We Are All Realists Now – The Atlantic

Nobody cares about whats happening to the Uyghurs, Chamath Palihapitiya, a billionaire part owner of the Golden State Warriors, said last month on a podcast. Im telling you a very hard, ugly truth, okay. Of all the things I care about, yes, it is below my line. Supply chains are above this venture capitalists line, but any concern for human rights abroad is a luxury belief. In a statement, the Warriors tried to disown Palihapitiya, who then tried to disown himself, with the transparently false self-criticism that public figures issue when their views get them in trouble. In re-listening to this weeks podcast, I recognize that I come across as lacking empathy, he said, betraying that his main concern was for his own image. To be clear, my belief is that human rights matter, whether in China, the United States, or elsewhere. Full stop.

Of course, Palihapitiya was telling the truth the first time. He doesnt care about the Uyghurs. Nor does Golden State, which didnt mention them in the teams statement. Nor does the NBA, which avoids and even suppresses criticism of China because of the billions of dollars that the league makes from Chinese contracts. Nor do most NBA players, whose silence is bought by lucrative endorsement deals with companies doing business in China, including ones whose sportswear is made with cotton produced by Uyghur slave labor. Tucker Carlson likes to attack NBA stars such as LeBron James for speaking out about racial injustice in America while avoiding any mention of mass rape and torture in Xinjiang province. But Carlson doesnt care about human rights, either, or he would stop mouthing Russian propaganda while the countrys dictator, Vladimir Putin, prepares to invade its democratic neighbor, Ukraine.

Read: One by one, my friends were sent to the camps

Ted Cruz and Mike Pompeo hammer China for its mistreatment of Uyghurs, but they also supported Trump-administration policies that kept desperate Muslim refugees out of this country; they champion democracy in Hong Kong, but they degrade it in the U.S. by challenging the results of the 2020 election. President Joe Biden and his aides often talk about putting human rights at the center of American foreign policy, but when this approach encountered its first real test last summer in Afghanistan, it failed. Other than banning the import of Chinese products made with forced Uyghur labor, and refusing to send an official delegation to the Beijing Olympics, the administration has done little to punish China for its brutal suppression of human rights in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong. The whole world has sent its athletes to celebrate a festival of youth and peace in the global capital of totalitarianism. And although these games must be the grimmest since 1972, if not 1936ubiquitous surveillance, depopulated arenas, muzzled athletes, a hostage-video interview with a disappeared Chinese tennis player, that industrial backdrop of concrete cooling towers behind the freestyle-ski eventsIm still watching.

The field of human rights is littered with hypocrisy. No individual or organization possesses a scale of judgment that carefully matches the condemnation to the crime and then applies it consistently across a globe of oppression; personal and political biases always skew the calculation. Governments never separate human rights from national interests and domestic politics. Jimmy Carter, who first made human rights an explicit part of American foreign policy, criticized the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos but had very little to say about the genocidal Khmer Rouge. Ronald Reagan preached freedom to people behind the Iron Curtain but cozied up to brutal military leaders in this hemisphere. Even if double standards werent routine, theres the question of how much good external pressure ever does. For every success (South African apartheid fell in part because of foreign sanctions and international isolation), there have been many more disappointments (China after Tiananmen Square). Nonetheless, the idea that oppression abroad matters to Americans was a prominent feature of U.S. foreign policy through the last years of the Cold War and during the postCold War period, used or misused by every president from Carter and Reagan to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

But in the past decade or so, human rights have pretty much disappeared from our politics. Throughout the 9/11 wars, the grotesque contradiction between the rhetoric of freedom and the reality of tortured prisoners, civilian casualties, and grinding conflict corrupted the cause beyond remedy. After Iraq and Afghanistan, no president can send young men and women to war by invoking human rights. When Barack Obama refrained from punishing Bashar al-Assad of Syria for murdering thousands of innocent people with poison gas, there was no outcry from the general public. Privately, Obama told his aide Ben Rhodes that not even the 1994 Rwandan genocide merited a strong U.S. response. Without announcing a new era of foreign-policy realism, Obama brought it into being. Donald Trump made a point of showing utter indifference to the suffering of Syrians, Afghans, Chinese, or anyone else, and his callousness never cost him a thing.

