I've read and listened to several articles and podcasts dealing with white
nationalists and what they say and believe. There was a truly amazing interview
done by an African American journalist with Richard Spencer, who is, one of the
most horrifying white men I've ever listened to. It was a very calm discussion
which, if you weren't using your brain, might have sounded rational. In it,
Richard Spencer was explaining why he believes that our society is damaging to
white people. He has, he explained, nothing against people of color. It's just
that their numbers are damaging to, "white culture", which, he equates, with
western civilization. All he wants to do is preserve western civilization which
means that our society must rid itself of people of color.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2017 1:56 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: NFL Plantation Owners Ban Uppity Quarterback
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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