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the president used an expletive to describe players who kneel or sit during the anthem to protest police brutality against black Americans and other forms of social injustice.

“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these N.F.L. owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired,’ ” the president said at a rally for Senator Luther Strange, who was appointed to the Senate this year and is facing Roy Moore in a Republican primary runoff.

“U bum @StephenCurry30 already said he ain’t going! So therefore ain’t no invite. Going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!” Mr. James wrote on Twitter.

The Warriors, who play in a league that sometimes promotes social issues and whose owners and players have been known to denounce the president, said in a statement they would use a visit to Washington in February to highlight issues of diversity and inclusiveness.

By midafternoon, a spokesman for the University of North Carolina national championship basketball team confirmed the team would not be going to the White House

Many athletes have been moved to comment on race and social justice more frequently in the past year after a series of police shootings of unarmed African-Americans and the support Mr. Trump has received from white supremacists.

“It’s unfortunate that the president decided to use his immense platform to make divisive and offensive statements about our players and the N.F.L.,’’ said Mark Murphy, the president and chief executive of the Green Bay Packers.

That unanswered question continues to haunt America. It deserves special and sustained attention this week as we grapple with commemorations of Selma as a signpost of premature racial progress and celebration, rather than a significant chapter in America's still unfinished national political saga.

Ms. Cain continued, “When athletes are not protected, they should be able to make choices that protect themselves. It’s like saying you don’t want to be with a company that doesn’t treat you well.”

“I am not a natural public speaker and get huge waves of anxiety before I speak to the world’s media,” she wrote. “I get really nervous and find it stressful to always try to engage.”

The power balance has changed — redistributing leverage among public figures, the journalists and publications that cover them, and the companies that they do business with. Social media has provided athletes and other celebrities a direct line to their public, cutting out the middlemen. When Ms. Osaka released a statement explaining her decision and the steps that led to it, she did so on her own platforms.

Indeed, Ms. Osaka’s statement, which appeared to be written on the notepad app of her phone, was arguably among the most influential uses of media of her career.

We’ve seen this with other young celebrities, such as the British actor, writer and director Michaela Coel, who told Vulture that she declined a $1 million Netflix deal when the streamer wouldn’t let her retain a percentage of the copyright to her show “I May Destroy You.” She fired her agents in the U.S. for pushing the deal, choosing instead the bold path of going agentless in Hollywood.

Like many successful athletes, Ms. Osaka gets most of her earnings from endorsements, not prize money or salaries. Her high profile started with her accomplishments on the tennis court, and her talent sustains that profile, but she has grown into a respected and influential brand herself. She has often taken risks with that influence, whether it’s wearing masks in support of Black Lives Matter at the U.S. Open last year or pushing back against critics on social media who criticized her for ruining her “innocent” image by posting photos of herself in a bathing suit.

“You are often compared to the Williams sisters. Maybe it’s because you’re Black. But I guess it’s because you’re talented and maybe American, too,” a journalist reportedly declared, bizarrely, before asking, “We could have a final between you and Serena. Is it something you hope for? I mean, 22 years separate you girls.”

This latest episode is evidence that when athletes such as Ms. Osaka and LeBron James are told to refrain from commenting on racism or politics and instead to shut up and play, it has always included an unsaid caveat: “unless we stand to profit off your voice.”

Jenkins — who was responding to comments Brees made to Yahoo Finance on Wednesday — said the veteran quarterback’s views were especially painful because he considered him “a friend.”

According to an ESPN report, Jenkins said the video was made just before Brees reached out to him to discuss his point of view, but that he still originally posted it “because it’s important for anyone who wants to consider themself an ally to know how these words and actions affect those you want to help.”

Brees elaborated further on his thoughts in an interview with ESPN, when asked if his comments will cause a fissure in the locker room with defensive leaders and social justice advocates such as Jenkins and Demario Davis, but he didn’t back down from his thoughts about standing for the national anthem

Teammate Michael Thomas and other sports stars, such as LeBron James, also ripped Brees for his comments.

Floyd, 46, died on May 25 in Minneapolis after police officer Derek Chauvin, 44, pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes after Floyd was suspected of spending a counterfeit $20 bill.

“They came back and got attacked for wearing their uniforms. They came back to … racism, to complete violenc

Jenkins also added that Brees comments show he doesn’t understand his “privilege.”

“Because when we step off this field, and I take my helmet off, I’m a black man walking around America and I’m telling you I’m dealing with these things. I’m telling you my community is dealing with these things.

“Even though we’re teammates, I can’t let this slide.”

Here is Ms Conley’s explanation from her 2001 book:In the aftermath of an election, politicians try to figure out what the outcome signifies. In an environment of imperfect information, they must try to distinguish between idiosyncratic events like a weak nominee and long-term political trends like ideological change… They never have perfect information about voters, and yet they must decide on a policy agenda. The task of studying electoral mandates must therefore focus on explaining when presidents feel they have enough popular support to ask for major policy changes.