Conor Friedersdorf: Do Uyghur lives matter to Americans?

With the eclipse of U.S. prestige and power, the decay of liberal democracy, and the rising appeal of authoritarian regimes, theres no longer any mechanismneither military force nor threat of sanctions and isolation, nor global pressure campaigns by civil-society groupsto make the worlds dictators hesitate before they throw people into concentration camps. Whats striking is how the demise of these mechanisms has soured Americans on the idea of human rights itself. Because we no longer think we can change the behavior of the worlds oppressorsbecause the cost of trying will be too highwe no longer think much about human rights at all. When they come up as a policy issue, we look for ways to justify doing nothing. We are all realists now.

Its almost a given today that the welfare of unknown peoples like the Uyghurs in far-off places like Xinjiang province is none of our business. As a result, the mind stops seeking and absorbing news of them, and so, in a sense, they cease to exist. Their nonexistence stems from and reinforces the profound self-absorption into which Americans have sunk in the past decade. The recent Joe RoganNeil YoungSpotify outrage ginned up far more passion and interest than the fact that Russia is poised to extinguish the independent state of Ukraine. When Chamath Palihapitiya said that Americans should take care of our own backyard before pointing fingers at other countries, he was voicing a widespread belief.

LeBron James expressed it in 2019, when he rebuked the Houston Rockets general manager, Daryl Morey, for tweeting in support of prodemocracy demonstrators in Hong Kong. James argued that people in the NBA should keep quiet about China, that he and others didnt know enough about Hong Kong to have an opinion on the Chinese governments assault on the demonstrators. He said hed speak out about something that hits home for me, about places and causes he knows; that is, American ones. If James had wanted to learn how the Chinese government snuffed out the remaining flickers of democracy in Hong Kong, he could have. But no one suffers reputational damage for saying, in effect, that oppressed people in China matter less than those in this country. Saying so can even be a kind of virtue signalingthe human-rights version of the old anti-foreign-aid line Charity begins at home.

The idea that solidarity with the oppressed here should naturally extend to the oppressed everywherean internationalist idea that long ago defined the lefthas died, along with the global system in which the U.S. played an intermittent, usually two-faced, often incompetent, occasionally effective role as the self-proclaimed upholder of human rights as a universal value.

But instincts have a way of outlasting ideas. Within most Americans lies a buried feeling that they should care about the torment of the Uyghurs. If by some accident an account of torture in a Chinese reeducation camp forces itself on our attention, were troubled, as if we should be doing something about it; and if a public figure says that nobody cares, we denounce himout of shame, because his indifference recalls our own. Theres no institutional mechanism for addressing human rights, no public discussion, no living ideajust an atavistic feeling that can sometimes be awakened.

Into this empty space Enes Kanter Freedom comes barging with his big, aggressive strides. Born Enes Kanter and raised in Turkey, he was the NBAs third draft choice in 2011 and has spent a decade bouncing around the league as a journeyman center. He told me the story of his awakening to human rights as a series of revelations. After he arrived in the U.S. in 2009 as a high-school basketball recruit, he heard a teammate criticize Obama. Dude, what are you doing? Kanter rebuked him. They might put you in jail. The teammate laughed: This is America. The first revelation was freedom of speech, and Kanter used it to criticize the repressive government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoan. The regime pursued Kanters family, took their passports, imprisoned his father, and forced his parents to renounce their son; he hasnt spoken to them in years. The Turkish government also went after Kanter himselfstripped his citizenship, put out an Interpol warrant for his arrest, and just missed snatching him in Indonesia. Kanter became more and more outspoken against the Erdoan regime. As long as Turkey was his target, the NBA left him alone.

Last summer came the second revelation. Kanter recently told me that he was shooting hoops with Brooklyn kids and posing for pictures at one of the basketball camps he hosts around the country when a parent accosted him: How can you call yourself a human-rights activist when your Muslim brothers and sisters are getting tortured and raped in Chinese concentration camps? Kanter knew little about Chinas mass oppression of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang province. He had focused his activism on the country he knew best. I promise Im going to get back to you, he told the parent.

