The History Of The Word ‘Racism’”

Gene Demby
January 06, 2014

http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/01/05/260006815/the-ugly-fascinating-history-of-the-word-racism

The Oxford English Dictionary’s first recorded utterance of the word racism was by a man named Richard Henry Pratt in 1902. Pratt was railing against the evils of racial segregation:

Segregating any class or race of people apart from the rest of the people kills the progress of the segregated people or makes their growth very slow. Association of races and classes is necessary to destroy racism and classism.

Although Pratt might have been the first person to inveigh against racism and its deleterious effects by name, he is much better-remembered for a very different coinage: “Kill the Indian…save the man”: “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one,” Pratt said. “In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.

We’re still living with the after-effects of what Pratt thought and did. His story serves as a useful parable for why discussions of racism remain so deeply contentious even now.

But let’s back up a bit.

Beginning in the 1880s, a group of well-heeled white men would travel to upstate New York each year to attend the Lake Mohonk Conference Of The Friend Of the Indian. Their primary focus was a solution to “the Indian problem,” the need for the government to deal with the Native American groups living in lands that had been forcibly seized from them. The Plains Wars had decimated the Native American population, but they were coming to an end. There was a general feeling among these men and other U.S. leaders that the remaining Native Americans would be wiped out within a generation or two, destroyed by disease and starvation.

The Lake Mohonk attendees wanted to stop that from happening, and they pressed lawmakers to change the government’s policies toward Indians. Pratt, in particular, was a staunch advocate of folding Native Americans into white life — assimilation through education. He persuaded Congress to let him test out his ideas, and they gave him an abandoned military post in Carlisle, Pa., to set up a boarding school for Native children. He was also able to convince many Native Americans, including some tribal leaders, to send their children far away from home, and leave them in his charge. “These [chiefs] were smart men,” said Grace Chaillier, a professor of Native American studies at Northern Michigan University. “They saw the handwriting on the wall. They knew their children were going to need to be educated in the ways of the dominant culture or they weren’t going to survive.”

For many Natives, Chaillier said, this wrenching decision came down to a grim arithmetic: the boarding school would provide their children with food and shelter, which were hard to come by on the reservations. “The reservations were becoming very, very sad places to be,” she said. “These were places of daunting poverty. People were starving.”

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School would become a model for dozens of other unaffiliated boarding schools for Indian children. But Pratt’s plans had lasting, disastrous ramifications. He pushed for the total erasure of Native cultures among his students. “No bilingualism was accommodated at these boarding schools,” said Christina Snyder, a historian at Indiana University. The students’ native tongues were strictly forbidden — a rule that was enforced through beating. Since they were rounded up from different tribes, the only way they could communicate with each other at the schools was in English.

“In Indian civilization I am a Baptist,” Pratt once told a convention of Baptist ministers, “because I believe in immersing the Indians in our civilization and when we get them under, holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked.” “The most significant consequence of this policy is the loss of languages,” Snyder says. “All native languages are [now] endangered and some of them are extinct.” Pratt also saw to it that his charges were Christianized. Carlisle students had to attend church each Sunday, although he allowed each student to choose the denomination to which she would belong.

When students would return home to the reservations — which Pratt objected to, because he felt it would slow down their assimilation — there was a huge cultural gap between them and their families. They dressed differently. They had a new religion. And they spoke a different language. “These kids coming from the boarding schools were literally unable to speak with their parents and grandparents,” Chaillier said. “In many cases, they were ashamed of them, because their grandparents and parents were living a life that nobody should aspire to live.”

But Pratt’s idea to assimilate Native Americans gained traction, and the government began to make attendance at Indian boarding schools compulsory. Families who didn’t comply were punished by the government. “For a period in the 1890s, federal Indian agents could withhold rations [from families] to kind of forcibly starve someone out,” Snyder says. According to Tsianina Lomawaima, who heads of the American Indian Studies program at the University of Arizona, the government’s schooling policy had more cynical aims. “They very specifically targeted Native nations that were the most recently hostile,” Lomawaima says. “There was a very conscious effort to recruit the children of leaders, and this was also explicit, essentially to hold those children hostage. The idea was it would be much easier to keep those communities pacified with their children held in a school somewhere far away.”

