While the shining lights inside U.S. Bank Stadium showcase some of the best talents the NFL has to offer during the Super Bowl, social activists on the outside of the event will be hoping that the big game can also help illuminate long-ignored social issues.
The intersection of sports and politics has seemingly never been clearer than in 2018, and the Super Bowl Anticorporate Antiracist Coalition hopes to amplify many of the connections that have been made between the two in a protest scheduled to begin at 3 p.m. the day of the Super Bowl (Feb. 4) at the intersection of Chicago Avenue and Franklin Avenue South.
“The purpose of our protest is to use the Super Bowl to address the issues of racism and corporate greed,” Meredith Aby-Keirstead, a lead organizer of the coalition, told me in an interview.
“In terms of racism, we feel like some players in the NFL have used their position as football players to try to bring forward a national conversation about police brutality,” she said in reference to players like Super Bowl participants Malcolm Jenkins and Chris Long or Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid.
“We here in the Twin Cities have had a lot of really important battles around police brutality and we want to send a message of solidarity to those players but also to piggyback off their discussion.”
In the Twin Cities, organizers have protested the killings of Philando Castile and Justine Damond among others by the police. Family members of those who have been killed by police in the state of Minnesota will be speaking at the rally.
The primary focal point for discussions surrounding racism and football will be an expansion of what NFL players have been best known to protest — police brutality. But organizers have also arranged to have a speaker, Clyde Bellecourt, talk about offensive mascots. Bellecourt is a co-founder of the American Indian Movement and protested the 1992 Super Bowl in Minneapolis.
The coalition also hopes to shed light on the choices made by the Twin Cities in the decision to host the Super Bowl. “The Super Bowl is really this game for the one percent. That’s who gets to go to the game, everything is orchestrated for them,” said Aby-Keirstead.
“They’re shutting down mass transit on the train line, so you get on in Bloomington and you get to go straight to downtown and nobody else gets to use that on Sunday, even though it’s paid for by taxpayer dollars,” she detailed. “Or the fact that even though they’re shutting off different sections of downtown or that people are being furloughed for that week; they’re being told that if you work in downtown, don’t come here. Or that they’ve moved out, weeks in advance, the homeless from downtown.
“We really want to use this as a way to talk about how we need money for human needs and not for athletic entertainment for the one percent. All the resources that are being put into the Super Bowl could be put into things that could actually help people who are forgotten about in downtown Minneapolis.”
“The Super Bowl is really this game for the one percent. That’s who gets to go to the game, everything is orchestrated for them”
Though direct funding for Super Bowl activities “above and beyond what’s normally included in department budgets” are reimbursed through the Super Bowl Host Committee and their private fundraising, the list of demands that the city ultimately agreed to from the NFL could cost many times what the Host Committee has offered to offset.
A Minneapolis and St. Paul commissioned report in favor of hosting Super Bowl estimated total expenditures to be around $407 million.
Even with offsetting funds, the appropriation of city resources for the exclusive use of one group at the cost of the general public is worthy of scrutiny.
It’s not just about the Super Bowl, even though the protests are occurring right before the big event. Aby-Keirstead explained, “It’s using the Super Bowl as a vehicle by which to talk about social justice. The Super Bowl gives us the opportunity to talk about how football relates to these two national issues. Like the use of football as a way to drain public resources, but also the use of football by the players to talk about police brutality.”
With two larger issues to focus on and a little bit of nuance to explore within those issues, there’s some degree of difficulty getting all the parts of the message conveyed effectively.
In response to that, Aby-Keirstead argued that the coalition should have no problem getting their message across. “The idea is that we have signs and banners that we’ve been making that talk about corporate greed and police brutality,” she said, also pointing out that they’ll have speakers and slogans specific to both issues.
“One angle we’ve been pursuing,” she mentioned, “is inviting high school students who have been a part of taking a knee as a part of their sporting activities to come and be a part of the protest carrying the banner, but also in terms of speaking at the protest. It gives us a way to make those connections because people in the NFL, like Colin Kaepernick, have inspired people. Like the team at Jefferson High School took a knee last year multiple times throughout the season, which was awesome.”
High school students across the country and in Minnesota have been taking a knee in solidarity with NFL players and in protest of system racism.
“They got a lot of harassment from fans,” Aby-Keirstead said of the high school students. “Not necessarily everyone was supportive of that, and when I asked one of the captains of the football team, who is African-American or biracial, how he felt about that, he said ‘it’s way harder to be black in this country than it is to take a knee.’
“We have a student from Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, I believe she’s a member of the volleyball team, who led her team in taking a knee and she’s got other team members who are going to come. We’ve also got invites out to students from Patrick Henry who are coming.”
In response to questions about the genuineness of students protesting, Aby-Keirstead was adamant that the political engagement of the students was self-motivated and well-thought out.