Read: Saving Uighur culture from genocide

Kanter canceled the rest of the days events. He went back to his hotel, closed the curtains, lay down on his bed, took out his phone, and Googled Uyghurs. He stayed up most of the night reading. He woke up puffy-eyed and ashamed.

Find me a concentration-camp survivor, Kanter said to his manager. A Uyghur woman in Washington told him her story of gang rape and torture. She wept for half an hour. When Kanter asked what he could do to help her, she told him, I am safe. There are millions of people suffering in those camps. Forget about me. Put your awareness on them.

On October 20, just before the season opener of Kanters Boston Celtics against the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden, he released a video on social media. He stood against a blank white wall wearing a black T-shirt with an image of the Dalai Lama in prayer. (He wanted to speak about Tibet before Xinjiang so that people wouldnt think he was just supporting fellow Muslims.) Brutal dictator of China, Xi Jinping, I have a message for you and your henchmen, he said, jabbing a finger at the camera. Free Tibet. Free Tibet. Free Tibet.

This is Kanters style of activismits personal. He gets in a dictators face, nose to nose, chest to chest, as if Xi Jinping is a bully throwing cheap shots and committing flagrant fouls and everyone else is afraid to call him out. Someone had to do it, Kanter told me.

Twenty minutes before the Knicks game, in the visitors locker room, Kanter put on his wildly colorful new shoes, designed by a dissident Chinese artist, with the yellow, blue, and red of the Tibetan flag; a roaring lion; a man in flames; and the words FREE TIBET. His teammates were intrigued and confusedWhat kind of shoes are those?but he had no time to explain. After warm-ups, Kanter was sitting on the bench when, he told me, two league officialsfriends of hisapproached. Listen, man, your shoes have been getting lots of attention, one of them said. You have to take them off.

Amid COVID and the social-justice protests of 2020, the league had encouraged self-expression, and NBA players had written various messages on their shoes in Sharpie: Black Lives Matter, Say Their Names, Wash Your Hands. Kanter, who spoke at a Black Lives Matter rally in Boston, was thrilled with the players new social awareness. But now two officials were pleading with him to change his shoes. Kanter was preparing for his U.S. citizenship test, and he reminded them of his First Amendment rights. I dont care if Im fined, he said.

Not fined, one of them said. Banned.

Kanter refused. Go tell your boss Im not taking my shoes off. Their boss was the NBAs commissioner, Adam Silver.

Kanter sat on the bench the entire first half. In the locker room at halftime, he checked his phone: It was swarming with messages. One of them, from his manager, informed him that Chinese media had stopped streaming the game. The Chinese ban on the Celtics would continue all year.

A senior official with the National Basketball Players Association, Kanters own union, kept calling and asking him not to wear anti-China shoes. I talked about Turkey 10 years, not one phone call, Kanter told me. I talked about China one day, Im getting phone calls every hour. He told the union rep not to call again. When Kanter reached Adam Silver, they spoke for half an hour. Silver told him that he was free to say whatever he wanted with his shoes; nonetheless, at the end of the conversation, according to Kanter, Silver remarked, Everyone knows its business. Kanter took this to mean: Youre free to talk about China, but you, your team, and the NBA might face consequences.

On October 22, for the Celtics home opener against Toronto, Kanter wore red, black, and blue Free Uyghur shoes that also said, Stop Genocide Torture Rape Slave Labor. He turned the 202122 season into a running face-off with the worlds leading dictators and their enablers. One pair of shoes targeted Venezuelas dictatorship; another featured a lineup of tyrants faces, including Kim Jong Un, Bashar al-Assad, and Mohammed bin Salman. Kanter even searched for an image to protest the Talibans abuse of women. He didnt hesitate to use tactics that were provocative to the point of rudeness. Against the Lakers, he wore shoes that mocked LeBron James for kneeling to the gold of Xi Jinping (James, questioned by reporters, refused to be drawn). When the Celtics played the Charlotte Hornets, owned by Michael Jordan, Kanter wore red-spattered Nike Air Jordan 11s that declared, Made with Slave Labor. (Nikes factories in China have been accused of using Uyghur forced labor.) On November 29, Kanter became an American citizen. He took the oath with a new name: Enes Kanter Freedom.

