He’s disrespecting the flag. He’s slighting veterans. He’s showing contempt for the national anthem. He’s not a true patriot.
That is what the critics have been saying about the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick since he started kneeling during the national anthem last year.
These
and other charges rain down on those who dare challenge the nation to
do better by blacks. The same thing happened to the track stars John
Carlos and Tommie Smith when they raised their black-gloved fists in a
black-power salute at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City to protest the
injustices black people faced back home. I remember seeing that gesture,
as a 9-year-old boy in Detroit, and feeling that those raised fists
helped to shatter my racial innocence. Carlos and Smith were deemed
un-American and disrespectful. Brent Musburger, a sportswriter at the
time, called them “black-skinned storm troopers.”
There’s
another criticism reserved for the black celebrity: That their wealth
and fame mean they have little to complain about, and when they speak
up, they’re being ungrateful for the privileges they enjoy. But that’s
just the point. At their best, the black blessed have always spoken up
for the black beleaguered.
You
don’t get to be a sports fan — to enjoy the spectacle of black
excellence — and look away from what these athletes demand. The issue
that primarily moved Kaepernick to take a knee, the killing of unarmed
black people by the police, remains a huge problem. The football players
who will continue to take a knee this season are part of a noble
tradition of sports figures acting from their conscience.
“You’ll
never know how easy you and Jackie and Doby and Campy made it for me to
do my job by what you did on the baseball field,” the Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. said to the baseball superstar Don Newcombe — speaking of Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby and Roy Campanella — a few weeks before King was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.
Newcombe
was humbled, he told a reporter. “Imagine, here is Martin getting
beaten with billy clubs, bitten by dogs and thrown in jail, and he says
we made his job easier.”
Americans
who are angry with Kaepernick often forget how black entertainers and
athletes have used their fame to break down barriers of discrimination.
Ray Charles helped to desegregate concert halls; Jackie Robinson
integrated an entire sports league. Entertainers and athletes also
helped to combat fear of black culture.
The
billy club and the baseball bat were competing weapons in the war for
the mind of white America. But increasingly, in the physics of race, it
became more difficult for two objects to occupy the same space at the
same time. The preservation of a society that prevented more black
people from thriving ran headlong into an appreciation for the athletic
gifts — and, by extension, the humanity — of black people. Robinson,
Doby, Campanella and Newcombe were the easiest translation of what the
civil rights movement aimed for: Give black folk a chance, treat us
fairly, make one set of rules for us all to abide by, and we will do
well.
It seemed a reasonable proposition: If you like me, and you like what I am, then like the culture that produced me.
These
athletes saw the contradiction between American ideals of fairness and
justice and their arbitrary application to people of color. A black
person had to be a superstar athlete and beloved icon to enjoy only some
of the perks that many white people could take for granted at birth.
All
of this seems foreign to people who didn’t — and don’t — depend on
their sports stars or their entertainers to double as part-time
spokesmen and spokeswomen for their race. Taylor Swift carries no such
burden; Bryce Harper curries no such expectation. Sure, Joe DiMaggio
made the Italians proud, and Jews exulted in the play of Hank Greenberg
and Sandy Koufax. But despite the undeniable prejudice some of them
confronted, none truly faced the feisty assortment of bigotries that
dogged the black athlete’s path.
Muhammad
Ali spoke against the war in Vietnam, often linking it to domestic
racial terror, and he paid for his dissent, cast as a villain, a racial
pariah, a traitor, a coward, a clueless and unpatriotic dupe. Ali died a
hero decades later, but by then his transformation was aided by a
disease that diminished his speech.
Colin
Kaepernick’s singular act of social conscience has galvanized many in
the black community. Scores of my students and other young people around
the country regard Kaepernick as a hero for his willingness to speak
out for justice, inspiring them in turn to attend local rallies or to
join protests against police brutality. These young people find
themselves thrust into the swirl of a history that to this point only
stared at them from a textbook.
The
thing that rich, talented and famous athletes can do is get others to
follow them. In this case, with Kaepernick and the many other players
who have taken a knee since his initial protest in 2016, it is the
coaches and owners who are now coming along, too.
It
is also important that privileged white people use their platforms to
challenge inequality — and speak out against white fragility and
indifference. In the sports world, three white men with power and
influence make this plain. The Detroit Pistons coach and president, Stan
Van Gundy, spoke bluntly
about Donald Trump after he was elected, saying that he didn’t think
“anybody can deny this guy is openly and brazenly racist and
misogynistic.” More recently, he lamented that the president has made
the national anthem a divisive issue. But he saw the positive: “People
are now talking about some very important problems.”
Gregg
Popovich, the coach of the San Antonio Spurs, has emerged as a
brilliant advocate of white people’s facing up to the legacy of white
privilege. “We still have no clue of what being born white means,” he has said.
And the Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank told me that he was quite
sympathetic to the social issues that black people face and that black
players express.
These
men, united by a sports world that is fueled in many ways by black
excellence, are patriots, true lovers of democracy, who want to see
substantive social change. That cannot happen without agitation and
resistance, without protest and uncomfortable moments of reckoning.
Kaepernick’s legacy resides far beyond the gridiron he deserves to play
on; it lives in the spiral of social awareness and public conscience
that his protest has unleashed.
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