Some of you are just not getting it.
You see a black football player kneeling during the national
anthem and immediately jump up and down to defend the flag against such blatant
disrespect. Do you even know why he’s doing it, or do you just see what you see?
What I see are professional athletes who take a knee during
the national anthem not to protest against the flag or the anthem, but for a
much greater reason. Their grievances have less to do with these symbols of America and more to do with America
itself. One hundred and fifty-two years after the end of the Civil War, people
of color are still fighting discrimination in virtually every facet of life –
the workplace, educational opportunities, housing, health and worst of all, in the
administration of justice in this country.
They are protesting to make people see, but too many of us still
aren’t looking.
Now obviously I am not an African American or a person of
color and I can never really know what it’s like to be one. That’s why I tend
to trust the word of people who are
members of these minority groups and are
living the life of an aggrieved minority over people who are not. I can
empathize out of principal and out of belief…but not out of actual experience.
Also, I’m able to read.
Here are some things I have learned:
(1) The ratio of African American and Hispanic prisoners to
whites in our penal institutions is way out of balance. It was already off the
charts before the Fascist regime of Donald J. Trump came to power, and it
certainly hasn’t gotten any better since then. Laws are not applied evenly to all races.
(2) People of color continue to be victims of racial profiling.
A friend of mine told me recently he had to march with his parents as a third
grader in order to keep attending a decent elementary school in his hometown.
He had a gun pulled on him by a police officer simply for walking down a public
street at night and fitting a certain description…a situation known to people
of color as "walking while black."
(3) Colin Kaepernick started his kneeling protest to call
attention to police brutality and the killing of unarmed black men by white
police, which had become all too common over the past couple of years. “I am
not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses
black people and people of color,” he said at the time. “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.”
By taking a stand – or rather by not standing – for civil
rights, a growing number of professional athletes are using their platform and
status to raise awareness of issues affecting minorities in the U.S. We could
make a pretty long list, but let’s start with these issues:
* Voting rights: States governed by Republican politicians
continue to press voter suppression legislation and other efforts to withhold voting
rights from people of color. These traditionally Democratic voting blocs helped
put Barack Obama in the White House twice, and eliminating them greases the
skids for Republicans to hold their ground.
* Jobs: The employment rate for African American men has been
11 to 15 percentage points lower than whites in every month since January 2000.
* Health: There are profound racial disparities in illness and
death. For example, blacks are two to three times more likely than whites to
suffer from hypertension and diabetes, leading in turn to higher rates of
cardiovascular disease.
* Wealth: For every $1 of wealth held by the median white
family, the median African American family has less than 8 cents in wealth, and
the median Hispanic family has less than 10 cents.
* Housing: Less than half of black and Hispanic families live
in owner-occupied housing, as of 2014. For
white families, that figure is 71 percent. Home ownership helps families
accumulate wealth and take advantage of sizable tax savings. By contrast, being
forced into the rental market can set off a domino effect of events that then
make it more difficult to exit from poverty, according to the annual “State of
the Union” report from Stanford University’s Center on Poverty and Inequality.
Here’s something else that I bet no one thought about:
White Christian groups are less likely to recognize
discrimination against people of color, choosing instead to believe that they are the ones being discriminated
against, according to a survey by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research
Institute. Only 36 percent of white evangelicals, 50 percent of white mainline
Protestants and 47 percent of white Catholics reported perceiving
discrimination against black people, while 86 percent of black Protestants
reported perceiving “a lot” of discrimination against black people in America,
as did 67 percent of the religiously unaffiliated.
In a previous study about discrimination, white evangelicals
were “overwhelmingly more likely to see discrimination against themselves than
against minority groups,” believing that they have lost their power, their
influence, the cultural center and the demographic dominance they once had.
Considering the influence this bloc of voters has over the current
administration, it’s not hard to understand why Colin Kaepernick and other
black athletes might have a complaint, and why they’re trying to get our
attention.
In simpler terms, if people can’t see the problems, they’re
damn sure not likely to try and do something about them. So if Kaepernick kneels
during the national anthem, I don’t see it as a protest against the flag or the
national anthem. It’s about issues that only people of color truly understand,
and by protesting, he’s trying to make the disbelievers see.
* * *
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