Certainly Colin Rand Kaepernick understood the very real consequences
of his actions. Indeed, the treatment of Colored Citizens is what
brought him to send his protest to the public. And the System has
responded in a manner that proves his point. His career is squashed
like a bug under foot. In the days when America was Great, a time
Trump wants to return to, Colin Rand Kaepernick's protest would have
been dismissed with the words, "That ought to teach that uppity nigger
a lesson!" But the lesson is not lost on a growing number of
Americans. Reinforced by president Donald Trump's pardon of Joe
Arpaio, the Word goes out for one and all to hear, "Return America to
her former Great, Whiteness". Or is that, to her former White
Greatness.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/30/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Colin Kaepernick. (photo: Jake Roth/Reuters)
NFL Plantation Owners Ban Uppity Quarterback
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
29 August 17
American Shame: Colin Kaepernick is jobless for thought crime
To watch America's structural racism at work, one need look no further than
the National Football League (NFL) and its treatment of nonviolent
unorthodoxy as expressed by Colin Kaepernick going to one knee during the
national anthem in support of the unacceptable thought that black lives
should matter as much as anyone else's. Of course, that's still a
relatively
new idea in the United States, dating from 1863 in law and still not fully
accepted in much of the country.
Colin Rand Kaepernick, who turns 30 in November, is a proven professional
football quarterback who chose to become a free agent after the 2016
season.
He led San Francisco to the Super Bowl in 2012. He is good enough to play
for most any of the NFL's 32 teams, but none have signed him. A year ago,
when unarmed black men shot by cops were getting heavy news coverage and
while presidential candidates Clinton and Trump disparaged Black Lives
Matter, Kaepernick undertook a solo protest, sitting during the national
anthem before the first NFL pre-season game. In subsequent games,
Kaepernick
went down on one knee in silent, respectful protest during the Star
Spangled
Banner. Asked by an NFL Network reporter why he was doing that, Kaepernick
said:
I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that
oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than
football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There
are
bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with
murder..
This is not something that I am going to run by anybody. I am not looking
for approval. I have to stand up for people that are oppressed.... If they
take football away, my endorsements from me, I know that I stood up for
what
is right.
At the time, official football - the league, his team, his coach - all
spoke
carefully about respecting Kaepernick's "right as a citizen," without
engaging the issue he was raising. Kaepernick is bi-racial. He was adopted
by white parents and raised in Wisconsin with white siblings.
Zeitgeist signals: Kaepernick blacklisted, Arpaio pardoned
In November 2016, a Miami Herald reporter asked Kaepernick about a shirt he
had worn showing Fidel Castro and Malcolm X with the caption: "Like Minds
Think Alike." In discussing the shirt, Kaepernick reportedly said: "One
thing that Fidel Castro did do is they have the highest literacy rate
because they invest more in their education system than they do in their
prison system, which we do not do here, even though we're fully capable of
doing that."That sort of truth, spoken out loud, does not endear one to the
overlords of the NFL or other American authorities, especially the ones who
created and profit from the unaddressed, unending scandal of prisons for
profit.
A year after he first spoke out by kneeling in silence, Colin Kaepernick is
unemployed. Unarmed black men are killed by cops at a faster rate now than
in 2016, but it's not news so much any more. Kaepernick had his free
speech,
now he's paying the price. The country has moved on to a more ardent
defense
of free speech by Nazis, white supremacists, the KKK, anti-Semites, and
other bigots.
The Trump administration is contributing to social calm and order by
setting
out to give local police more military weapons, from armored troop carriers
to grenade launchers.
The ugliest sign of the country's darkening racial zeitgeist is President
Trump's pre-emptive, unprincipled, unconditional pardon of one of America's
most notorious police bigots, former sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona, a man
who spoke proudly of his brutal and deadly prison system as a
"concentration
camp." Arpaio was awaiting sentencing when the President interdicted the
judicial process with a hasty pardon, granted without any of the usual
review and consideration. The brief White House announcement concluded with
these lies:
Throughout his time as Sheriff, Arpaio continued his life's work of
protecting the public from the scourges of crime and illegal immigration.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio is now eighty-five years old, and after more than fifty
years of admirable service to our Nation, he is worthy candidate for a
Presidential pardon.
Arpaio's record is reasonably clear that he did little protecting of the
public or the Constitution. His office operated with racist standards that
encouraged police brutality and led to prisoner deaths from violence and
neglect. Arpaio's service as sheriff was not admirable but self-serving,
obsessed with targeting Latinos regardless of guilt, while ignoring real
criminal offenses, including domestic abuse and child abuse.
Kaepernick and the Star Spangled Banner of American irony
Some say Kaepernick is the victim of a blacklist. Others deny what seems
obviously true. One of the deniers makes much of a few other players making
similar gestures without consequences. But he leaves out critical facts:
that these are players currently under contract and that they have a union
to defend them. He makes a point of saying that "NFL rosters are 70 per
cent
Black," without wondering why NFL rosters are close to 100 per cent without
any expressed social conscience. He does not mention that NFL owners would
be 100 per cent white but for some limited partners like Reggie Fowler of
the Minnesota Vikings.
American racism is structural, institutional, shameless, and intractable.
Electing Barack Obama in 2008 didn't make the country a post-racial society
any more than electing Donald Trump in 2016 makes the country a post-sane
society. The abiding ambiguity of American madness can be seen in our
"national anthem," which has been our national anthem less than 100 years
(adopted 1931).
The Star Spangled Banner celebrates the defense of Fort McHenry in
Baltimore
Harbor in 1814 in Maryland, a slave state. The attacking British force
included numbers of escaped slaves fighting for the British on the promise
of earning their freedom. Francis Scott Key, who wrote the Star Spangled
Banner, was a lifelong slave owner. A lawyer who served as US Attorney, Key
used his office to prosecute abolitionists. In an 1837 prosecution of
abolitionist Dr. Reuben Crandall for instigating a slave rebellion, Key
said
in his summation to the jury:
Are you willing, gentlemen, to abandon your country, to permit it to be
taken from you, and occupied by the abolitionist, according to whose taste
it is to associate and amalgamate with the negro? Or, gentlemen, on the
other hand, are there laws in this community to defend you from the
immediate abolitionist, who would open upon you the floodgates of such
extensive wickedness and mischief?
Rendered in modern language, these are the same sentiments the racists of
Charlottesville expressed in their exercise of free speech. In 1837, the
jury acquitted Dr. Crandall. On the Charlottesville hordes, the jury is
still out.
Maybe, should our public consciousness come to grips with the reality that
our national anthem is a slave owner's paean to the defense of a slave
state, we might think more seriously about kneeling ourselves. That might
be
a better way to express our hope to become, truly, the land of the free and
the home of the brave.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV,
print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont
judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America,
Corporation
for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award
nomination
from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work.
Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
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