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I was at the 76ers game Wednesday. A day of renewal. A day we were supposed to see the first pick of the 2016 draft but instead were treated to finally seeing Joel Embiid and Dario Saric. Two players drafted in 2014 who had not yet played for the Sixers.

I could tell you about that, and how happy I am that Embiid seems more than capable or that I walked by him Tuesday night around the Ben Franklin parkway and got extremely excited. I was there at the game and saw a Sixers dancer sing the national anthem. Immediately I thought that something happened, that there was some sort of #blacklivesmatter protest planned and things had gone in direction that wasn’t necessarily in their (perceived) best interest.

I would like to say that the woman who sang the national anthem did a lovely job. I hope they have Jemila as the backup at all times because she is more than capable and it’s somewhat unfortunate that the story isn’t about her.

So by now you may or may not know that Sevyn Streeter was not allowed to sing by the organization because she wore a “We Matter” jersey.

Was suppose to sing the anthem at @sixers & @okcthunder game but mins b4 @sixers said I couldn’t because I was wearing a “We Matter” jersey pic.twitter.com/wjoJN3rq0r

— Sevyn (@sevyn) October 27, 2016

This comes not long after another BLM protest at a sixers game; albiet not a home game. It was a preseason game and nothing really of note happened so I cannot really blame the media for focusing on the protest and not the game. I know what the media focused on it because I was bombarded with it the next day.

So I cannot really blame the Sixers for not letting the story be about Joel Embiid, Dario Saric, a slightly healthy Okafor and a Sixers team that aims not to be basement dwellers; at least not on purpose. The BLM aspect would be part of the story or partly interrupt the story and who knows exactly what Ms. Streeter might have had planned besides the jersey. Either way it would definitely be covered and this NBA franchise thing is a business. If  I were running it I wouldn’t want the BLM story soaking up the internet while I’m trying to make the case that I’m a serious franchise again.

It’s an election year and I can’t watch TV without watching some sort of political bullshit ad against Trump or for Trump or against Katie McGinty or Pat Toomey or whatever the fuck. I really don’t need politics at a sports game I paid money to see ad-interrupted. Now if Embiid wanted to wear a BLM shirt or Oakafor wanted to kneel during the national anthem I support that for the most part. But to be asked to sing the national anthem and then make some sort of political statement; I’d rather hear a recording if it has to come to it, Whitney Houston preferably.

This isn’t about BLM or silencing people or sparking a debate. The debate is happening and if you’re unaware there’s social injustice in the United States you’ve probably been in a coma since the early 1400’s.  I’m not advocating for people to stop educating about the issues they believe to be important but I am saying that you may no longer be able to do that with a symbolic gesture; it’s been done to death.

So maybe they should have let her sing and I wouldn’t be writing this and it wouldn’t have sparked a debate of whether or not she should have been able to sing. One thing is obvious, the story is now about Sevyn Streeter and not BLM.

Somewhat lost in all this is the person who books the anthem singer and halftime show because things didn’t really go that well.

I’ll be the first one to tell you that I had never heard of Desiigner but I’m open to new things. I’m not really sure what this new thing was but there was a tattooed white chick dancing at the end of my row. It was energetic but they were clearly not actually performing the raps (maybe besides the yips and yaps). At least I got a t-shirt out of this, but it was a white t-shirt unfortunately which is objectively racist. Way to go Sixers 🙁

Bob McFlurry with Sports

So Lebron James has recently come out and stated that race played a role in the amount or severity of the backlash he received stemming from his decision to leave the Cleveland Cavilers and sign along with Chris Bosh to play in Miami with Dwyane Wade.  Yes there’s always going to be a racial component to a pretty much everything dealing with multimillion dollar athletes and their coverage in the media. The media handling of issues is then fed to the sheepish American public, most of whom don’t think for themselves or read between the lines.

With that being said, Lebron James wasn’t obligated to stay in Cleveland. This is America and if he chose he could have went anywhere that would have signed him to a contract. What Lebron should understand is that being the most over-hyped sports figure in modern sports and decision he makes is magnified to an exponential level. If Žydr?nas Ilgauskas had decided to leave Cleveland it doesn’t have the same effect as the most heavily marketed player in the game (by the way Big Z is heading to Miami too). Being the so called face of the NBA comes with a lot of weight on your shoulders. You have to take the good with the bad and that includes how the media deals with you and how race is involved in that coverage.

So Lebron is right, there is a racial component of how the media dealt with him and his decision. Always has been, always will be. What James’ may or may not have taken into account is how much these kids look up to him and expect him to do the right things. I learned a long time ago that there aren’t anymore heroes, at least not advertised ones, but kids and other people who saw Lebron as infallible don’t understand why he left Cleveland. The people of Cleveland certainly have nothing to cheer about now that their home grown superstar has flown the coop, leaving Josh Cribbs as maybe the most recognizable athlete in Cleveland. Fans in Chicago, New York and New Jersey are pissed that James didn’t come to their team. Millions of people including retired NBA greats looked at his teaming with Bosh and Wade as a cop-out, as the path of least resistance to win a championship. And the fact that he had an hour-long special on ESPN to announce his decision didn’t seem like the kind of thing that even media/endorsement whore Michael Jordan would have contemplated doing. Granted these are different times.

But for Lebron to act as if the media painted him in a negative light partly due to race is ignoring the essentially free pass he’s gotten from that same media and partially because of race up until his decision to leave Cleveland. For the first time in his career he’s had to endure some national ridicule. A multi-millionaire since he was out of high school and commonly known nickname, “KING JAMES”, it couldn’t possibly be that James brought this ridicule onto himself in the way he handled changing teams.

Even if James didn’t mean to implicate that race was anything but always an issue he did it in the wrong way and gave his detractors the means to attack him further.  If he wants to be anything like his idol Michael Jordan he better shut up and start blaming things on himself instead of other people or crying about how the media is treating him. The blue collar contingent of the U.S. doesn’t want to hear a multimillionaire bitch and complain about how tough their lives are. They’ve been making fun of rich white people for decades for that reason and I will bet that African American blue collar people feel like they just lost a little bit of pride in a guy that bitches and complains like a rich white guy.