Enacting Antiracist Pedagogy: An Analysis of LeBron James and Doc Rivers’ Antiracist Discourse

In the summer of 2020, powerful protests against police brutality took place throughout the United States in response to the unlawful deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and the shooting of Jacob Blake. Though the types of protests ranged from local grassroot organizations walking the streets to athletes using their platforms to address the injustices, the protests had one goal in mind—to bring attention, awareness, and hopefully change to an unjust legal system that consistently and disproportionately affects unarmed Black people. The aim of this article is to focus on the responses of both LeBron James and Doc Rivers to the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man who was shot seven times in the back by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), as informed by Black Critical Theory (BlackCrit), we argue that the dynamic words of these two Black men not only operate as an act of protest and an act of resistance, but also they provide pedagogical enactments for being and becoming antiracist.