College athletes tend to shy away from making controversial statements, because schools have so much control over their futures.
Outspoken athletes like Nigel Hayes and Shabazz Napier are outliers, while schools often tell athletes to just shut up and play.
Recently, LSU told its players not to wear LSU gear if they protested the killing of Alton Sterling, a black man who was shot and killed by police while he was being held down and not posing a threat to officers.
But star college football recruit Tyreke Smith isn’t about to stop talking, even if it means schools stop recruiting him. Smith, a four-star recruit from Cleveland, Ohio, wore a shirt to an Ohio State camp that said “I Hope I Don’t Get Killed For Being Black Today.”
⭕️state was great!!!! 💯 pic.twitter.com/HlWtYBXhOu
— Tyreke Smith (@T_23_baller) June 17, 2017
Smith, and his older brother Malik—a basketball player at Bryant—told Eleven Warriors that the shirt is meant to protest all violence against African-Americans, including police brutality and violence in black neighborhoods.
“I decided to wear the shirt because I wanted to bring attention to the epidemic of blacks being killed at an alarming rate,” Smith said. “What we would like to do is have people talk about these issues to reduce the murder rate of African-Americans.”
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“The shirt was created to bring light into the every day problems that blacks face between police and black-on-black crimes,” Tyreke’s older brother, Malik, said. “The shirt exemplifies a voice that we have, but may not be heard. So why not have people see it?”
Smith wore the shirt just one day after a jury failed to convict a Minneapolis police officer for shooting and killing a man who was reaching for his wallet. It also comes after a Cleveland police officer wasn’t indicted for shooting and killing a 12-year-old for playing with a toy gun, after a jury failed to convict a North Charleston police officer for shooting and killing an unarmed man who was running away and not posing a threat, and after a Tulsa police officer was acquitted for killing an unarmed man who she said looked like a “bad dude.”
What this means is that cops essentially can avoid punishment as long as they say they feared for their life—and that fear can come from the person they shoot simply being black.
https://twitter.com/WesleyLowery/status/877300278088871936
A black person, mind you, who is not doing anything particularly “threatening” — unless you consider black people inherently threatening.
— Jane Coaston 🏔️ (@janecoaston) June 21, 2017
Now, Smith is using his massive platform—as a recruit that programs worth hundreds of millions of dollars are pursuing, and as a future college athlete—to shine a light on the issue. Good on him, and hopefully others follow in his footsteps.
