In 2026, Azeez Al-Shaair’s ‘Controversial’ Eye Blacks Are The Closest Thing To Athlete Activism [Op-Ed]

Source: Todd Rosenberg / Getty

Raised fists stripped Tommie Smith and John Carlos of their Olympic medals. Kneeling got Colin Kaepernick blackballed. Valuing life keeps getting Azeez Al-Shaair fined.

Nowadays, this is what “buck-breaking” looks like.

The Houston Texans linebacker has become quite the “disturbance” this year, depending on your geopolitical views and sense of humanity, as he’s been in the news more for his equipment choices than for his on-field production. 

Before last Sunday’s game in Indianapolis against the Colts, Al-Shaair took to social media to post a photo of an eye black that featured the names of two Palestinian children who were killed in Gaza. During Week One, he wrote “Hind Rajab,” the name of another Palestinian girl who had been killed in Gaza, on his eye black and was fined $11,941. “What’s a life worth?” he said when asked about the penalty. “Is a life worth $11,000? I think it’s priceless. So, to sit there and say that, ‘Oh man, the money’ and whatever, that wasn’t relevant to me.”

“As human beings, because we all have our own issues and things that we’re going through, (you) can get so lost in your own problems that you can’t have compassion for other people in the world,” he added.

The following week, he sported the name of another deceased Palestinian child on his eye black before removing it during the game. According to reports, the NFL threatened to remove him from the game if he didn’t remove it. Earlier this year, Al-Shaair was fined for having “stop the genocide” on his eye black.

“I knew that it was a fine, but I understood what I was doing,” he said in January. “It’s bigger than me,” he explained. “There are things that are going on that make people uncomfortable. Imagine how those people feel.”

In the decade since Kaepernick took a knee, and against the backdrop of his recent interviews highlighting how the space for athletes to use their voices has diminished, sports have deteriorated to the point where eye blacks have become as “revolutionary” as wearing Black berets.

It’s as sad as it is laughable.

During a recent appearance on “The New Yorker Radio Hour,” Kaepernick spoke about the “disappointment” he felt when more of his teammates and other players around the league didn’t join him in his peaceful protest, characterizing them as being “scared.”

“I had players that came back and were like, ‘I talked to my agent about it, or I talked to my family about it.’ I remember one … playing this back is a little bit of a mind-blowing conversation. I had one player that came back and was like, ‘My owner told me that I can’t protest.’ And that was an unfathomable sentence to me,” he explained.

“The part that stands out to me, and the NFL told on themselves in this situation, is that I wasn’t protesting the NFL,” he added. “At no point in time was I like, ‘the NFL, you are the ones doing this,’ but their reaction was, ‘We have to make this stop, we’re going to take an oppositional position.”

Kaepernick and Al-Shaair’s situations are similar in that neither of their demonstrations directly called out the NFL. The league that had no problem with honoring Charlie Kirk continues to draw the line whenever athletes of color want to address the actions that lead to the loss of life for other people of color. As usual, the league keeps underlining its own hypocrisy.

“The conversation has changed but about the same issues,” Tommie Smith said back in 2017, when the intersection of sports and social issues was at its peak. “Different time, same issues.” As one half of the duo that changed sports by raising their fists on the medal stand at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, Smith is the godfather of understanding the power of silent protests in sports and the sacrifices that come with them.

“I never said a word as the national anthem was playing,” Smith wrote in his autobiography. “My silent gesture was designed to speak volumes. As hard as I had worked to climb the victory stand, I had worked just as hard to earn the platform that the stand provided.”

During the lead-up to Super Bowl 59, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell declined to fall in line with Donald Trump’s White House, saying his league would continue to pursue diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives instead of removing them. “We got into diversity efforts because we felt it was the right thing for the National Football League,” he explained. “And we’re going to continue towards that, because we’ve not only convinced ourselves, I think we’ve proven ourselves that it does make the NFL better.”

The year before that, at that same annual Super Bowl press conference, the commissioner said that he wanted NFL players to speak up. “I do prefer our players have voices. And I would tell you that I learned an awful lot from our players. Not just during that period of time, but every single day,” he declared.

If Al-Shaair takes the league to court over his fine and the alleged threats he has received, that quote from Goodell could serve as the defense’s “smoking gun.”

Before this NFL season began, the league announced it would continue its on-field “anti-racism” messaging, as franchises had previously etched their end zones with phrases like “End Racism,” “Stop Hate,” “Inspire Change,” and “Choose Love.” Given this intent, and what Al-Shaair has experienced, it becomes clear what has transpired in the sports world since Colin Kaepernick’s protests — the NFL made an example of one, and the many waved the white flag, lost their nerve, and succumbed to cowardice.

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