A meaningless ‘honor’ of an American icon

ignorant and unworthy.

Which is not fundamentally different from Kaepernick’s frustration with police brutality that kills and wounds AfricanAmericans while the courts do nothing.

Yes, his protest is often called unpatriotic and offensive. The same was said of Parks’ protest. Not incidentally, she broke the law; he didn’t.

And as Kaepernick is called names and threatened by outraged white people, so was she.

Parks once said she refused to stand because she was “tired of taking it.”

The things that made her tired were in plain sight, as obvious as a “Whites Only” sign.

Yet, they were invisible to most white people.

Sixty-two years later, we can all easily see the things that fatigued her and other black people back then.

We marvel that there was ever a time some of us could not. And Parks, 12 years dead, is unthreatening enough to be “honored” by a Donald Trump.

Well, this is the same Trump who has led the metaphorical lynch mob against black athletes for doing essentially what Parks and her generation did.

Moreover, he’s the same Trump who retweets white supremacists and Islamophobes, the one who found moral equivalence between neo-Nazis and those who protested them.

So this “honor” is cynical, hypocritical and deeply insulting to the memory of a great woman.

Trump needs to take Rosa Parks’ name out of his lying mouth. He sullies it by speaking it.

Meantime, that football player Trump loathes risked his livelihood because he got tired of “taking” the brutalization of black people.

He has faced condemnation and threat for demanding that all of us see what some of us refuse to.

Like the seamstress on the bus six decades ago, Colin Kaepernick has ignited a generation because he decided he literally would not stand for it anymore.

He honors Rosa Parks more meaningfully than Donald Trump ever could.