Unhappy, homesick students regularly ran away from the schools, and authorities were sent out to apprehend deserters, who were sometimes given asylum by Native communities who protested the mandatory school laws.

But since there was little oversight of the boarding schools, the students were often subjected to horrific mistreatment. Many were regularly beaten. Chaillier said that some of the schools were rife with sexual abuse. Tuberculosis or trachoma, a preventable disease which causes blindness, were rampant. All of the boarding schools, she said, had their own cemeteries.

Chaillier said that Pratt wasn’t always aware of these conditions. But these were the consequences of the popularity of his philosophies.

Chaillier, who is Lakota, told me a story that her mother often shared with her about her Indian school experience. One day, according to her mother’s story, a young student snuck out from his room at night, fell into a hole being dug for a well on the school grounds, broke his neck and died. His body was put on display and the students were assembled, forced to view their schoolmate’s corpse as a reminder of what happened to students who were disobedient.

But Chaillier’s mother insisted that she didn’t attend one of the bad Indian boarding schools. And she wanted Chaillier to attend one, as well. “If you were Indian, you went to Indian school,” she said, describing her mother’s feelings. Her mother felt that the Indian schools were a net good, even as they were calamitous for Indian cultures.

It’s that ambivalence that makes Pratt’s legacy so hard to neatly characterize. “Richard Henry Pratt was an incredibly complex individual in many ways,” Chaillier said. “Some of the worst outcomes that have happened in society have started out with someone thinking they were doing something good.”

“For his time, Pratt was definitely a progressive,” Snyder said. Indeed, he thought his ideas were the only thing keeping Native peoples from being entirely wiped out by disease and starvation. “That’s one of the dirty little secrets of American progressivism — that [progress] was still shaped around ideas of whiteness.” Snyder said that Pratt replaced the popular idea that some groups were natively inferior to others with the idea that some cultures were the problem, and needed to be corrected or destroyed. In other words, he swapped biological determinism for cultural imperialism. Given the sheer scale of the physical and cultural violence he helped set in motion, was Pratt himself a practitioner of the very ill he decried at the Lake Mohonk convention? Was he a racist?

Over a century after he was first recorded using the word, we still ask that question — is she or isn’t she racist? — in situations where no clear answer would ever present itself. We argue about the composition of the accused’s soul and the fundamental goodness or badness therein. But those are things we can’t possibly know. And as we litigate that question, other more meaningful questions become obscured.

Racism remains a force of enormous consequence in American life, yet no one can be accused of perpetrating it without a kicking up a grand fight. No one ever says, “Yeah, I was a little bit racist. I’m sorry.” That’s in part because racists, in our cultural conversations, have become inhuman. They’re fairy-tale villains, and thus can’t be real. There’s no nuance to these public fights. Someone is either seen as a racist and therefore an inhuman monster, or they’re seen as an actual, complex human being, and therefore, according to the standard view, incapable of being a racist.

Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic, who often writes about race, is one of several writers and thinkers who has drawn attention to this paradox:

The idea that America has lots of racism but few actual racists is not a new one. Philip Dray titled his seminal history of lynching At the Hands of Persons Unknown because most “investigations” of lynchings in the South turned up no actual lynchers. Both David Duke and George Wallace insisted that they weren’t racists. That’s because in the popular vocabulary, the racist is not so much an actual person but a monster, an outcast thug who leads the lynch mob and keeps Mein Kampf in his back pocket.

We can ask whether Richard Henry Pratt was himself racist even as he decried racism. But that question distracts from the concrete and lingering realities of his legacy. It’s far more valuable to wrestle with these two ideas at once: Pratt probably improved the material lives of many individual Native American children who lived in poverty and were at risk of starving. He also aggressively campaigned to destroy their cultures and subjected them to a panoply of miseries and privations.

Last Monday, a woman named Emily Johnson Dickerson died. She was the last person in the world who spoke only the Chickasaw language. That’s a reality interlaced with the difficult legacy of Richard Henry Pratt.

In the century since Pratt used the word racism, the term has become an abstraction. But always buried somewhere underneath it are actions with real consequences. Sometimes those outcomes are intended. Sometimes they’re not. But it’s the outcomes, not the intentions, that matter most in the end.

