This Is Why NFL Cheerleaders Haven't Taken a Knee

"The league is not interested in what we have to say.”

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The recent wave of protests taking place at football stadiums across the country has many debating the ethics of expressing dissent. When, and how, should individuals and communities share their political beliefs? While an important debate, some of those engaging in it often overlook the fact that not everyone feels able to engage in protest in the first place. Many of us lack the capital, political, social, and/or economic means, to make our opinions known, and as a result may be punished or simply not heard.

Nowhere is this protesting gap more stark right now than on the football field. In recent weeks, a growing number of players and coaches have taken a knee during the national anthem, following the lead of the now unsigned NFL player Colin Kaepernick who adopted the gesture to protest racial injustice. Cheerleaders, on the other hand, have remained standing.

“Bottom line, cheerleaders are a little fish in a big pond,” Michele Wright, a broadcast journalist and former cheerleader for the Jacksonville Jaguars, told via email. “Although they are of great worth and value to the football experience and their respective communities, many are undervalued. So to remain neutral, they wouldn’t take a knee.”

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Wright’s feelings echo those expressed by a number of former cheerleaders who spoke to about the protests, on- and off-the-record. (All of the over 50 current cheerleaders, cheerleader coordinators, and team captains contacted for this story didn’t respond or explicitly declined to comment.) Cheerleaders, they explained, are expected to be founts of positive energy, impeccable rhythm paired with toothy smiles and toned legs. They are supposed to be fun and have fun on the field; such a good time that it compensates for the fact that they are, in the best of circumstances, being paid minimum wage with no health benefits by an industry that rakes in $14 billion dollars a year in revenue. Voicing their opinions in public is, in most squads, considered squarely unfun, and so cheerleaders are discouraged from doing it.

Many are okay with this arrangement. Dancing for the NFL is a dream come true, they say, and the fact that you can’t earn a living wage while cheering is the sacrifice they make for their art. The wages are terrible, yes, but they were never promised otherwise. They signed their contract. There have been no surprises. Some acknowledge the sexism in the way they are treated—from being referred to as “girls,” to having to look “put-together” at all times, on and off the field—but think the experience is still worth it in the end.

“It would be hard to be the only one,”

“I’m not shocked that they are not protesting,” one former cheerleader told “It’s not that we women don’t have an opinion; we have opinions. Many of us have other jobs while we are cheering, there are doctors and politicians out there on the field. We do this because we love to dance, and our job as cheerleaders isn’t to create controversy. It’s to make everyone happy.”

Not one woman spoke to for this story said she would have participated in the protests. It’s simply not the culture of cheering, they explained, and their captains wouldn’t have supported them. Also, since cheerleaders are often told how replaceable they are, they felt that they could very easily be fired for taking a stand. One pointed out that even a talented, well-known player like Kaepernick essentially lost his job for making a statement. Few cheerleaders would be willing to take that risk.

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Danetha Doe, a former cheerleader for the Indianapolis Colts, said that as a black woman she probably wouldn’t have felt comfortable taking a knee alongside her mostly white squad in front of mostly white fans.

“It would be hard to be the only one,” Doe, now a financial coach for women, told “Plus the skirts are so short.”

Another felt that since they aren’t the main feature at the game, they shouldn’t try to grab the spotlight.

“If I was still a cheerleader, I wouldn’t kneel down, it’s not my job. I would be frustrated about what’s going on in the country, but I would put my thoughts and opinions to the side and keep on moving,” another former cheerleader told “We are the appetizers, the players are the entrees. They are who people come to see.”

“There is a huge intimidation factor that these women experience."

Most of them agreed that should a cheerleader protest, it would not be taken well by their captains or their teams. Cheerleaders are discouraged from voicing personal opinions while working or critiquing their profession, and when they do, controversy ensues. Over the past three years, there has been an ongoing fight to get cheerleaders compensated fairly (a former San Francisco 49ers' Gold Rush Girl calculated that she made $2.75 an hour), one that has led to a number of high profile multi-million dollar settlements, along with disquietude among colleagues who disagree about whether this is a fight worth having.

“There is a huge intimidation factor that these women experience. These are women who have trained for more than a decade, sometimes longer. They get this role and they won’t even call them women, they call them girls. And they constantly tell them how replaceable they are and a million people want their job. They denigrate them and make them feel worthless, and then they tell them to tell everyone that it’s great,” Drexel Bradshaw, a San Francisco-based lawyer who worked on a number of lawsuits against the NFL involving compensation for cheerleaders, told These includes cases in which cheerleaders are trying to get paid fairly, and a current one in which cheerleaders are alleging the the NFL teams actively conspire to underpay them and prevent them from negotiating higher wages.

“We have fans as well. Why isn’t the league interested in hearing what we have to say?”

Doe said that while she understands why individual cheerleaders aren’t taking part in the recent protests, the fact that the NFL discourages many of its female employees from expressing themselves is something more of them should consider resisting.

“There’s a bigger conversation to be had here: Why, as women, aren’t we a bigger part of these conversations? Why isn’t our opinion valued as highly as others?,” said Doe. “We have fans as well. Why isn’t the league interested in hearing what we have to say?”

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