With Speaker Boehner’s assertion that “we’ll have as much of a mandate as [Obama] will...to not raise taxes”, it is clear that the GOP-controlled House of Representatives is not about to grant the president any kind of deference as he begins his second term in office. If Mr Obama is able to push his tax proposals through Congress it will not be because he was given a mandate or because he claimed one. Legislative success will come if Mr Obama is skillful politically and is able to wrangle support from key legislators at key moments in the process

Adopting physical or cultural characteristics of those with higher status/more power is fine. Adopting the same characteristics of those lower in status or power is risky. For example, virtually nobody would be offended if someone dressed up in full preppy regalia, complete with lacrosse stick, Dartmouth ring, and golden retriever. Many people would be upset if someone dressed up with a huge hooked nose, greasy cheek curls, and fur hat. Both costumes would be based on ridiculous stereotypes, but one would be funny and the other offensive

Students at various schools said in interviews that they viewed racial tension as the driving force behind many of the warnings, especially in the last few weeks, since stories about a fraternity party gone wrong at the University of California, Los Angeles, raised concerns at many schools. Some white students at the party dressed as Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, with smudged faces and exaggerated, padded body parts.

And at the University of Michigan, the dean of students has a webpage titled “Cultural Appropriation — what is the big deal?” It urges students to ask themselves why they are wearing a particular costume, and then to consider how accurate it is in depicting a culture or identity.

One right our constitution does NOT bestow is the right to NOT be offended. Quite the opposit, the First Amendment, the right of freedom of speech, bestows the right TO offend.The harsh realities of being alive in an insane world ARE offensive. Being offended is a GOOD thing. It builds resilience, and character. It provides for personal growth. It toughens you.

Mocking someone's culture is a cheap shot and often leads to worse. Also, if it's such a heinous imposition on you to respect other people's benign wishes regarding how you treat their culture, then maybe the problem isn't their sensitivity but your own.

There is a difference between dressing up as Kim and Kanye, both of whom have made a career of being campy exaggerations of themselves, and being culturally insensitive. Kim and Kanye, as willing celebrities, are legitimate subjects for parody.

I'm gay and there are lots of men dressing in drag at the local college. A woman dressed as a football player. So what? I laughed because some of them looked so ridiculous. I would look ridiculous dressed as a Samarai warrior. Isn't that the point? To be silly and ridiculous on Halloween. Maybe everyone should just wear black t shirts and grey trousers which is about the only thing left that seems to be safe to wear.

It is somewhat different if you want to go as a celebrity. Suppose you want to go as Lebron James. The #23 jersey, and the baggy shorts, and the ball all make a great costume. If you are short like me, the joke is even funnier. If like me you are white, however, don't go in blackface. People who go in blackface (or something similar) know it offends and intend to offend. You might as well wear a sign that says, "I'm supposed to be Labron James, but in real life I'm am just a jerk."

Halloween, Ms. Garcia said, is now often about ridicule. “Dressing up as Pocahontas (or Sexy Pocahontas, let’s get real), is offensive because it takes the whitewashed version of a whole group of people that have been victimized and abused in their own land,” and presents it as “a thing one can just try for a night,” she said.

I find it quite sad that so many commenters here have such an odd interpretation of what's going on. What these Universities are so boldly doing is teaching our children how to navigate the increasingly diverse world we live in, and that mutual respect and understanding are more important than being able to act stupidly without regard for how it affects others. Do we expect everyone to be perfect? Of course not. All that is being asked is that we THINK before we act (or dress up), and use good judgement -- anyone that thinks that isn't a worthy aim by dismissing this all as "hypersensitivity" is seriously missing the point.

Dressing up in ways that mock POC cultures isn't harmless -- it perpetuates stereotypes that result in actual harm. To you, it's only a Halloween costume that you get to take off at the end of the night -- for them, it's their LIVES. To me, protecting POC and dismantling dangerous stereotypes is more important than your desire to dress up for Halloween without thinking about the impact of your costume.

There are stereotypes and stereotypes. Surely we can all agree that a Halloween party isn't an appropriate place to don blackface and pretend to be a negro minstrel. And there are tasteless jokes that offend us no matter how friendly the person telling them or the lack of intent to offend. I understand the desire to promote a sense of decency at a time and place where good judgment often goes out the window. But at the same time, if we lose all perspective and the ability to laugh at our own stupidity, then what we embrace is a culture of outrage. Those of us with unique and interesting backgrounds ought not to be so precious.

Some schools advise that borrowing from any culture is demeaning and insulting unless the wearer is a part of that culture. In other words, do not put on a karate outfit with a black belt, the University of Washington advised in the video it sent to students, unless you actually earned that belt.

Are you serious? Halloween costumes aside, what many universities are doing is shielding students from divergent points of view.

I'm not sure if donning a sombrero, a false mustache, and clothes suitable to a mariachi band is offensive. But I don't think that dressing as a geisha or a judoka is offensive in the same way that dressing as "a suicide bomber" is. But is dressing as Osama Bin Laden offensive, because it means wearing typical Arabic clothing? Would the clothing itself be offensive without racial stereotypes? Are Viking costumes offensive to people of Scandinavian descent? Are leprechaun costumes offensive to the Irish? Are Tyrolean costumes offensive to Austrians, Germans, and Swiss?

