This is Pete Carroll’s, Seahawks’ time to lead unprecedented NFL push for racial equality
Pete Carroll quotes Dick Gregory, the comedian and civil right activist from generations ago.
“We’ve got a big job, and we ain’t got much time.”
That was from the 1960s.
“Well, it’s true today. It hasn’t happened yet,” Carroll said Thursday.
“We’ve got a big job. And we ain’t got much time.”
Carroll’s called on Dr. Harry Edwards, the noted activist and sociologist from his native Bay Area, to talk to his Seahawks about how they should feel about race. That was four years ago.
Now, with the nation in as much social and racial turmoil as in Gregory’s and Edwards’ Civil Rights Movement, Seattle’s 68-year-old white coach has been calling on his mostly Black players.
Seventy of the 90 players on the Seahawks’ current roster are Black. They have taken Carroll and his team into new territory talking about racial inequality in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death and the nation’s protests of it plus the killings of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor.
Carroll and Seattle’s players have been talking about this issue for years. That is, since the time Colin Kaepernick was first getting vilified for taking a knee in protest of these same problems during national anthems at NFL games in 2016.
But right now, right this moment in America, Carroll sees an unprecedented opportunity for real, lasting change.
If all Americans, particularly white Americans, in and out of the NFL act.
“Just being on it isn’t good enough. Just being on board ain’t good enough,” Carroll said on an online Zoom call Thursday, 17 days after a white Minneapolis police offer pressed his knee into Black man Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes before he died.
“We’ve seen that before. We’ve got to GO.
“We have to do it by voting; that’s one big way. But we’ve to get the right people in the right positions to make the right choices, so that we can make the changes. Because we have to get this done.”
Carroll clapped his hands for emphasis.
“We have to make the changes. We don’t have another choice. ...We need to continue to grow. This should be an ongoing protest of getting to the right place where everything is right, and equal, and just. ...
“One of things that’s really important is that white people do a WAY better job in this whole discussion than they’ve ever done before. There are a lot of legislators that are white, that are making the call, that are making decisions. And we have to make sure that we position ourselves so that our word and our thoughts and what is right is represented.
“That’s why voting is so important. ...Our players are so tuned into voting, like never before—for all the right reasons.”
He’s fumed at problems with voting, closed polling places, broken machine and hours- and days-long waits to vote in primary elections in Wisconsin last month and Georgia this week. Some see it as voter suppression—and a preview of the presidential election Nov. 3.
Carroll said voting problems make him “sick to my stomach.”
“I think we need to follow the emotion that drives these protests right now,” Carroll said. “These protests have been extraordinary, and they’ve made an enormous statement that is absolutely necessary.”
Players lead calls for change
Russell Wilson, Bobby Wagner, Duane Brown, K.J. Wright and other most veteran Seahawks leaders have been talking about this for two weeks with teammates. They’ve led daily team Zoom online calls. They’ve led the discussions that everything is not right, equal or just in the U.S. Haven’t been for Blacks for more than 400 years.
White Seahawks such as Greg Olsen, Luke Willson and Jacob Hollister, among others, have responded with genuine concern and interest to improve, Wilson, Carroll and others have said.
The coach mentioned the wives of Seahawks’ players are planning a march for Saturday at 2 p.m. at Aubrey Davis Park on Mercer Island.
“That is a statement opportunity for us,” Carroll said. “I can’t wait to get there and be part of it.”
But he stressed this isn’t new for Seattle’s locker room. Seahawks players been talking about this since Doug Baldwin, Richard Sherman, Kam Chancellor and Michael Bennett were winning the Super Bowl while speaking out from 2012-16.
“To tell you the truth, we’ve been on the topic for a long time,” Carroll said. “This isn’t just the last couple weeks for us. We’ve been on the topic for years in our building, and in our locker room and in our team room. And, trying to figure out and make sense of how we can help and how we can do the right thing.
“This is not new issues. This is not new concerns that needed to be dealt with. They just now have taken, just, a new turn.”
What is new for Carroll: the opportunity for growth. Within the Seahawks, and across the country.
“So, I think that as everybody as the opportunity to get into the discussions more deeply, more earnestly, with more intent, we just learn more. This is a topic for us that has so much depth to it, and so much concern for all of us to get on,” Carroll said.
