Taking a Knee: Colin Kaepernick, Protest, and the Backlash
In case you have not yet heard, 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick did a thing recently. Well, technically, he didn’t do a thing; he elected not to stand for the national anthem in his team’s preseason game against the Green Bay Packers.
When asked about it afterwards, Kaepernick said that he “[was] not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color […] There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” And lo, somehow the internet was able to withstand the stampede of Walter Sobchaks onto the comment section of every sports website.
The response was swift, vocal, and wholly unsurprising. The sheer number of “LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT” comments very nearly reached the peak set during the early stages of the Iraq War. Jason Whitlock, who quoted himself eight times in the mission statement for his ill-fated sportswriting website, accused Kaepernick of being self-absorbed.
A lot of the backlash tended to come in one of two forms.
The first was some variant of, “he’s making 19 million dollars to play a game, guess he can’t be all that oppressed.” This is beside the point; Kaepernick himself said that “it would be selfish on my part to look the other way.” He admits that he’s doing this from a position of relative privilege; so pointing out his annual salary is a total waste of time and energy.
The other common retort revolved around supporting the troops, a well-worn dissent-stifling tactic since, in my memory at least, the early days of the Iraq War. This context adds an interesting twist to the conversation, as the NFL itself loves conspicuous support for the military.
The league itself is facing a small crisis as people become more aware of the fact that it is, at its heart, a business that uses men giving each other long-term, debilitating health problems as a vehicle to sell satellite television, pickup trucks, and beer. It’s a business that empowers crooked billionaires to use hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money to build a stadium that will be used about twenty times in a good year, then charge those taxpayers 50 bucks to park there.
The NFL loves to use phony, rah-rah military bullshit as a means of wallpapering over the fact that it’s a moneymaking enterprise so crass and cynical that Upton Sinclair would call it “a bit much.”
So Kaepernick walked his statements back, because of course he did; he even struck a compromise with the “ARE TROOPS” crowd by deciding to kneel during the anthem instead of sitting, because there are all kinds of unwritten rules when it comes to arbitrary, abstract displays of national pride.
When I began writing this I intended to talk about how silly this whole thing was. I thought that Kaepernick’s method of protest was ineffectual. Sitting down during the anthem (as he was at the time) is hardly as evocative an image as the Miami Heat donning hoodies after the death of Trayvon Martin or Cleveland Browns receiver Andrew Hawkins warming up in a “Justice For Tamir Rice and John Crawford” shirt, much less John Carlos and Tommie Smith raising gloved fists on the medal podium at the 1968 Olympics. Indeed, he had been doing it for weeks before anyone noticed it.
But a funny thing happened: it started to catch on. As soon as it was noticed for the first time, everybody started to talk about it.
Once Kaepernick clarified his position in a team meeting, he had the support of the rest of the 49ers, and reports started to circulate that most players around the league supported him even though none of the owners did. A “Veterans For Kaepernick” hashtag started to circulate, and the NFL’s opening week — which happened to fall on the anniversary of the September 11th attacks — many players around the league joined in on Kaepernick’s protest by kneeling or raising their fists during the national anthem.
I initially dismissed his stated purpose to “start a conversation” as passive and mealy-mouthed. Yet — people have been talking about this for weeks. He’s brought in a wide array of reactions; it seems as though he has started to open up some major schism in the United States.
Kaepernick and his supporters look at the flag and can’t help but see a state in which designated undesirables are shunted off out of sight and left to die. His critics tend to view the flag and the playing of the anthem as a tribute to the military.
Either they are indeed using this as a cheap rhetorical trick (being that not supporting the troops is the only real dealbreaker in American public discourse), or they seem to troublesomely conflate the men and women of the military with the state that has no regrets using them up and spitting them out. — the very state that Kaepernick has targeted with his protest.
The critics also seem to misunderstand the point of a protest. I am of the mind that they’re uncomfortable with confronting the idea of people experiencing a different America than they are used to.
As previously stated, most of these people jump immediately to bringing up the troops — imagine risking life and limb thousands of miles away from home, only to come back to be used as a soapbox for the dumbest and huffiest of reactionaries. Others complained that Kaepernick wasn’t picking the right time or place for the protest, that a symbolic display of nationalism is the wrong venue to protest a nation’s institutional inequities.
If you’re gonna protest, they say, do it in the clubhouse, or when you’re brushing your teeth in the bathroom or something. Just as long as I don’t have to see it.
Whatever. Fuck ‘em.
Update:
The dumbest take had yet to be written — here’s idiot man Lee Zeldin on Kaepernick and the Chelsea bombing suspect: