As you’re getting ready for some football today, knowing there will be more players taking a knee during the national anthem, consider:

• Taking a knee began as a means of bringing attention to the ongoing over-policing and over-incarceration of black Americans.
• Protest, in whatever legal form it occurs, is as American as apple pie. Our country was created as an act of extreme protest: revolution.
• 2019 marks the 400-year anniversary of the first black African slaves brought to the Jamestown colony in Virginia.
• No other immigrant minority group has been more excoriated, less enfranchised, less welcomed into the American family than black men and women. They’ve been systemically marginalized by means of slavery, yes, but also by Jim Crow laws, segregation in housing, schooling, and employment, voter registration “tests,” poll taxes, institutionalized domestic terrorism by the Klan and others.
• America was built upon the bloodied backs and labor of black men and women, in the South, North, and throughout Western expansion. This needs to be recognized and dealt with forthrightly at the highest level of our government and culture, as well as at the level of the common citizen.
• That rotten core of our history, unacknowledged and un-dealt-with, is worthy of disrespect. The flag, the anthem, the Constitution itself are symbols of the country, and legitimate targets of disrespect.

Our less-than-bright president, wading into the issue at a political rally early in the season, has turned the spectacle into Trump vs. the NFL. This will expand the players’ activism. It will bring greater attention to it, and more argument and eventually, hopefully, discussion. But first it will be ugly. This is a good thing. Racism is ugly, too.

If this offends you or what you believe, good. Four-hundred years is a lot of offense, too. Maybe it’ll lead you to think past the flag, the anthem, and the multi-millionaire players and owners, and ask yourself why this is happening. Why are protests going on around the country? Why did we see hundreds of white men marching through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, by torchlight this past summer? Why are black men and women sentenced more frequently and harshly for the same crimes as white men and women?

THINK.

#American #culture #racism #NFL

Snopes:

WHAT’S TRUE

The NFL’s rulebook says nothing about player conduct during the pre-game playing of the U.S. national anthem.

WHAT’S FALSE

The NFL’s game operations manual may contain a policy stating that players must be present on the sidelines during the national anthem, but not that they must stand.

Emphasis mine.

Risking popular backlash by flouting “policy” and cultural norms is an essential part of protest. Playing it safe by respecting cultural totems is not. People in a lather about NFL players sitting- or kneeling-out the anthem are missing the point of the effort.

The national anthem and the American flag are not about military service members, living or dead. They are not about first responders, or anyone’s idea of “heroes.” They are symbols of our country and its culture – about what it aspires to be as well as how far it falls short. What better target of protest against that shortfall could there be?

If people are offended by the players’ behavior, where is their outrage at the use of these patriotic symbols for selling cars, furniture, and other goods, or at the practice of wearing the flag’s likeness as clothing? Selective outrage tells us what’s really on the mind of the outraged. It’s not so much patriotism as it is what the protest is saying to them: you are part of the problem. Your acquiescence or ignorance compounds the issue of long-running ethnic bias and discrimination.

Don’t be angry at the protesters, be angry at what they’re protesting.

Declining to participate in the anthem is and will continue to be a protest against the rotten core of American culture. Once enshrined in our laws, but now simply encoded in the hateful behavior of a minority of the white majority, the treatment of non-white, and particularly brown and black Americans as well as native American Indians steamrolled into near-oblivion has been a four-hundred year disgrace yet to be forthrightly addressed.

That the protesting of this disgrace discomfits some is a bulls-eye.

Consider it a favor, then, that these players risk the ire of their fans and their employers. Take them at their word, which is what I’ve written above, and ask the next question. Why do we not address the core issue? Indeed, why do we cast about for any other reason to be offended?

I’ve read people claim that they’re all for peaceful protest, but not during playing of the national anthem. It’s that little word “but” that tells you all you need to know about the speaker. Injustice is unjust, all of the time, no room for “but”s. It must be addressed and stamped out, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us.

#American #culture #racism #national #anthem #NFL

Not that this is the stupidest or least humane response to an issue by the NFL. The way it handled Ray Rice’s beat-down of his girlfriend in an elevator in plain view of a security camera arguably ranks up there. But why rank sins?

William C. Rhodes – The Undefeated:

Kaepernick vs. the NFL is not a football issue and never has been. Anyone who believes that Kaepernick’s continued unemployment is about ability is being dangerously naïve.

Kaepernick’s protests last season are precisely why he remains unsigned today. Lesser players are already under contract. His unemployment is another tell that the NFL, as part of larger American culture, is unwilling to face America’s original sin. Doing so might tarnish the brand.

Dr. King was shot dead for doing this. John Lewis was bludgeoned nearly to death. Black and white men and women were beaten, terrorized, killed, buried, and forgotten. For decades. The list of those suffering the backlash of cultural denial is long.

Memory, for much of the American culture who repudiate Kaepernick and his supporters, is short.

Kaepernick made a conscious choice to draw attention to himself, which begged the question why he was taking a knee. We all know why. The fallout he’s seeing this season is part of that conscious choice, too. He knew he’d be not only excoriated, but sidelined, and then unemployed and unemployable in the NFL. We should continue to ask, why?

There’s an upside to this predictability. News of Kaepernick’s treatment this season will be reported, as here. A few more minds will ask why?, wake up, and decry the ongoing second-classness of being non-white in America.

Slavery. Jim Crow.  Segregationist housing and schooling. Mass incarceration. Racist policing. Economic oppression. Openly white supremacist activism after the election of Mr. Trump.

Tell me again how we’re all treated equal in America, because I don’t believe it.

There is a truth out there that will eventually make this problem, the sorest American problem since our founding, moot. Census data doesn’t lie. The tide of color in America is decidedly a multitude of shades darker than European white. And as multi-racial families grow in number, the coloring of America grows. That’s fact. You can look it up (page 9, table 2).

We shouldn’t have to wait for generations to die before the promise of America is brought to everyone.

#colin #kaepernick #nfl #blackballed