Six years ago, in the middle of a “racial reckoning” that never was, a White House that had begun out of control reached its chaotic apex. Federal officials were sweeping citizens off American streets in unmarked vehicles, surrounding the Lincoln Memorial with armed guards and rolling military vehicles through residential neighborhoods in a fascist reaction to protests against the murder of George Floyd. It was at this point that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, realizing it had all gone too far, appeared on a Zoom and admitted his league was “wrong” for not listening to its players when they had protested against police brutality.
The implication was clear: more than any other sports league, the NFL was harshest in its reaction to the protests that began with Trayvon Martin in 2012 and continued with Ferguson, Baltimore and Colin Kaepernick. By blackballing Kaepernick, sitting by while broadcast partners refused to air the national anthem to undermine the protests, and, most embarrassingly, Goodell’s draconian announcement that teams would be subject to fines if players showed dissent, the NFL had proven itself to act in the most un-American of ways. This week, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft showed he has learned nothing from those years.
He banned Macklemore from supporting Ed Sheeran at the Patriots’ Gillette Stadium over the rapper’s vocal support for Palestine – something that has become a career-threatening political position as dangerous as kneeling during the national anthem. Kraft imposed his own version of authoritarianism: Macklemore claims that Kraft not only banned him from his stadium, but appeared to influence other NFL owners to stop the rapper from appearing at most of Sheeran’s other stadium dates. For his part, Kraft says his decision to stop Macklemore from performing at Gillette was due to both Macklemore’s “recent actions” and “a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery that we believe has been deeply offensive and hurtful to the Jewish community”.
In 2014, Macklemore apologized after he wore a wig, beard and hooked nose at a Seattle concert, which critics said was an anti-semitic caricature. No NFL owner has worked harder to be seen as reasonable and socially conscious as Kraft. He has appeared on the surface as a shrewd businessman, power-neutral, making political donations to Republicans and Democrats alike.
New Englanders recall him fondly as the man who rescued the Patriots from the misogyny and vile incompetence of the Victor Kiam years; from the threat of the team relocating to St Louis when he bought the Patriots from James Orthwein in 1994; and, of course, the man who saved them from all the losing. Kraft was eventually given the benefit of the doubt as the hero in his stadium battle against disgraced former Massachusetts legislature speaker Thomas Finneran that nearly led to Kraft moving the Patriots out of the Commonwealth. He did so by building the only 100% privately financed stadium in the NFL – even though in 1998 Kraft himself had agreed to take a lucrative offer of public money from the Connecticut legislature and move the Patriots to Hartford.
It was under Kraft’s ownership – led by his late wife Myra – that the Patriots took a stand for women, renouncing the rights to Christian Peter a week after drafting him, when multiple domestic violence accusations and convictions against the player surfaced. As the NFL collectively destroyed Kaepernick’s career (the former quarterback says the same tactics of collusion are now being used against Macklemore), it was Kraft who tried to appear sympathetic to those who suffered under systemic racial injustices. He supported Patriots Devin and Jason McCourty in their advocacy of criminal justice reform, helped the release from prison of rapper Meek Mill, and following the deadly 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, loaned the Patriots’ plane to students traveling to Washington to protest gun violence.
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