Politics cloud meaning of NFL player protests
Prepare for another Sunday of political football — at least during the pregame ceremonies. On one side will be players taking a knee and teams linking arms or skipping the national anthem altogether, while on the other will be politicians — one in particular — calling the protests unpatriotic and disrespectful of the flag.
But some observers hope that Sunday marks a return to the original intent of the protests, started by Colin Kaepernick when he was a 49er: calling attention to racial injustice and police use of excessive force.
That hasn’t been the focus of the national conversation during a week when President Trump attempted to reframe the protests as attacks on
patriotism, saying players who refuse to stand for “The Star-Spangled Banner” were “sons of bitches” who should be fired.
“The way that this conversation has pivoted to a conversation about patriotism has symbolized how the dominant group can always mute out conversations about race in American society,” said James Taylor, a professor of political science at the University of San Francisco and author of “Black Nationalism in the United States: From Malcolm X to Barack Obama.” “When someone else sets the tone of the debate, the rest of us can be arguing so intently that we don’t even realize that the topic has changed.”
Perhaps only one man can fix that, Taylor said: “To reclaim this conversation, Colin Kaepernick has to come out and talk and lead the discourse. Part of the reason that his message has been derailed is that everybody else has jumped in — like Donald Trump — and nobody has heard his voice.”
On Saturday night, Trump renewed his demand that players rise for the anthem.
“Very important that NFL players STAND tomorrow, and always, for the playing of our National Anthem,” the president tweeted. “Respect our Flag and our Country!”
While recent polls show most Americans disagree with Trump about firing players, the president has succeeded not only in muddying the protesters’ message but also in distracting the country from his failure to move health care legislation forward, the Russia investigation, the nuclear stare-down with North Korea, his favored Senate candidate losing the Alabama primary, and the private plane scandal that ended with Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price resigning Friday.
When asked what story they heard most in the past few days, 61 percent of the respondents in a YouGov/Huffington Post poll said “NFL players kneeling during the national anthem.” Only 14 percent mentioned the hurricane destruction in Puerto Rico and another 14 percent cited the failed Republican health care bill.
“Donald Trump understands there is a reticence in this country to talk about issue of race — especially when it is politicized. Black Lives Matter pissed white America off,” Taylor said.
The president could tap into this anger about protests and demonstrations to “mobilize support for Trump and his supporters in 2018 and 2020,” Taylor said.
But navigating these political waters is complicated, particularly when it comes to the NFL. Pro football fans are “much more bipartisan than those of other major sports leagues,” according to a data analysis by the political and sports website FiveThirtyEight, and the league “risks angering one side or the other if it mishandles the situation.”
That happened in Pittsburgh, a city whose Steeler fans were nearly equally Democrat and Republican, according to the study. The city supported Hillary Clinton, while much of the rest of western Pennsylvania backed Trump.
Caught in the middle were the Steelers, who are as much a part of the region’s fabric as the city’s three rivers. Some fans were angry that the team remained in the locker room during the anthem last Sunday in the hope of taking the focus off the protests and putting it back on football.
“The intentions of Steelers players were to stay out of the business of making political statements by not taking the field,” owner Art Rooney II wrote in a open letter to fans, some of whom committed the civic sacrilege of burning Steelers jerseys.
“Unfortunately, that was interpreted as a boycott of the anthem, which was never our players’ intention.”
This week the team will be on the field, and the players will stand or kneel as they wish.
Wes Watkins, an Oakland Raiders season ticket holder, said the media placed too much emphasis on the players who protested last Sunday. He’s not opposed to players protesting or to the issues they’re emphasizing, but he thinks kneeling during the anthem is a sign of disrespect. A CBS/YouGov poll found that 52 percent of the respondents disapproved of players protesting by taking a knee, while 38 percent approved.
“They’re doing it during the national anthem,” said Watkins, who lives in San Francisco. “The national anthem is the time to honor our patriots and our first responders. There are other places to protest.”
But all of this talk about the choreography and timing of the protest has clouded the core issue.
Activists say the challenge is that there has been little conversation about African Americans being more than twice as likely to be arrested as whites or being killed by police at a much higher rate than whites, and the fact that nearly half of African American men are arrested at least once before they are 23 years old.
“We have to admit the truth,” said Malkia Cyril, executive director of the Center for Media Justice, a racial justice organization in Oakland. “We can’t continue to tell the lie, and so we have to say that black life is not valued in this country, that black people are killed at the hands of white officers. If we don’t deal with those facts — and just feelings (about the issue) — we cannot move along.
“This is not about patriotism,” Cyril said. “My perspective is that I love this country so much that I cannot bear to see it destroyed, to see it fractured by racism as it has been for 500 years. This is all about who is controlling the language. And we can’t let the white supremacists in the White House control the language.
“This is about when are we going to tell the truth.”