What does ‘reverse racism’ mean and is it actually real? Experts weigh in

https://www.today.com/tmrw/what-reverse-racism-experts-weigh-term-t184580

The last month has been an intense period of reflection when it comes to racism. Perhaps you’ve also heard the term “reverse racism” in the media, on Instagram, at work or in pockets of mostly white communities over the last few weeks. But what does the term really mean?

Before understanding the concept of “reverse racism” — the claim by white people that they’ve been victims of racism by people of color — Worku Nida, an expert in sociocultural anthropology with a Ph.D. from UCLA, says it’s imperative to first break down the roots of racism in the U.S.

“Racism is a mechanism where resources and unfortunately power, wealth, prestige and even humanity are distributed along a color line. That’s what racism is about,” Nida, who is currently chair of the University of California Riverside Anthropology Department, said.

TMRW interviewed Nida and other experts to understand what drives the idea of reverse racism and if the term is actually valid.

Types of racism

There are two types of racism, individual and systemic, which, according to Nida, are intertwined to reinforce and perpetuate racism in this country. So what are the differences?

Individual racism

Individualized racism is when a person in a position of privilege has some prejudice against another person based on the color of their skin.

“My practice and knowledge is that racism is the combination of two things: discrimination plus power over,” Lynne Lyman, a justice advocate and former California state director for the Drug Policy Alliance, told TMRW. “Where a lot of white people get caught up and confused is that they may have felt discriminated against … but it’s very different from racism when you don’t have the power. [Racism] can only come from the most dominant group.”

The problematic pattern of individualized racism, according to Lyman, is that once you put a person who has been taught to have racial biases, overtly or subconsciously, into a position where they have any clout, their “personal racist tendencies” become “amplified and empowered.”

For example, if one white manager at a company was racist against Black people and never hired Black people during a 10-year management period, it would eventually impact the entire structure and culture of the company. With no Black employees hired at entry-level positions, there would be no advancement for Black people into higher positions.

“Now that company’s practice has been institutionalized over time with no room for Black people,” Lyman told TODAY.

Lyman compared this to sexism, which by definition cannot be experienced by cisgender men because they have, historically and undeniably, been in positions of power over women. All it takes is one individual with racist or sexist tendencies in a position of power at a school, corporation, on a police force or in the government to cultivate a toxic culture.

Systemic racism

“In systemic and structural racism is rooted in institutions, actions and policies that allow certain groups of people to (advance) while preventing other people from having access to resources,” Nida told TMRW. “This works through the court system, congress, presidency, through all levels of structures of government, in business, in education — you name it.”

A “glaring” example of systemic racism, Nida said, is the G.I. Bill of Rights that was passed after World War II. Officially titled the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, the bill was designed to help veterans start their lives and families with low-interest mortgage rates, access to loans for education and training and other privileges.

“This is a very important landmark. The G.I. Bill created the largest group of middle class probably in the world and is how the U.S. economy really formed,” Nida told TMRW. “Black and brown people fought alongside white people in World War II, and they were excluded from this, unfortunately.”

Passed 20 years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, during a time when overt racism was the norm in many areas, the G.I. Bill required veterans to get benefits from a white Veterans Administration and loans from white bankers who refused them regardless of their eligibility. The V.A. also adopted “redlining,” developed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 New Deal. On a color-coded map of metro areas throughout the entire country, the Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration circled places in red to indicate they were too risky to insure mortgages.

Anywhere a Black family lived or lived near was circled red. When Black people applied for loans, whether they had secured benefits from the G.I. Bill or not, they were segregated to areas within the red lines. If a Black family persevered through racist red tape to buy a house in one of the nicer, low-risk areas, there was “white flight,” a concept referring to white people moving from an area to keep people of color separate.

Another example of structural racism is President Richard Nixon’s 1971 declaration of the “War on Drugs.” Drugs, according to Lyman, were strategically made illegal to oppress certain minorities at different times throughout this country’s history.

Laws created on “clearly” racist principles to keep people of color, minorities and immigrants oppressed and controlled, Lyman said, have continued to this day. This has culminated in drastic incarceration rates.