The entirety of the Republican Party’s response to this situation during its two years of unified control of the federal government was a failed effort to slash health-care coverage for millions and a successful effort to cut taxes on the wealthy. The GOP needs a different story to tell about what’s wrong with the country, and the one about people of color living lavishly at the expense of white people who work hard and play by the rules is an old classic.

What this narrative is meant to obscure is the reality that American policy making has not created some nightmare inversion of power between white people and ethnic minorities, but a landscape of harrowing inequality where people are forced to beg strangers for money on the internet to pay their medical bills. Upward mobility is stagnant; those who are born rich, die rich, and those who are born poor, die poor. Real wages have risen painfully slowly for decades; housing, particularly in urban centers, is unaffordable; and young people are saddled with skyrocketing student debt for educations that did not provide the opportunities they were supposed to.

Even after Obama was elected, conservative pundits argued that Obama wasn’t “really popular” because he maintained sky-high support among black voters—who, they implied, should count less. The underlying argument behind the claim, no matter how mundane or outlandish, was that being black confers unearned benefits rather than systemic obstacles to be overcome. Obama became the living, breathing symbol of the narrative that undeserving people of color were being elevated even as hardworking white people were being left behind

In America, when people of color succeed despite the limits placed on them, and use their newfound status to indict the system for holding others back, they are held up as proof that the limits do not exist, they are denounced as ingrates, or they are pilloried as frauds incapable of the successes attributed to them.

The exception is if they present their success as evidence that the structural barriers are not as great as they seem, and that in truth the only thing that holds back marginalized communities is their own lack of ability or motivation. If they affirm the righteousness of the class and caste system that they defied to succeed, they are hailed as heroes by the same people who would otherwise have denounced them as frauds.

When people of color enter elite spaces, they make those with unearned advantages conscious of how they’ve been favored by the system.

Trump is president in large part because of his ability to speak to this insecurity.

During the 2016 campaign, for every problem America faced, Trump found an enemy, an outsider to blame: Latino immigrants stealing jobs and lowering wages, Muslims engaging in terrorism, black men committing crimes. Then there were the white liberals, such as Elizabeth Warren, whose claim to American Indian heritage was touted as proof that the system is rigged to the advantage of undeserving people of color—so much so that even white liberals seek to get in on the scam

The unworthy, in this case, are not the legislators and their wealthy benefactors who have worked tirelessly for decades to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few, at the expense of American welfare and democracy. Rather, they are marginalized communities and their white liberal allies, who maintain a corrupt spoils system for black and brown people at the expense of hardworking white Americans.

what if all these people claiming to be fighting for the future of women’s sports would really fight for the future of women’s sports? What if they suddenly said, “We demand women’s sports get equal resources, equal media coverage, and equal pay”? What if these new activists embraced women’s sports and invested in female athletes, instead of using us as their excuse for transphobia?

The debate around transgender rights in sports feels sometimes like fighting over bunk beds on the Titanic. In almost every case, as soon as money and power are involved, women’s sports take a back seat to men’s.

Women’s sports get attention when there’s an egregious slight against us, such as when the world champion women’s national soccer team sued for pay equal to the men’s team, which failed to qualify for the World Cup.

That means we get less coverage of us simply playing sports. When the journalist Brenna Greene looked for photos from the women’s basketball tournament this week, she found the N.C.A.A. hadn’t posted any.

Male players’ generous March Madness accommodations do not make news, because they are expected. That is because the men’s tournament gets extensive coverage, with the N.C.A.A. earning more than 20 times as much from the television rights for the men’s tournament as from its separate contract that includes rights to the women’s event. The system is set up this way. Investment follows, and inequality grows.

The only time I remember seeing an elite women’s track race on a front page in recent years is when one of the women in the race was framed as a threat.

It was not a coincidence that the athlete — Caster Semenya, a champion intersex sprinter from South Africa — is Black. Images of her competing incubated the American campaign against trans participation in sport, which is also racist.

If things were fair, any time we raved about LeBron James or Usain Bolt, we would also be watching Candace Parker pirouette with a basketball and Allyson Felix sprinting toward an unfathomable fifth Olympics.

At the last Olympics — where resources are equally divided among men’s and women’s teams — women earned more than half of American medals. You could argue that we deserve more resources, not less. And yet many Americans wring their hands over transgender inclusion. They are missing the point.

“WOW MAN!! Is it still surprising at this point. Sure isn’t! You literally still don’t understand why Kap was kneeling on one knee??” the Los Angeles Lakers forward posted on Twitter.

“Is everything right with our country right now? No, it’s not. We still have a long away to go. But, I think what you do by standing there and showing respect for the flag with your hand over your heart, is it shows unity.”

Has absolute nothing to do with the disrespect of Flag of United States and our soldiers(men and women) who keep our land free.”

James also said his father-in-law fought for the United States and that he asked him questions about it and thanks him all the time.

“He never found Kap peaceful protest offensive because he and I both know what’s right is right and what’s wrong is wrong! God bless you.”