Freedoms playing time dwindled to the lowest of his career; in some games, he didnt even see action during garbage time, the last minutes of a blowout. He accused the Celtics of benching him for his anti-China activism; the Celtics pointed to his difficulties defending the pick-and-roll. Friends around the league advised him to enjoy the season because it was going to be his last. Freedom claims that he hasnt been shunned by teammates, that he gets quiet support. Once, he told me, as he was getting ready to shoot a free throw, a Lakers player murmured: Listen, man, what youre doing is so brave, keep speaking upbut I cant talk about it. These teams got us. But some players asked him to unfollow them on social media, and not one has spoken out on his behalf. Maybe they dont know enough about it, he told me. But I feel like the fear of losing money, the fear of losing business, the fear of losing endorsement deals He didnt complete the obvious thought. And also, sometimes they do not care enough about whats going on outside America.

This indifference, and not the pervasive influence of Chinese contracts and sneaker endorsements, is the most interesting thing about the leagues unfriendly response to Freedoms campaign for global human rights. Of course young players want to win lucrative deals while they can, but most people in the league dont even experience a conflict between money and principle. The latter has disappeared. Its as if Freedom is putting all that money in jeopardy for a self-indulgent whimas if hes taken a tactless interest in matters that dont concern him.

His shoes match his viewsboth are unsubtle and unsparing. And the shoes can be more eloquent than the man. Freedom told me that he believes pure human rights have nothing to do with politics. It should be separated, he said. I dont even like politics. This is naive: Theres a short, straight line connecting the behavior of American companies in China to U.S. foreign-policy decisions and how theyre exploited in domestic politics. Freedom is well within his rights to charge LeBron James with hypocrisy, but his illusion that human rights can be kept separate from politics has made him a mark for right-wing commentators such as Tucker Carlson, who baited him into telling his fellow NBA players, mostly Black Americans, to stop criticizing the greatest nation in the world.

Freedom plans to speak to the Conservative Political Action Committee later this month. He might intend to go as an advocate for pure human rights, but at CPAC hell identify himself with a political camp whose interest in human rights is utterly opportunistic. Hes entangled himself with Turkish politics as well, as a close associate of the exiled religious leader Fethullah Glen, who has an extensive network of supporters inside Turkey. (Freedom was at Glens heavily guarded compound in rural Pennsylvania on the night of the 2016 failed coup attempt in Turkey, which Erdoan blamed on Glen, and for which Glen denied responsibility.)

A symbol as rough and blunt and improvised as a painted pair of sneakers, worn by an athlete in the brief interlude of his fame, is just what we should expect in a time when nobody cares about whats happening to the Uyghurs. With no high-level debate to enter in this country, no established institution to join, nothing in which to fit his lonely campaign, Freedom has to figure it out by himself, one game at a time.

Read: I never thought China could be this dark

We spoke last week when he was in Brooklyn to play the Nets. The NBAs trade deadline was just a few days off, and I asked if he thought the Celtics would try to unload him. I dont think they will, Freedom said. They will get a lot of backlash; they will be in a very uncomfortable situation. Theyre hoping Lets finish the year like this and see what happens.

Freedom was having a busy week. During NBCs prime-time Olympic broadcast (which he refused to watch), he appeared in an ad for free speech by FIREthe Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. A member of the Norwegian Parliament put his name up for the Nobel Peace Prize. Last Thursday, 30 Nobel laureates released a letter calling on the Celtics to stand with Freedom on the right side of history and not to drop him as a player.

Thursday was the trade deadline. In the late afternoon, the Celtics sent Freedom to the Houston Rocketsthe team that had forced its general manager to retract his tweet in support of Hong Kongs prodemocracy protesters in 2019. Within minutes the Rockets waived Freedom, and no other team picked him up. Now the NBA has him where it wants himout of sight, out of mind, like the Uyghurs themselves. If Freedom, whos already sacrificed his family and his career, is in it for the long haul, hell have to find some other way to make Americans care than by wearing painted sneakers.

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We Are All Realists Now - The Atlantic