In a recent Harper’s Magazine article, Nixon aide John Ehrlichman was quoted admitting the War on Drugs was a ruse to fight the Nixon White House’s “two enemies: the antiwar left and black people.”

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Some white people may diminish racism in 2020 by justifying that they, their parents or grandparents came from nothing and worked hard to get what they have. But federal legislation and structures like the G.I. Bill and the War on Drugs are crucial to understanding that hard work was not enough for Black Americans to overcome the structural barriers they faced.

Where does structural racism come from?

Both Lyman, who is white, and Nida, who is Ethiopian, emphasized that racist beliefs and structures in the U.S. were cultivated in anti-Blackness.

“White supremacy and white privilege are at the heart of and define structural racism. They were constructed historically and legally codified in 1691 in Virginia,” Nida told TMRW. “Different plantation owners put on paper as the law that white Americans were superior to enslaved Africans and people of color, and had the right to own the land, to be in charge and to be in charge of slave labor.”

When groups of enslaved laborers began to rebel against their exploiters and plantation owners, who were comparatively few in number, Nida said the ideology of white supremacy was crafted and distributed to all groups of white people to promote a political system that for hundreds of years would align working class and poor white people with the elite white people over Black communities with a similar socioeconomic standing.

“People weren’t just born racist because you grew up on this soil. It was a very deliberate, conscious and centuries-long marketing effort,” Lyman told TMRW. “When the abolitionists started pushing out ideas that all humans are equal, a lot of which was based in Christianity and other religions on how you treat other people, in the South, (white people) knew there had to be a counter-narrative. It was like a slave labor PR Firm. Through the social media of the time (the printing press, public speeches, pamphlets), there was a very intentional effort to prove that Black people were inferior.”

So, what about reverse racism? Can a person of color be racist against a white person in this country?
The term “reverse racism,” according to experts on the subject like Lyman and Nida, is a mythological ideology that stems from discourse and propaganda on anti-Blackness.

With roots dating back to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Nida says this concept has sprung up repeatedly through history: in the campaigns launched against abolitionists, in Jim Crow, in the War on Drugs, in the Civil Rights movement and still today in the Black Lives Matter movement in an effort to deflect and distract from the realities of the Black experience in this country.

“Affirmative action emerged in 1966 after the Civil Rights movement when the people of color and Black people included were given limited access to education. Doors were being opened to them that had been closed for centuries for no other reason than being who they are,” Nida told TMRW. “Some white folks brought up the analogy of reverse racism. It’s a social lie, it doesn’t exist. (Because) if we’re talking about dismantling systemic racism, we’re talking about white supremacy and white racism. People who are benefiting from (those concepts) are not going to be happy with changes that affect the status quo.”

Now, there are plenty of Black people in white-collar jobs who are loved and treated well by their white friends and colleagues. But the deeply embedded structures and federal laws passed by outright racists when outright racism was the norm still exist. A white person may not feel or be individually racist, but we live in a system that was designed to uplift white Americans and neglect the pain and suffering of Black Americans.

Racism stems from this imbalance in power. Before considering whether a white person has experienced “reverse racism,” Nida urges you to ask yourself these questions:

When is the last time Black people and people of color forced white people to work on plantations?

When was the last time Black people and people of color subjected white folks to lynching?

When was the last time Black people and people of color excluded white folks from having access to the middle-class opportunities?

How many Black presidents have we had? How many Native American presidents have we had? How many Hispanic?

“A Black person can treat a white person poorly. A Black person can hate a white person for being white. But it’s this idea of reverse racism that doesn’t work,” Lyman told TMRW. “It’s never too late to see and acknowledge this kind of gross injustice and start to fight against anti-Blackness. You can never be too late to this party. We need to undo it in ourselves, in our communities, in our laws and in our society.”

Many of us know about Matt Waldman. Football guy, draft analyst.

Here in a series of tweets, he feels compelled to address the big issues we’re seeing right now. It’s worth a read IMO. He talks about being the husband of a black woman and father of a black child in today’s USA.

Matt Waldman@MattWaldman
Seeing some of my colleagues talk about what it’s like being black in America–
@DianteLee_ comes to mind prominently this afternoon, I’d like to offer a different perspective.

Being white, growing up in the north and south, and becoming part of a black family. What you learn.