“These kids that I’ve talked to, they’re definitely doing it because they want to. Sometimes they’re not getting support from the adults in their universe, but they’re doing it anyway because they feel like this is something that they want to do. They want to use their position as a school leader to talk about an important issue, which I think is amazing.”
She went on, “When I went to high school, people who were team captains weren’t political. So I just think that this is a little bit of that spirit from Muhammad Ali that we have sort of coming back, where people are using their opportunity as like ‘Hi, I’m a sports leader but I can also be a leader of a conversation on an important social issue.’ And I think that’s important because we need to be having more conversations about racism and police brutality in this country, not less.”
The reference to Ali is not uncommon, and Kaepernick won Sports Illustrated‘s Muhammad Ali Legacy Award for 2017.
And though Kaepernick is held in high regard by the coalition organizing the protest, they do not have a stand on whether or not Kaepernick should be employed by the NFL.
Instead, they want to focus on the broader issues of systemic racism within policing and how big events like the Super Bowl impact less fortunate populations, like the homeless.
How the homeless would be treated during the event has been a hot-button topic for some time, with typical temporary solutions impossible to resolve — most temporary housing accommodations, like hotels, are booked with Super Bowl guests or are having their facilities used for Super Bowl activities in other ways.
The homelessness issue drives home what Aby-Keirstead feels about efforts to depoliticize sports. “Politics are connected to the Super Bowl, especially when things like getting ready for the Super Bowl means all the homeless people are moved out. Why do we have homeless people in the streets of downtown? It’s Minnesota for God’s sake. Like no one should be homeless in the streets of Minnesota in this winter. That’s a disaster.”
With a growing homelessness problem that has driven people to take shelter in light rail train cars and sheltered bus stops, areas that have been heavily monitored in the lead-up to the Super Bowl.
In 2008 and 2014 — for the Republican National Convention and the MLB All-Star game — police removed homeless encampments and arrested panhandlers.
While advocates argue that this year is different, with instructions to the police to direct people in need to resources instead of arresting them, resources meant for the homeless are being moved out of the city as a matter of course, with shelters temporarily moving to the outskirts of the city.
Even with better treatment of the homeless population, the larger question of resource allocation looms large for Aby-Keirstead and her coalition.
“…Minneapolis is not going to earn money and second of all, it is messed up to be earning that money at the expense of all of the people who need to also use downtown to work or the homeless people who were pushed out”
“What we don’t understand this sort of trade-off for the common good that happens by focusing on the needs of sports teams at the expense of people that the state is actually supposed to be taking care of. That trade-off, the coalition would have a problem with and wants to use the Super Bowl as a vehicle by which to draw out these inequities that we see in society but that don’t always get the attention they deserve.”
The Super Bowl Host Committee has created a Legacy Fund solicited from private donations to create “52 weeks of giving” and disburse $4.5 million to various charitable organizations around Minnesota.
Those organizations include those meant to help the less fortunate, like Second Harvest Heartland Grant does with food security or People’s Center Clinic & Services, which provides a network of community health resources.
While charitable giving is one way to balance the impact that the Super Bowl provides, the overall cost of the event may exceed the benefits of charitable giving.
“There’s a lot of economists who have gone on the record who have shown, ‘look, we don’t actually end up earning money from these things,'” said Aby-Keirstead. “And if you look at the way we’ve got it set up, these people are being put on the train in Bloomington, shipped to the Super Bowl and shipped right back. All these people in Minneapolis were told, they were going to earn all this money but the fact is, on the day of, people aren’t going to be hanging around downtown.”
“The fact of the matter is is that we are given those types of arguments as a way to try to trick people into supporting the Super Bowl as a way to earn money, but the fact is that Minneapolis is not going to earn money and second of all, it is messed up to be earning that money at the expense of all of the people who need to also use downtown to work or the homeless people who were pushed out.”
The economic benefits of hosting an event like the Super Bowl are not clear, and the gains or losses are hotly contested. Despite reimbursement from their host committee, San Francisco found that it had net lost nearly $5 million by hosting a Super Bowl and the story was the same for those in Glendale, Arizona.
Generally, economists commissioned by the NFL or eager host cities have found benefits for those cities and many unaffiliated economists have landed on the other side of the issue.
Though the report commissioned on behalf of Minneapolis and St. Paul acknowledges the problems in previous reports, they apparently fall into many of the same traps, according to the New York Times.
The Super Bowl Host Committee is well aware of the protest, and though they haven’t responded to attempts to contact them about this story, they did provide a statement to the Associated Press. “We have worked with local public safety officials and community stakeholders for more than two years to create a welcoming environment … and we invite all Minnesotans to come and share in the excitement,” host committee spokesman Michael Howard told the newswire.
Disclosure: Meredith Aby-Keirstead was Arif Hasan’s high school debate coach, and Hasan has written opinion pieces agreeing with the substance and form of player protests.
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