Legitimized voices

So this is how it is in America, as if it weren't before. It's just out there showing its face to us now at long last.

In America, if you're white, you can be a high school dropout who crosses state lines lugging ordinance it was illegal for you to carry, violate curfew in someone else's city and kill a couple of people while playing cop. And some folks will think you're a hero who was only defending himself from Dangerous Commie Radical Anarchists.

In America, if you're black and fed up with being shot by the police in situations where you shouldn't be getting shot, you can take to the streets to protest. And because some of that gets out of hand, the police and the President of the United States and the Vice-President will call you a mob and say you're going to burn down all our cities and hint that it's your own fault the white kid with the AR-15 shot you in the head because, after all, you were out after curfew, too.

And in America, if your name is LeBron James or Doc Rivers or the names of a hundred other professional athletes and coaches, you get sneered at as entitled circus performers who should shut up and dribble, or swing a bat, or do something useful instead of depriving us of our games for a night or two.

One of those doing the sneering the other day -- or the next thing to it -- was Jared Kushner, and ain't that rich. Kushner is the son-of-law of Our Only Available Impeached President, and his middle name is Entitled. He came from crooked money and then married crooked money, and he hasn't had to do an honest day's work in his life as a result. Guys like him are born on third and get walked home and think they're Babe Ruth hitting No. 60.

And he's invoking working people to call out LeBron James? The hell would he know about working people?

Or men like LeBron James, for that matter?

Listen. If you're a successful professional athlete in this country, you didn't get there by marrying into it. You did it by taking the gifts God gave you and then working like a fiend to maximize those gifts. You came up from nothing or next to nothing in a lot of cases, and you got where you are because you put oceans of sweat equity into it. And you got where you are because, unlike the world in which Jared Kushner moves, your world is the meritocracy of all meritocracies.

Never has been more apparent than this week, when the Indiana Pacers fired head coach Nate McMillan two weeks after giving him a contract extension.

They didn't fire him because he did a bad job. Indeed, in four seasons as the Pacers' coach, McMillan's teams never won fewer than 42 games. And this season he got an injury-riddled team minus its two All-Stars (Victor Oladipo and Domantas Sabonis) to 45 wins and the No. 4 seed in the playoffs.

But then the Pacers got run out in four straight by the Heat. It was the second straight year they'd been swept in the first round, and they've now lost their last nine playoff games.

That's what got McMillan fired, more than likely. Not because his team didn't perform, but because it didn't perform when it counted.

This is the world in which all those entitled professional athletes live. And it's a platform they are using to do more than just symbolically walk out of their ballparks and stadiums and arenas. They're investing whole chunks of that big money they make in causes that advance social justice. And they're continuing to speak out, and will.

They're doing that because, as highly visible individuals in our society, they know they have a bully pulpit. And they're using it.

And unlike some others we could name, they've actually earned that pulpit.