What would you have done in Olympic sprinter Peter Norman’s place, standing on the podium alongside Tommie Smith and John Carlos as they raised their fists in protest at the 1968 Olympics 200-meter sprint medal ceremony? At the LA84 Foundation Summit last Thursday, October 18, attendees had a chance to imagine their answer and pose for photographs on a podium with Smith and Carlos’ now iconic silhouettes on the backdrop behind them. Stand alongside them or stand in front of them — whatever will get the most likes on Instagram.
There’s no doubt that the day-long event featured individuals and organizations that are doing valuable work, from campaigning for equal opportunities for para-athletes and speaking out on sexual assault, to running inclusive sports programs in underserved neighborhoods. But absent from this so-called “Athlete Activism and Social Justice” summit was any attempt to understand why injustices exist and who is responsible. Instead, the hosts neatly avoided topics that might ruffle the feathers of the LA84 Foundation’s corporate partners; the summit celebrated charitable giving while ignoring charitable givers’ financial incentives to keep inequality firmly in place.
Prior to the event, NOlympics LA put together a 30-square bingo sheet with terms we thought would be necessary to bring up at a social justice summit taking place right now in Los Angeles. Of the 30 terms, we counted mentions of just five:
One panel rightly denounced high incarceration rates in black and brown communities, but there was no discussion of how the 2028 Olympics will lead to increased incarceration as Los Angeles ramps up policing and surveillance to guarantee “security” for Olympic visitors. Homelessness was mentioned just once, tangentially. That’s right — at a social justice summit in Los Angeles in 2018, nobody addressed the region’s homelessness and housing crisis, despite its irrefutable impact on the low-income population the Foundation aims to serve. There was therefore also no discussion of how LA’s Olympics will accelerate gentrification and exacerbate the housing crisis, as the mega-event has done in recent host cities around the world, from Vancouver to London to Rio.
In fact, the 2028 Olympic Games themselves were only mentioned a handful of times over the course of the day. It appeared the LA84 Foundation was not interested in discussing the elephant in the fancy conference room: the complicity of its partners in the Olympic industry in perpetuating social injustice from host city to host city (see: police crackdowns and enhanced urban surveillance, displacement via both eviction and gentrification, the transfer of resources from public to private ownership, the brushing aside of environmental protections, just to list a few regular concerns). Also not up for discussion: how the genuinely valuable work of some LA84 Foundation grantees will be used to justify an enormous corporate circus that has the primary goal of turning a profit for its global investors (like LA84 Foundation summit partners NBC).
“On the flip side, if it doesn’t [go well] we have the chance to lose one billion dollars.”
The extent to which the summit was not the place for discussing the risks of an Olympics was made clear following paralympic national champion Kendall Stier’s astute comments on the 2028 Games: “If all goes successfully we have the chance to, you know, have the money to fund youth sports for 50 to 60 years. On the flip side, if it doesn’t […] we have the chance to lose one billion dollars.” Silence filled the Marriott Hotel conference hall, before moderator Kym Eisner quipped that Stier sure was putting a lot of pressure on herself.
Even if the LA84 Foundation believes, as the LA 2028 Organizing Committee does, that LA is the host city that can buck the trend of going wildly over budget, if it’s serious about social justice it needs to engage in conversation about the threats brought about by hosting and how to mitigate them.
The summit did find the time to spotlight three companies that donate to youth sports programs: ESPN, the NBA, and Verizon, whose representatives participated in a panel titled “Doing well by doing good.” The representatives insights’ on how donations are decided was probably useful to some audience members; less useful was the uncritical praise for corporations that are willing to hurdle right over pesky social justice obstacles in their pursuit of profit. After labeling all three companies as “incredible brands,” moderator Joanne Pasternak extolled ESPN as “clearly the leader in storytelling around sports.” An earlier panel had discussed concussions in football as a social justice issue, but there was no connection drawn here to how this “incredible brand” depends on football games for profit, including college football played by unpaid athletes. Nor was the connection drawn to ESPN’s long-term employment of commentator Brent Musberger, one of the most virulent critics of Tommie Smith and John Carlos’ 1968 protest. As John Carlos himself told The Daily Beast in 2016: “I asked ESPN to explain to me how they were giving me and Tommie Smith an award and still letting Brent Musburger keep doing games on their network […] I never got an answer. They just let that shit slide like water off a duck’s back.”
“The 1968 Games did not just inspire a movement, they actually inspired a shoe line.”
The LA84 Foundation seems to be letting a lot of shit slide like water off a duck’s back. Like its Olympic partners, many of its corporate partners are creating or sustaining the inequalities that contribute to the play equity “crisis” the Foundation discusses, as well as to all the other crises the Foundation doesn’t like to discuss (see: Impossible Bingo). The LA84 Foundation’s long-time partner Nike needs little introduction in terms of its labor rights abuses. However, its shoes featured prominently on the foundation’s summit tweets, while Foundation president Renata Simril concluded the summit by drawing attention to her own pair of Nike Cortez kicks and bizarrely reflecting: “The 1968 Games did not just inspire a movement, they actually inspired a shoe line.” Then there are the companies that hold the LA84 Foundation’s investments like real estate management leviathan Blackstone (the primary funder of anti-rent control lobbying in California), which unsurprisingly got no mention at all at the oh-so-progressive summit event.
In all, the LA84 Foundation Summit was a little too light on “capitalism and structural inequality 101” and a little too heavy on “dance with the corporation that b(r)ought you.” Tommie Smith and John Carlos’ iconic salute, after all, was powerful not just because they took a stand against racial injustice and human rights abuses, but because they risked their reputations and their careers to do so, challenging the complacency and complicity of mighty global institutions. That’s something to consider before stepping up onto the podium alongside them.
