JOHN BERMAN (CO-HOST): Well there was solidarity. The players on those teams standing together against what the president said. But as for race, Wesley Lowery, do you buy what the president says, that his statements are not about race?
WESLEY LOWERY: Well, of course not. I mean this issue is unquestionably to some extent about race. I think that there's a long history, sometimes, of us trying to suggest that if someone doesn't explicitly talk about race, right, if you don't say, “These black players should be punished,” then all of a sudden the dynamic of race does not exist. What we know is that in this nation, a nation that was premised on racial inequalities from the beginning, that many of our issues, socially and politically, are, at their core, about race and our disagreements about race, right? This is an instance in which you have players protesting, primarily American-American players, for the last year, who have been protesting specifically about what they believe to be racial disparities in police use of force and police killings, right? You have a dynamic in which you have a majority African-American league with a majority of white owners, and here you have a president who, time and time again, both on the campaign and here as the president of the United States, has inflamed racial tensions nationwide, who's calling on those white owners essentially to take punitive measures against their black players for speaking out. So the racial dynamics here are clear. Whether there's explicit racial language used or not, I think we have to accept that race is obviously a factor here.
