Why Colin Kaepernick Is Winning
Why Colin Kaepernick Is Winning
Colin Kaepernick isn’t the first sports star to defy the national anthem. It took a movement to make his protest stick.
Until August 26, 2016, the National Football League had never distinguished itself as a site of social protest. It’s not that the league doesn’t try to project a social conscience—it lists on its website a number of social causes in which it is invested, from breast cancer awareness (players are reliably bedecked in pink each October) to domestic violence prevention. But American football is, above all, a site of patriotic devotion. The Star-Spangled Banner, through some combination of mandate and ritualistic inertia, sticks to sports like a refrigerator magnet, and to football above all. Stadium flyovers and Marine bands are part and parcel of every Sunday.
Funny, then, that the NFL has suddenly found itself embroiled in the most divisive social conflict facing the United States today, centered on the very symbol of national unity the league so proudly promotes—the flag. When Steve Wyche of NFL.com finally asked second-string San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick why he was kneeling during the pregame playing of the national anthem, his succinct answer—“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color”—sparked a national conversation that moved concussions, deflated footballs, and how-bad-is-that-team-in-L.A. to the second page of the sports section.
No one saw it coming, including Kaepernick himself, an unlikely catalyst whose climb to NFL stardom had been stalled by erratic play over the last few seasons. The singular image that launched the dialogue—Kaepernick, kneeling, somber-faced—was not nearly as dramatic as the sports image that endures as the protest icon of the civil rights era: the black-gloved, raised-fist salute by American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.
So why doesn’t it go away? Why is Kaepernick, who has received death threats, joined each week by players from various teams, some who kneel, some who raise fists, some who start to talk, for the first time in public, about their views on racism and inequality?
One obvious answer is that American police forces, with chilling regularity, continue to justify Kaepernick’s protest. Even Donald Trump, a determined racist according to leaders of his own party, raised questions about the fatal shooting of Terence Crutcher, an unarmed black man, by white police officer Betty Shelby in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Altogether, police are on track to kill as many people this year as they did in 2015—nearly 1,000.
But beyond that, the answer seems to be that the quarterback, consciously or not, was emboldened by a movement, in this case the largest movement for black freedom since the 1970s. And others are following him. Every day, new pro, college, and high-school athletes are joined by cheerleaders and fans in protest. Recently, a high-school marching band in Oakland, California that plays the pregame national anthem even took a knee during the final stanza.
Even as Trump has uncorked an underlying racism in our society—or partly because he has—black protests have taken center stage in popular culture. The social context of Kaepernick’s protest, as much as the actual act, has allowed it to flourish.
Through great personal risk—far greater than Kaepernick’s—Black Lives Matter activists have placed a civil rights revolution back firmly on the agenda of American politics. If the demands from Occupy Wall Street seemed ambiguous, Black Lives Matter has a clear platform. Likewise, the Fight for 15 movement, led by low-wage black workers, has doubled the minimum wage in some major cities, while opening a national conversation about a dignified job. What does it mean to be a citizen, this movement has asked, if you can’t afford a decent life?
Kaepernick’s protest tapped into the spirit of what is actually a radical moment. One could hardly imagine an institution less inclined toward political protest than the NCAA, but recently it snatched seven events out of North Carolina to protest the state’s HB2 law, widely seen as discriminating against the queer community. The NCAA was no doubt influenced by the NBA, which earlier had pulled its signature event, the 2017 All-Star Weekend, out of Charlotte for the same reason.
Kaepernick-like protests are all but guaranteed to continue into the pro basketball season: the sport’s biggest stars (LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul, and Dwyane Wade among them) have already spoken out about police violence, albeit never mentioning Black Lives Matter. Is the NBA more progressive than other leagues? Perhaps. But twenty years ago, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, a devout Muslim, was blackballed by the same league after he refused to stand for the national anthem. He, like Kaepernick, saw the flag as a symbol of oppression. But Abdul-Rauf, in 1996, got little more than a few murmurs of support—even though he was the Denver Nuggets’ leading scorer and one of the most crowd-pleasing players in the league at just twenty-seven years old. Come season’s end, he was traded to the Sacramento Kings, and by 2001 he was out of the league.
Kaepernick’s future in the NFL remains to be seen. But his protest, like Smith and Carlos’s in 1968, will endure, because it has brilliantly seized upon a moment. His kneeling was a raised finger to not only what seems to be a new species of racist American vitriol but also to liberal complacency and the brutal status quo it accepts. Kaepernick’s refusal of the national anthem is also a pledge of allegiance to the new generation of activists, who, in the streets of Charlotte, Chicago, New York, and Ferguson, are working daily for social change. Far from stealing their thunder, Kaepernick has—in his own silence—handed them a megaphone.
Jack McCallum covered professional basketball for thirty-five years at Sports Illustrated. Jamie McCallum is an assistant professor of sociology at Middlebury College.
