An old saying maintains that what is understood doesn’t need an explanation. Some things may be widely understood but still need explanation, because understanding the experience is different from understanding the system that produces it. Racism in sports is understood. The system that makes silence economically rational is what bears explaining.
In 1990, Michael Jordan was asked to endorse Harvey Gantt, North Carolina’s Democratic nominee for Senate. Gantt was a formidable candidate: an MIT-trained architect, the first Black student to enroll at Clemson, and Charlotte's first Black mayor. Jordan declined. Pressed by reporters, he offered the line that would follow him for decades: “Republicans buy shoes too.” Read the subtext. Jordan understood — as every Black American understands — that any bid for Black empowerment, Black equality, invites economic and financial backlash. Challenge that dynamic and you gamble your livelihood. Ask John Carlos and Tommie Smith, Muhammad Ali, Doug Williams, Craig Hodges, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, Colin Kaepernick.
Incumbent Senator Jesse Helms narrowly defeated Harvey Gantt in North Carolina, 52 to 47. Going into the race, the polls were a dead heat. Helms played the race card — literally. His campaign ran an ad showing a white worker's hands crumpling a rejection slip, denied a job, the narrator said, because of a racial quota. Helms's strategist Carter Wrenn later admitted it outright: “We played the race card.”
To be clear, this is not a condemnation of Jordan. It condemns the system that forced his calculation. Michael Jordan's decision should not be remembered primarily as a personal indictment. It should be understood as evidence of an institutional failure. At 28, Jordan was asked to weigh his civic influence against an emerging commercial empire. The infrastructure that might have allowed him to exercise political agency while collectively managing the economic consequences did not exist at the scale he needed. More than three decades later, it still does not. That is exactly what Black athletes have never had. Jordan had shoe contracts and a jump shot; he did not have an institution built to convert his platform into durable power without costing him everything. Individual courage — Ali's, Kaepernick's — has never been enough, precisely because it was individual. The system punishes the lone actor. Only an institution can rewrite the terms.
Jordan’s endorsement might well have pushed Gantt over the top — but at what cost to himself, and what institution existed to absorb that risk alongside him when the backlash came? None. And that absence is the whole point. Jordan's dilemma did not emerge from the athlete economy alone. It reflects a much older American accommodation. In my book The Unwritten Truce, I argue that the Civil War never ended in a true peace: the doctrine of white supremacy lost the war on slavery but won the prevailing peace on everything that followed; the institution of chattel slavery was destroyed, but the underlying philosophy that permitted it to exist, the belief in white supremacy, survived in an unwritten agreement that was never named and never renounced.
Progress against that truce has never come from waiting for hearts and minds to change. Progress has come when an institution chose accountability — named the wrong, wrote down better terms, and enforced them. When President Truman desegregated the armed forces in 1948, it was, in effect, the first written amendment to that unwritten truce. Not a change of heart. A change of terms made permanent by an institution. Institutions are inanimate objects; they do not change on their own; people must make them change. In 1947, those people were A. Philip Randolph, Walter White, and William Hastie, to name a few. They, along with millions of Black Americans, created the pressure that led to the change.
In America's 250 years, tremendous progress has been made; however, naming and defeating the philosophy that was the foundation for chattel slavery remains a strategic imperative for all Americans. If Black Americans can be disenfranchised in violation of the Constitution, so can women, gays and lesbians, Jews, Catholics — anyone the power structure decides is unworthy.
Either we are all free, or none of us is.
So, who is pushing for the next change? Who is building the institution Black athletes need to leverage their extraordinary economic and cultural power without being punished for demanding greater justice?
Join that conversation September 15, 2026, at The Historic Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C.