Fueled by a life-long anti-sports bias that is difficult to explain, even to myself, I ignored initial news reports about a football player refusing to stand up for the national anthem. I caught only the headline, so I knew this was a protest over recent police shootings of young black men. That’s an issue I’ve tried to follow, but I wasn’t all that interested in whatever it was that a professional jock had to say about it. A few days later, the headlines changed. The guy was now kneeling for the national anthem out of respect for veterans. I immediately read the story and then caught up on the earlier reports. I don’t care much for football, but I’m a sucker for shrewd political strategy.
Colin Kaepernick, I learned, is a San Francisco 49er quarterback. That may explain why he seems unusually adept at distinguishing a strategy from a tactic. If I get the game right, a pass is a tactic. Standing alone, all that does is put the ball in the air for a small period of time. A strategy is a detailed way of executing the pass so that the ball eventually ends up in the desired destination. I have no idea what kind of a quarterback Kaepernick is, but off the field, I have to say I like his moves.
Politically, this player’s goal was to crank up the heat on what he and many others see as police racism: the profiling, the brutality, the shootings. That strikes me as a noble objective. Now, wait a minute! Before you slam your electronic device against the wall and delete me from your address book, hear me out. Most cops are decent, hard working public servants who have no racial animosity and are highly skilled in defusing tense situations with minimal force. People who say that all police officers are racist are as wrong as those who say none are. That we have a significant community policing problem in desperate need of being addressed is beyond dispute. Most political figures throughout the spectrum – Donald Trump included – acknowledge that.
Yet, this country is in the throes of serious attention deficit disorder when it comes to acting on this matter. The push for reform was on after Michael Brown was killed by a Ferguson police officer two years ago. The momentum quickly died. Then Tamir Rice was killed by Cleveland police. Talk of change started again and then faded. And the pattern continued through the deaths of Tony Robinson in Madison, Eric Harris in Tulsa, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, and on and on and on. These countless deaths should have had a cumulative effect on our national psyche, pushing us into action, just as the AIDS death toll eventually did in the early 1990s. Instead, it has numbed us into the same kind of ritualized pattern response of shock-and-move-on that we have applied to mass shootings and gun control.
Then into the game comes Quarterback Kaepernick with his Star Spangled Banner sit-in. And the world goes crazy. Everyone is taking shots at him, calling him a traitor and much worse. Google “Kaepernick News” and you will get 23 million entries from media outlets throughout the world. Each piece focuses on the issue of racial police bias. Days later, the quarterback decided to drop to one knee during the anthem out of respect for veterans. A fellow teammate, a veteran, joined the protest, creating a whole new round of media coverage. Yesterday, the Santa Clara, CA police union threatened a to stop patrolling the stadium, giving rise to even more exposure for Kaepernick’s cause. Same thing happened today when the city’s police chief reminded his force of the quarterback’s free speech rights.
The bottom line is that there has been more sustained public discussion of race and police policies these last couple of weeks than there has been since Ferguson. And it didn’t take another death to do it. To be sure, Colin Kaepernick is not winning any popularity contests with his antics; neither did the civil rights activists who took to the streets in the 1960s. The fact of the matter is that there has never been a racial wrong righted in this country without sufficient turbulence to nudge the issue to resolution. Right now, love him or hate him, this quarterback is moving the ball down the field.
Right on Bruce!