Today, athletes from across the NBA, WNBA, MLB, and MLS chose not to play, cancelling playoff games and regular season games and sitting out in those games that did continue.
They chose not to because, to a man and a woman, they wanted to make a statement that Jacob Blake should not have been shot seven times in the back by the Kenosha, Wisconsin police department while his back was turned. They wanted to make a statement that the many ways in which Black people are mistreated in the country they call home, both by the police and by society itself, cannot simply be paid lip service to and not changed.