“The whole thought of Black Lives Matter, when it first came out, I can remember in our meetings the players, we were talking, they were asking questions: ‘What does this mean? What does this mean to me? How should I take this?’ as people were saying ‘All Lives Matter’ and ‘Blue Lives Matter’ and all that kind of stuff was happening. And I can remember the discussions, I went right to Dr. Harry Edwards, and got him right connected: ‘Help us understand where we should go, and what we should come to understand.’
“And the topics and all the things that we were talking about right then are the topics that we are on right now—but fortunately we are at a time where the opportunity to create change is more available to us now.
“Understanding how powerful it is to say that Black lives matter, and to stand behind that principle and that thought and what that means is more clear to us. It’s more clear to our players, to myself personally.
“So, as we all grow we need to stay with it. We need to make something happen. And we need to really work this thing until we get to where it has to go, to a place where everybody is considered free and equal, and just things are happening. Where we all feel we are living in a great world, compared to what we are in right now.
“Our ability to communicate and converse and approach concepts is really at a place that it’s never been. I’m grateful for that. I’m sorry, to my heart, we are here because of the reasons we are here, the events that happened.
“But, we’ve got to do something right and do something well right now.”
NFL owners must change
Prompted by a players video last week that included new face of the league Patrick Mahomes saying “Black lives matter” and demanding the NFL do something, commissioner Roger Goodell did something. Goodell admitted last Friday “we were wrong” in ignoring the players’ concerns Kaepernick amplified so controversially in 2016.
But it’s Goodell’s bosses—the almost all white, billionaire team owners—who ultimately will determine if the NFL does what Carroll says the league has the power to: not just affect but lead societal change.
Those white, billionaire owners are the same ones who have blackballed Kaepernick out of the league in the three seasons since he began kneeling for social change.
The Seahawks have one of those white, billionaire owners. Jody Allen, sister of the late team owner Paul Allen, chairs the trust that runs Seattle’s franchise.
Carroll was asked if he’d be interested in asking Jody Allen if she would approach her fellow, white team owners across the NFL and ask them to commit to personal accountability and transparency in these issues.
Owners have remained silent for years. They’ve paid Goodell a reported $40 million per year to face the players’ rage while they occasionally—such as in the case of Jerry Jones with the Dallas Cowboys—have threatened to end the employment of players who protest during the anthem.
When it was suggested team owners are hiding behind Goodell, Carroll sounded angry.
“You guys don’t know Jody Allen very well, but she ain’t hiding behind nothin’,” Seattle’s coach said. “She’s got extraordinary perspective. She’s got a strength to her. She’s got toughness to her. She ain’t hiding behind anybody.
“I don’t even know what that means. ...
“She’s a treasure.”
Carroll blamed the entire league, in general, for its lack of action in racial inequality and police brutality since Kaepernick began kneeling four years ago.
“Obviously, we didn’t get the message before, when we had the chance to,” Carroll said. “The message is the same message. We need to hear it better, and hear it right, as people who that support the game and people who love the game from the outside.
“And that message comes from our guys. And we have to listen to them. We’ve got to grow with them, and respond to them, and make sure that we represent them.
“Because the NFL is as powerful an institution as there is in the country.”
He pounded the table at which he was looking into his computer screen.
“And this, frickin’...the league needs to stand up for the right stuff and make things move the way we can make things move,” the coach said. “We have a lot of power; something happened, and the next thing you know the president is commenting on it. We have the platform to do great stuff. Well, let’s let our guys be in position to do that. Let’s be sure that we support them and promote them.
“The Black people know what’s necessarily. They’ve been living this life. It’s the white people that’s got to come on board and figure it out. We need our guys to speak on behalf of what is right and what’s necessarily. ...We need to listen to them. ...
“And if we do that and we follow them, we will do the right thing.
“I really hope, more than ever before, that we will regard what they’ve come from and what they know and what they see and what they feel, as they represent their understanding of what is necessary in the world that they are living in,” Carroll said of Black Seahawks, and Black NFL players everywhere. “And it will make the difference in how we follow that messaging in the league.
“They are coming from their heart, from their experiences that they uniquely know.”
This story was originally published June 12, 2020 at 5:15 AM.
