No “word of the day” today,
because I just encountered yet another opinion piece supporting black athletes who are “taking
the knee” during the National Anthem, apparently begun by the 49ers’ bench-sitter
Colin Kaepernick, probably to get some attention and prevent people from forgetting
he’s still on an NFL roster. Other
players have followed his lead, like Brandon Marshall of the Broncos. Two
teams, the Seahawks and the Chiefs, demonstrated by locking their arms together
during the national anthem this past Sunday. It has also been reported that at
least three high school football teams have also taken to making a “stand.” Kaepernick
explained his stand thus:
I have great respect for the men and women that have fought for this
country. I have family, I have friends that have gone and fought for this
country. And they fight for freedom, they fight for the people, they fight for
liberty and justice, for everyone. That’s not happening. People are dying in
vain because this country isn’t holding their end of the bargain up, as far as
giving freedom and justice, liberty to everybody. That’s something that’s not
happening. I’ve seen videos, I’ve seen circumstances where men and women that
have been in the military have come back and been treated unjustly by the
country they fought have for, and have been murdered by the country they fought
for, on our land. That’s not right.
First of all, this is obviously quite self-serving. Is Kaepernick
implying that all the black men who have been shot by police are former combat
veterans in Iraq (I don’t believe we were in Iraq fighting for our “freedom,”
but that is not the point)? It must be
the case, because, after all, he wouldn’t be getting as much support if he was
taking a knee for common criminals. While there probably were a few black
service members who have murdered, there is a 90 percent probability that they
were killed by people for whom there is a 90 percent probability that they don’t
give a damn what America “stands for,” let alone for freedom, justice, liberty
and all that. The motives were likely murky variations of what constitutes “respect,”
which is something more likely to be missing in every day relations of the
person doing the shooting.
Second of all, there is more than
a little hypocrisy at play here. These athletes are being paid millions of
dollars a year by white owners and a largely white audience. They are not “out”
to get them, or any other black male (save for white gender activists who see
black male athletes as easy pickings to exploit). They are just like
million-dollar black athletes living in
their million-dollar homes in high-end, gated communities: they are not afraid
of getting shot by police in the “old neighborhood”—they are more afraid of
being shot or robbed by one of their “brothers” there.
Now Howard Bryant of ESPN noted that
Baltimore Orioles player Adam Jones also took his “knee,” and complained that
Adams will be “misunderstood,” the “substance” of his complaints about baseball
being a “white man’s sport” being “mauled, chewed and twisted beyond
recognition.” First of all, that hasn’t happened, save in the comments section.
Bryant claims that “Baseball is a white man's game, and is so by the
specific design of the people who run it. In a country full of world-class
black athletes, baseball cannot seem to attract many. Nothing Jones said is
statistically, factually or anecdotally remarkable except for that he took the
remarkable step of actually saying it.”
Bryant went on to say that
baseball has not “evolved,” meaning it has few black (or for that matter,
Latino) managers, owners or general managers. But is he really talking about
why so few black kids show any interest in baseball? Historically black Howard
University recently dropped its baseball program for lack of interest, and very
few college teams have more than one black player on their rosters, usually
only as a “token.” Inner city Little Leagues are virtually non-existent. And if
baseball is supposedly a “white man’s game,” then professional basketball
certainly can be defined as a “black man’s game,” largely because the game has “evolved”
by what Bryant should actually mean—by incorporating the language and culture
of the “street.” Is that supposed to be “good”? You tell me. It probably doesn’t
help baseball’s appeal to black America in that it is a slow-moving sport with
very little “contact.”
The Kaepernick Effect reached
its low point in the Washington Post last week, when someone
named Zack Linly, a black man who claimed to be engaged in numerous
occupations, wrote that it was time to “stop arguing with disingenuous white
people” who don’t agree with the usual narrative involving the topic of police
brutality on most occasions (although I would fully concur that there are
instances when a shooting occurs for reasons existing only in a cop’s paranoid
and poisoned mind). Linly was “tired” of whites who did not know what they were
“talking about,” even claiming that they had no right to speak to the issue,
even though they are being directly accused. Linly went on to write
“We’ve spelled it out for white
America a hundred different ways that their beloved police forces are full of
officers who are simply more volatile, fearful and prone to harassment and
abuse of power when dealing with us – and it’s costing us our lives. We’ve laid
out all the statistics and all of our millions of personal testimonies.” Linly
then offered a list of statements in which whites “rationalized” the issue of
police shootings, like “There must be more to the story,” “All lives matter”
and “What about black on black crime?” Linly dismisses these and other
pertinent observations as “deflective” responses—to what? Linly’s credibility
is “shot” when he dismisses contempt for moral and ethical standards in
dysfunctional communities, or any observations concerning them at all. He can “explain” it any way he wishes, but he has no
right to complain harshly when people point out the holes in his explanation
that a herd of elephants can run through.
The United States may not “perfectly”
live up to its creed; I know that as well as anyone. But if it has been “unkind”
to Kaperpernick, Adams and Linly, they could try living in the following
countries, which according to one health organization list are the top seven “must
to avoid” places for “tourists” to visit: Central African Republic, Chad, Mali,
Somalia, South Sudan, Niger and Burundi. In countries like these, they’d likely
need an entire Army battalion as a bodyguard to protect themselves and their wealth
from their innocent “brothers.”
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