On Wednesday night the Milwaukee Bucks walked off the court before an NBA playoff game in protest of the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. In total three NBA games were postponed Wednesday night. The WNBA, MLS, and three MLB games followed suit.
This was just another instance in a long line of police shootings and athletes from professional leagues to colleges across the country are using their platforms to speak out against social and racial injustices that are coming to light.
At the University of Florida, Dan Mullen says he encourages his players to use their platform and being a football player at UF certainly gives a platform that most aren’t afforded.
A lot of Florida’s football players have been outspoken on social media, none more so than Zachary Carter.
https://twitter.com/_ZachAttacks/status/1289991311697653767
Mullen fully supports his players using that platform and he says he spoke with his team on Thursday morning regarding the latest police shooting in Wisconsin. The biggest change for Mullen, in his estimation, has been listening. Through conversations with his players and with his coaches and staff he’s shut his mouth, opened his ears and his mind to listen to the experiences of other people, from different backgrounds, and different viewpoints to better shape his own thoughts and opinions.
“People have to try to get a little uncomfortable and people to have to try to go learn about other people. Go expand your horizons. Go expand what it is. Don’t just look at something and judge other people or don’t look at someone who is different than you and judge them, go learn about everything,” Mullen said on a Zoom call Thursday. “I’ve become very educated over the last couple of months. You know what, I would probably look at things and then go form an opinion. Now I look back and I’ve changed my opinions on a lot of things.”
Mullen is an avid runner; he’s even completed the Boston Marathon. When asked about a particular experience that maybe has opened his eyes to injustices or have changed his mind he recalled the bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013.
“The Boston Strong shirts came out, right, well, why isn’t everybody strong, why does it only get to be Boston that gets to be strong, right? When you think about to me in the terms of that, where it does, of course, all lives do matter, but that’s not what we’re talking about right now. We’re talking about this specific situation where we’re seeing racial injustice has happened and we’re trying to draw light to that,” he said. “We’re not saying other things aren’t important, we’re trying to draw light to this. When you can draw on things from a lot of examples, like people all the sudden want to jump and say Ok, well what about this, I have to be on a side, no, just educate yourself. We’re trying to do is educate ourselves about the social injustices happening. It doesn’t mean when you say Black Lives Matter it doesn’t mean I’m forgetting about other people. It means I’m focusing on the social injustice issues that we currently have in our country and let’s focus on that. That’s what it pays attention to.”
It’s important for Mullen, a football coach making more than six million dollars a year, leading a team made up predominantly of young African-Americans to listen to them. He’s done that and he’s been open-minded enough to even change his perspective, opinions, and thought processes from those discussions.