‘Still a Black man’: Amani Oruwariye and Jason Cabinda fight against racial injustice with Detroit Lions
Amani Oruwariye felt numb.
After scrolling through Twitter on Aug. 23, the former Penn State cornerback stopped once he saw a video of an unarmed Black man — 29-year-old Jacob Blake — shot in the back seven times by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. “Man, it’s just another killing,” he told himself.
But the Detroit Lions second-year backup caught himself. He knew he shouldn’t push the news out of his head. He couldn’t.
“We keep seeing it. It keeps popping up. You know, when’s stuff gonna change?” Oruwariye told the Centre Daily Times. “Like you’re not supposed to just be seeing Black people getting murdered on video. That’s not normal. So, you kind of gotta take a step back and then look at it like, ‘I can’t just become numb to this. We’ve gotta say something. We’ve gotta do something. We’ve gotta make changes to try to help.’”
Oruwariye — along with current teammate, and former Nittany Lion, linebacker Jason Cabinda — got his chance to take action two days later, after Blake’s father had announced his son was in stable condition but paralyzed from the waist down. On Aug. 25, the Lions became the first professional sports team to cancel practice in protest of police brutality and other racial injustices.
They spent that morning trading stories of their own encounters with racism and talking about tangible actions they could take. Then, around 1:30 p.m., all 80 Lions players and the coaching staff silently walked out of the team’s practice facility to address reporters.
“We didn’t feel right with the message being what it was, like, ‘The world can’t go on,’ … and then we go practice and kinda treat the day as business as usual,” Cabinda told the CDT. “We didn’t feel like that was right. We felt like it contradicted the message.”
The Lions first started to have conversations about systemic racism when graphic video surfaced of the fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery in early May. Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man and cousin of Lions safety Tracy Walker, was killed by two white men while jogging in Brunswick, Georgia, in late February.
Cabinda described the weeks following those early discussions as a “real emotional” time. He and Oruwariye agree that talking openly about race has brought the locker room closer.
“It’s important, especially in a team atmosphere when you have diversity throughout the whole team — Blacks, whites, anything — to just kinda share those stories,” Oruwariye said. “Because those are people close to you. And actually explaining that to them and letting them know, ‘We deal with this on an everyday basis.’”
Though neither Cabinda nor Oruwariye opened up about their own experiences in their Aug. 25 team meeting, Cabinda couldn’t help but think back to a recent encounter he had with a police officer.
Toward the end of last season, Cabinda found himself in a situation he’d so often read about in the news. He was on the way to the airport to drop off two friends who had flown into town to see him play when he was pulled over. The officer asked Cabinda if he had any weapons or drugs in the car and later told him he was “the most decent NFL player” he’d ever met. Though he wouldn’t elaborate much on the incident, Cabinda said he genuinely feared for his safety in the moment.
But he said he was glad, in a way, that the interaction occurred because it allowed one of his white friends — in the car at the time — to see firsthand what he’s tried to explain all along.
“I don’t think he had ever had an experience where he could truly pin it down, like, ‘This sh-t really exists. This sh-t is really real,’” Cabinda said. “And I think that was, for him, a truly eye-opening situation where he just did not understand why the cop was acting how he was acting.”
It’s the same reason why Cabinda and Oruwariye believe conversations about lived experiences with their teammates of different backgrounds are so crucial.
The two former Nittany Lions teammates also feel a responsibility to use their stage as professional athletes to advocate for change.
“With our platform, we should be pushing out that kind of information and feeding that, because people do look up to us,” Oruwariye said. “Kids, even adults, look up to us. You want to push that out and let them know, ‘When I take this helmet off, I’m still a Black man going home. I’m still a Black man in the car, driving home. So, if you actually support us and actually care about us, you’ll help with this change.’”
Still, they know it’ll take more than talk to make a palpable difference.
Cabinda said the Lions haven’t settled on any community outreach ideas yet to fight against police brutality and racial injustices, but they’ve begun brainstorming. They’ll continue to discuss options in the days leading up to the start of their season in mid-September.
For now, Cabinda and Oruwariye are just grateful to be members of an organization that encourages them to voice their opinions on issues that matter to them.
And they’re honored to have been a part of history, too.
“It’s a really, really good deal to be able to be a part of an organization that truly cares about us besides just what we can do on the field,” Cabinda said. “It’s humbling, because there’s not a lot of organizations like that. It was a really dope moment.”
This story was originally published September 2, 2020 at 12:06 PM.
