Video Transcript:

Trump’s attack on football players challenging the anthem was his most revealing moment. It showed what he means by Make America Great Again. It means going back to when Blacks knew their place.

Trump wouldn’t connect that to Lincoln freeing the slaves. It’s too long ago and it’s in books, which he doesn’t read. My guess is he connects it to the Jackie Robinson era, starting in the 1940s, when the colour bar was broken in U.S. sports, and Trump was an impressionable kid watching it all on TV with his racist dad. For 20 years, team after team and sport after sport let Black players in. It’s how Trump experienced the original sin against his white America.

Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey, like Lincoln, was responsible. Obama was a later Jackie Robinson.

Note who Trump appealed to: the owners. I can’t help hearing “slave” implied.

There’s a scene in the recent Robinson film that’s hard to watch.

But it rings to me like Trump’s howl.

It must’ve killed him when those owners — mostly white, rich and old like him — rejected his call and backed their players.

Emancipation was never cancelled but progress was rolled back. And sport won’t return to pre-Robinson but bad things can happen. As Ta-Nehisi Coates says, quoting James Baldwin: “White people have caused great harm to humanity, because they think they’re white.”