The first thing you learn is that no matter how open-minded, loving, and book-educated you are, you are not ready for what you’ll experience once you become emotionally invested in the lives of people who are black.

Seeing, experiencing, and feeling it on a visceral level.

You will at first do what black people do as they’re growing up and first experiencing it: Wondering if what you experienced happened as you perceived it and trying to rationalize the motivations as not racist. Revisiting multiple times to make sure you’re not crazy.

Black people revisit, replay, and analyze things that happen–even after experiencing events like it for decades.

You learn there’s a constant state of questioning, analyzing, explaining (while angry). It’s stressful and wears you out.

You learn why a lifetime of having to be on guard for the potential of significant danger to well-being physically, financially, and emotionally is a drain on mental, physical, and financial health–and considering how doctors have been mistrained (even recently)…

about the pain tolerance, dosages, and overall untrue differences with black patients, it’s not surprising there’s a distrust of U.S. healthcare.

BTW-I learned with one of my roommates in 1990 in Miami that if I didn’t barge past the ER front desk in an empty waiting room,

my roommate, who waited 30 minutes with a medical emergency (I rushed him there) and was hyperventilating and sweating bullets was about two minutes from a stroke if I didn’t grab an annoyed doctor (once he saw my roommate–five folks were working on him immediately)

Even w/that story, at 20 yrs old, having influential teachers talk to me about their life in America, reading Malcolm X, learning history beyond my high school curriculum, I still wanted to rationalize what my roommate went through.

The truth: Being dangerously ill while black

I learned how to have “the talks” with my kids about retail stores, police, school, and the parents of their white friends. Things I never had to consider growing up. Sometimes those talks happened after the fact with incidents that came earlier than I hoped to God would.

Teacher putting my talkative kid in a desk and putting a tape perimeter around her to tell other kids not to interact with her and wanted her tested for a learning disability–when all she did was finish her assignments early (and correctly and consistently) and was bored.

Cashier being rude to my girlfriend because the clerk shorted $20 at the grocery. The manager being ruder when summoned. Neither manager nor cashier offering the slightest apology after counting drawer and it being exactly $20 over.

Countless times followed by retail clerks or front store security behaving brusquely until they realized I was with them and then behaving 180 degrees different. Cops thinking the way to behave with my executive wife whose family all earned college degrees was to speak ebonics

Wife pulled over for alleged “rolling stops”, going through yellow lights, or going 5mph over the speed limit & questioned about the veracity of her ownership of the car because of the cognitive dissonance of her dark skin & German last name that’s on her license and insurance.

Cops questioning that she owns the car even after they see the name match with the IDs. Cops following her home after everything checks out but they want to make sure that nice car is hers–the “don’t-fuck-with-me,” car that I would never have to drive for people at work to see

that she’s not some charity case they hired but a star employee. Not to mention that her dad, sister, and brother were Baltimore PD. And they know police training has been cut well short of optimal in the past 15-20 years.

My wife having to deal with “Cooper-like” women (not new) using tears as a weapon when they become threatened about my wife’s positive work relationships w/males at the job. And those males taking the bait because they don’t expect white women to be mature one but need rescuing.

Ex-girlfriend and I once applied for same job. She had more desirable industry experience, called her first, talked salary, & scheduled interview. She arrived in a stunning Chanel suit–very interview appropriate. Hiring manager took one look at her, said job was filled, offered

entry-level gig. Then manager called me, I went through three interviews–one was clearly a “does the owner give the stamp of approval that I’m a white male,” interview and was offered the job (I graphically told them what they could do with the offer).

The dread I felt when my wife decided to take a drive in her new car and forgot to tell me she was doing so after she ran an errand at night and I thought she’d be home in 20 minutes. Me driving around the county looking for her because I hoped she wasn’t pulled over.

My wife panicking and wanting to leave a concert when my daughter, a Marine, got pulled over for a traffic stop at night in a county that 15 years ago had signs that essentially told black people to leave at night.

I notice how some people who are uncomfortable around blacks get tense and shaky and I have to be 1-2 steps ahead and wonder if this is the day I’m going to jail for my wife. I have learned how to take the temperature of a room in a way I never had to before.

