Introduction

Athletes across the United States and around the world engaged in high-profile protests against state violence following the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown, a young Black man, in Ferguson, Missouri. Soon after the policing killing of Michael Brown, the protests by the National Football League (NFL) quarterback Colin Kaepernick engendered a space for athletic activism at all levels of sport in the United States and around the world (Thangaraj, 2019). His refusal to stand during the US national anthem in protest of state violence against Black communities sparked various forms of support and contempt from across the sporting and social divide. His knee became an important venue that opened up conservations to talk about power, anti-Black racism, and the demand for rights. His knee was a counterdiscourse to what we traditionally hear and think about in sport (Trimbur, 2019). As his knee in support of Black Lives Matters and ending police brutality took place, we saw athletes protesting state and white vigilante violence in the United States that reverberated with renewed urgency around the world in the summer of 2020 following the police killing of Black civilian George Floyd by white officer Derek Chauvin.