In 2020 in the United States during the Black Lives Matter movement, the players of the WNBA arrived at their games wearing shirts emblazoned with the names of victims of police brutality and streaked with blood-red paint to represent gunshot wounds. They boycotted their own games, and soon the players of the NBA began to do the same.
The movement spread to other athletes and other humans around the world. Conversations happened, new ideas were formed, and some, not all, but some minds were changed. That is the power of speaking up.
Of course, there are other impacts from speaking out on social issues. Some of these athletes and other activists may have lost friends or fans or financial opportunities. When Colin Kaepernick, a former NFL quarterback, spoke out about police brutality in 2016, it effectively ended his playing career.
And these athletes faced massive amounts of criticism. Questions arose, like “Why should we listen to what athletes have to say about social issues?”
But this is the incorrect question to ask.
The right questions to ask when contemplating speaking out are: does speaking out align with my values, and can I reach new people with my message? The answer to the first question is unique to all of us, but for famous athletes, the answer to that second question is a resounding yes.
There are countless tv shows, radio shows, and podcasts about sports. There are entire channels on television and entire social media empires devoted to communicating the latest in sports news. Individual athletes themselves have large social media platforms and masses of followers.
When a famous athlete speaks out about a social or political issue, that becomes sports news. All of the people who follow them or the many more who follow sports in general will hear their message. People who may not follow the news and haven’t heard about the issue or heard about it spoken in that way will now have it plastered all over their chosen media.
In a world where information is increasingly fragmented by subject or political affiliation, where we can live in our own little information bubble, any action that brings information about social or political injustice to new audiences is vital.
A sports fan who never watches the news but watches sports may never hear about police brutality unless a sports figure speaks out.
This logic applies to other folks with large platforms, but it also applies to all of us in our everyday lives.
People in our lives who only hear news from limited or biased sources might not have any other way to hear what we have to say unless we say it. We might be the only link someone in our lives has to new information.
And I’m not talking about the outcome. We don’t speak out for the outcome; we speak out for the opportunity of the outcome.
If you speak out about something you care about, is it possible that someone, anyone, even one solitary person, will hear something new? Not that they will change their minds, not that they will suddenly join your cause, but that you have put a new idea into their heads? Is that a possibility? If the answer is yes, then I don’t have to tell you what to do; you already know.
We don’t have to have a huge platform to give one new person new information. Our voices can make an impact with a large platform or a small one. The scale may be different but the way we do the work is the same. That is how we break down the barriers of information bubbles. One voice at a time.
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