things that you have to deal with. We don’t like to think about those things, because then the reality of what can happen to us won’t allow us to play anymore. It’s like you have to think that it won’t happen to you.

But every once in a while, you see that you are human when it happens to somebody and you think like, man, that could have been me. You try to put that in the back of your mind, because you want to be able to progress, but sometimes you think about that, and you think about when you get injured and somebody gets a concussion and you see how hard they got hit, you worry, like, damn, that could have been me.

MARTIN: I was fascinated to read in the book how young people can be, and show symptoms of CTE. And I just wonder when you were starting your career as a, say, as a high school player, did you think about brain injury?

BENNETT: I don’t think we ever thought about that. I don’t think — nobody really thought about it at the time because it wasn’t at the forefront of it. I don’t think there was a language for it. It wasn’t like that — now it’s that coded language, they say concussion instead of saying bruising of the brain, all these different issues that are happening that are traumatic to your head. And I think before there wasn’t really — couldn’t really explain it or maybe they didn’t know and nobody really said anything.

MARTIN: But what about now? Is that something that you all talk about? Or do you not even allow yourselves to talk about it?

BENNETT: I think there’s definitely that line between where people don’t want to talk about it because they want to live in a fantasy that things can happen to them but, because of fear, because every player has a fear of what can happen to their body after they play sports, every player has that fear that they don’t — that they can be the person who has that injury. So because of that fear, I wouldn’t say it’s a lack of courage. I just think it`s a fear of the people who are depending on them to think that after all the work that they’ve done, there’s still a possibility that they can let their family down. So that’s a lot to weigh on your brain when you think about it. So I think a lot of times guys don’t really want to really talk about it because of that.

MARTIN: What about you? Are you ever afraid?

BENNETT: I’m always afraid. I don’t think anybody can look in your eyes and tell you that they are fearful, they would be lying to the young and to the youth. I think everybody should have a small bit of fear if you do something like this. Because then it keeps the reality and you can weigh in the options of it. And you can really feel the pain when you have it because when you have that, when you don’t have that fear, you just think you start to believe in the own — your own mystic and your own fables and you start to become your own fairy tale. And it’s not until you realize that when the doctor’s there and you’re like, this is reality and I think it’s important to keep that fear and to keep the humanity in your own self.

MARTIN: I take it you would not let your own son, if you had a son, play football.

BENNETT: Probably not.

MARTIN: Probably not?

BENNETT: Probably not. and I think also, too, I think football and a lot of times it’s the way to get out of your situation. And I think right now when you are in a certain place, you can put your kids in a space where they can compete and have the opportunity to do something else outside. And I think that’s the greatest thing about being able to be with my daughters is that I don’t feel that force need to force them to be something that they don’t have to. They can be equal and better than me through just their own genre or whatever they want to do. And I think that’s important for a parent to understand that, that just because you’re great at something, doesn’t mean you have to force your kids to be great at it. And you have to be able to support them with what they want to do. And I think that for me has been a whole full circle.

MARTIN: Wow. That’s really deep. I mean to realize that you created this opportunity for your family through the sacrifice of your body.

BENNETT: Yes. It’s poetry.

MARTIN: It’s a hard thing.

BENNETT: It’s like — it’s a lot of poetry. And like I said, I feel like sometimes — like I feel it’s like Romeo and Juliet. Like you love something so much but it could still cause death or it could cause harm. They loved each other so much but at the end, they both died. And they left the world, the world still kept going. And I think that’s something that we don’t really talk about a lot and I think when you talk about a lot of great people and you talk about a lot of great things that a lot of people have done, we love to glorify and honor the things that we see fit. We love to honor, like, seeing Giancarlo take a fist. We love all these people when Michael Sam took his stance.

But then you look at the other part of it, the sorrow part of it and that’s where the poetry and the love comes in because nobody ever really talks about that side of it. We all just glorify the part that we see, that we can give people hope. But I think when you give somebody hope, you’ve got to give them the whole spectrum of a person’s life. And I think a lot of times we don’t really dig that deep. And I think when you look at the whole spectrum of it, sometimes it’s really sad.

MARTIN: So why do it?

BENNETT: Why do it?

MARTIN: Why keep playing?

BENNETT: That’s the contradiction. That’s the imperfect of me, the imbalance of it. That’s the thing about it. It’s like, you love being competitive. And I also think, for me, I just always love the group of guys that I play with. It’s getting to that point where someone said, it’s like you love it and you’re living it but at the same time, you don’t really know why you love this thing so much when you know the pain of it. But I think it’s kind of like — I think love is like that sometimes. Love is like ups and downs, the pain.

MARTIN: It’s irrational.

BENNETT: It’s irrational. And it’s irrational when it comes to playing something like this.

MARTIN: Well, it’s nice to meet you.

BENNETT: It’s nice to meet you too.

MARTIN: Thank you so much for talking to us.