I notice black people taking the temperature of my behavior. Am I at ease and self-aware or am I going to be that guy trying to act black? Am I that guy who will treat my wife as some fetishized trophy? Am I the well-meaning but ignorant liberal social justice warrior 24/7?

All of this is done out of protection and understandably so. Some have seen and experienced too much to even want to try with me. And I get that. Hate it’s that way, but I get it and know I can’t change that in one interaction–and in some cases, ever.

What did I learn?

Being outwardly and vocally hateful was wrong and made your family look bad but being exclusionary for ignorant reasons, telling jokes, reinforcing racism behind the scenes was intentionally and unintentionally encouraged.

It’s the source of gaslighting.

That racism was often tolerated by younger adults not to upset their older parents or authority figures in society with the purse strings.

That it was ok to be friendly but not close to black people.

That black entertainers were exceptional and not the norm. Ring a bell?

That the norm was more like what I saw on the news. What did I see on the news? Murders, robbers, rioters in Miami reacting to police murder/brutality.

I knew this wasn’t true. Didn’t change the emotional reactions I had from these being internalized. Sound familiar?

Like many, these lessons created an ingrained fear. Fear of saying the wrong thing. Fear of being labeled a racist more than tacitly supporting racism. Fear of where to even begin with gaining real knowledge. It’s why so many never even begin.

Fact is, 5 yrs ago the reactions to this behavior was met with a lot more resistance. Progress is sadly slow but it’s there. Feeling that helplessness is a part of honest recognition.

Mostly, I’ve learned that I had to unlearn subtle and unintentional behaviors that I was taught that perpetuated systemic racism. Things family and authority taught. That it took time, effort, humility, and painful self-reflection. I’m still learning. We’re all still learning.

And, it’s exhausting to explain as often as it needs to be explained to give someone uninitiated a clear picture. A clear picture you may not see immediately or in its totality. I’m not telling you how to be, just sharing how I’ve been. Hope it helps.

Paris is showing the world how to practice social distancing. What can be better than sharing your table with giant teddy bears!
H/t @Soma_G pic.twitter.com/qm0WqJdZvC

— Joy Bhattacharjya (@joybhattacharj) June 27, 2020

In Sunday's NYT: "Just as the country needed to stay shut down longer, many states — mostly with Republican governors — took their foot off the brake, and Mr. Trump cheered them on." https://t.co/hLmt41iJlN

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) June 27, 2020

I appreciate Mike relaying with legendary offensive line coach Dante Scarnecchia recently told Bill Polian & me on @SiriusXMNFL about the player traits that were important to the @Patriots. Scar obviously leaves some huge shoes to fill this season in New England (sound familiar?) https://t.co/YybhtlHfbu

— Alex Marvez (@alexmarvez) June 28, 2020

Young people are driving a spike in coronavirus infections, officials say https://t.co/cWrZkNw0dY

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 28, 2020

Michele Steele@ESPNMichele
I remember speaking with various team & league execs in early March and there was concern *then* that an inadequate national strategy to contain the virus would make things exponentially harder to operate across many markets. That concern was well founded.

from https://theathletic.com/1886726/2020/06/25/four-on-the-roster-12-personnel-and-many-questions-evaluating-rams-tight-ends/?source=twittered

Rich Hammond:

Up front, adding a second tight end — usually Mundt — helped the line and the run game. Bobby Evans played well as a rookie at right tackle after Rob Havenstein’s injury, and I don’t want to downplay that but he also got a lot of help in those bigger packages. Mundt and Higbee both are great blockers. What this all means for Everett, I’m still not sure, but the Rams found something in the second half of the season that almost instantly revitalized their offense.

Jourdan Rodrigue:

Because of the extra roster allowances this season, I think the Rams see a bit of a loophole here, in that they can get away with carrying four tight ends — especially if one or two are designated in blocking support. You can carry 55 players on game days now, and teams probably will need more based on health protocols likely coming the league’s way soon. So in a year when you might see roster and practice-squad expansion, they can develop Hopkins and see what he’s got and continue to see whether Everett is a long-term option without immediately extending him. If he would command too much money (and I’m all for players going out and getting their money, by the way), they would have someone waiting in the wings to take on the role.