And I will,” he says in the series, which arrives on Friday.
“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 told the NFL Network’s Steve Wyche.
Detractors seethed; they misrepresented the football player’s defiance, viewing it as an affront to some gauzy notion of patriotism.
I’d make the case that many roads led us to the summer of 2020, but one of those roads ran straight through the athletic fields of the US.
We’re talking dozens of communities that felt the effect of Kaepernick’s taking that knee, that felt the effect of the Black Lives Matter movement, that felt the effect of the legacy of the killing of Trayvon Martin, who came up over and over again when I talked with young people about why they took a knee.
Anybody who’s ever been an athlete also knows how traumatic it can be not to have the respect of your coach or your teammates, because that’s supposed to be the ultimate clique.
And while we talk about what we saw in 2020, it’s also what we’ve seen in 2021, with the unhinged reaction to so-called critical race theory and even with some of the responses to masking.
The first sign that the sports world was going to play a big role in what was happening was in the ESPY speech that LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul and Dwyane Wade gave after the death of Muhammad Ali.
Then Kaepernick said, “Actually, we can’t talk about coming together until there’s justice.” That represented a big shift in what many athletes had been saying up to that point in terms of looking for quote-unquote solutions.
Ali never said, “We need to get people who love the war and hate the war in one room and learn how to love one other.” He said, “No, there’s a side.
If Kaepernick were to kneel this year, it’d barely be news.
The first is that NFL ownership has decided that Kaepernick has more value to them as a ghost story than as someone who can contribute to a Super Bowl team.
The second thing is that the NFL operates on a system of what I’d describe as racial labor discipline, in that it’s very authoritarian, very top-down and very dependent on Black players deciding to play and not be like, “This is bulls***.
So, the NFL has no problem putting “End Racism” in the end zone or even having people have “Black Lives Matter” on their helmets, because it’s being orchestrated from the top down.
But the Gruden emails actually give us an incredible view into the kind of contempt that people in power in the NFL have for the people whose blood, sweat and tears make the sport.