Price of our convictions
I’ve no problem with Black Lives Matter, but I do have reservations about the organization’s name, which started as a hashtag in the wake of the Trayvon Martin killing in 2012. It invites the kind of disingenuous semantic jujitsu often practiced in online comment sections and community college faculty lounges. They should have called it “Black Lives Matter Too.” While any fair-minded person can understand arguing for the validity of one thing is not the same as arguing against the validity of anything else, some of us aren’t fair-minded.
And if some individuals in sympathy with BLM have adopted dubious tactics or behaved badly, anyone who professes to be a Christian should understand it’s unfair to condemn a group for the actions of a few. BLM is so decentralized it exists more as a state of mind than an organization. If you find yourself troubled by the fact that, for whatever reason, black people are far more likely to die at the hands of police (or police surrogates) in America you too might be in solidarity with BLM.
It’s not the other side of the white supremacy coin. To pretend that it is is to make a false equivalency. There’s a problem with the way police relate to poor people and minority populations in this country. The idea that somehow white people can’t get a fair shake is risible.
That said, I kind of admire Colin Kaepernick’s taking a stand on the issue. Or rather his taking a knee during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” before National Football League games last season. Kaepernick, the erstwhile quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, used his position to demonstrate displeasure with the way policing is conducted in this country, and he did so in a dignified and peaceful manner. It probably cost him his job, and may have cost him the chance to ever play in the NFL again.
(But I doubt that. Some team owner—having just lost the services of a Blake Bortles or a Mike Glennon—will decide that Kaepernick’s utility outweighs the public relations problems that would accompany his signing and he will go back to work. That’s just my guess.)
I like that Kaepernick was willing to do what so many of us aren’t—he risked something for his principles. I don’t know that I’d do that; no one tells me what to write or not write but if I got a directive that explicitly told me to lay off a particular issue or else, I don’t know that I’d defy it. I’d probably rationalize that I have a pretty good platform and that it would make more sense to write around the area of sensitivity than to run headlong into a buzzsaw. Because the boss can fire me.
Just like Kaepernick’s boss effectively fired him.
There are reasons to detest the NFL. It is a borderline evil cabal, a business built on the idea that particularly fast and strong young men will gleefully wreck their bodies in public spectacle for a relative pittance. Meanwhile the owners, who can have 50- or 60-year careers as opposed to the two or three seasons most players have before their bodies fail, extort their fan bases, who not only pay exorbitant prices for tickets and concessions but have to kick in to pay for stadium boondoogles too. And then they proceed to wrap themselves in the flag, holding football out as some kind of American sacrament. (While charging the Department of Defense—taxpayers—for “military tributes.” After the practice was brought to light last year, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell promised the league would return more than $700,000 paid in exchange for half-time “Hometown Hero” ceremonies and the like.)
But that’s fine. You can do like me and look at the games on TV from time to time. You don’t have to buy $200 jerseys and $7 bottles of water. You could watch golf instead.
What I know about Kaepernick is fairly limited; there was a time not long ago when some people considered him a new quarterbacking archetype, but his performance fell off. The statistics indicate he had a pretty good season on a very bad team. Which means reasonable people can disagree about whether he’s still a good player or not. And they do—there’s no consensus on Kaepernick. He’s probably better than a lot of quarterbacks in the NFL, but he’s not so good that he seems likely to significantly improve a team’s chances of winning. (If he were, he’d been given a contract; there are plenty of game-changing criminals on NFL rosters.)
But Kaepernick isn’t a criminal; in the minds of the NFL owners he’s worse. He’s a politically outspoken player who’s liable to have opinions. There’s a playbook for dealing with wife punchers and girlfriend terrorizers—cycles of abasement, repentance and reconciliation. Kaepernick has nothing to apologize for, and if the league planned to make him an example, the strategy has backfired. Other players are following his example; before their Aug. 21 pre-season game with the New York Giants, 10 members of the Cleveland Browns knelt during the national anthem.
Whether or not team owners have colluded to keep Kaepernick out of the sport doesn’t matter; the NFL isn’t a public agency. The teams have a right to hire him or not, just as he has a right to act in accordance with his beliefs.
Even if we find Kaepernick’s politics naive (and some of his other actions seem juvenile at best) it’s refreshing to see a professional athlete who is willing to take a risk to make a statement. But when the risk is real, it’s possible to lose.
Curt Flood found that out when he challenged baseball’s reserve clause, which effectively put a single team in charge of a player’s destiny, and lost. He sat out the 1970 season, and when he returned to the game in 1971 he played only 13 games before retiring. Soon he exiled himself to Spain, where he opened a bar in Majorca and hid out from his creditors. Eventually he was admitted into a Barcelona psychiatric hospital.
A few years later, Flood pulled himself back together, and by the ’90s he was hailed as a pioneer who paved the way for free agency. I wonder if we’ll remember Kaepernick in 20 years.