Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
This is why Kaepernick knelt
The deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd remind us why forner 49ers QB protested
When Colin Kaepernick started kneeling in 2016 to create awareness toward systematic racism and police brutality, the thenNFL quarterback became a symbol of what America has become.
We’re a nation that’s divided.
Four years after Kaepernick took a knee during the playing of the national anthem, he’s been blackballed from the NFL for three years.
And nothing seems to have changed in society, in light of Ahmaud Arbery’s death at the hands of vigilantes who hunted him down and shot the 25-year-old black male as he jogged in their Brunswick, Georgia neighborhood, and the recent killing of George Floyd, a Minnesota man whose pleas were ignored as a police officer kept his knee on Floyd’s neck.
“Please, I can’t breathe,” Floyd was caught on a bystander’s video as saying while handcuffed and pinned down by officers on the scene.
One of those officers had his knee on Floyd’s neck for several minutes.
“Everything hurts,” Floyd said. “They’re going to kill me.”
And that’s exactly what these four officers on the scene, who were supposed to protect and serve society,
did to this 46-year-old African-American male.
All four were fired on Tuesday, but charges haven’t been filed, and arrests haven’t been made.
History tells us getting justice for Floyd will be just as much of an uphill battle as it is to get justice for Arbrey, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown,
Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland and Eric Garner, all unarmed people of color whose deaths have inspired Kaepernick’s protest and the Black Lives Matter movement.
And the truth is, without video evidence of exactly what happened, the world would never know the truth, and most of society probably wouldn’t care.
Floyd would be dead, and those former officers would still have a job policing society, pretending to create law and order because of their creative writing skills on an incident report.
Without video evidence, we could continue to believe that Floyd was just another threat to society. Or to put it in simpler terms, he was just another black man like my father, my brother and my son.
Think about how many times during the course of a month, the year, this decade — or better yet your lifetime — incidents like this have happened in your community to people of color and it wasn’t caught on video.
How many times has someone been victimized by police brutality or overall bigotry that didn’t create an outrage?
This isn’t OK.
But more importantly, it has never been OK. Yet it keeps happening. Ask yourself why, and then ask yourself what are you going to do about it?
What are you going to do about yet another black man who was murdered at the hands of the police office employed to protect and serve?
That unnamed officer knelt on Floyd’s neck with conviction for several — not a couple — minutes as Floyd pleaded for his life.
You have to wonder if Arbery pleaded for his life too, as armed men in two vehicles chased him up and down that Georgia neighborhood before finally catching him and shooting him in a February confrontation that was caught on video.
It took three months for the men involved in that fatal encounter to be arrested, and that likely only happened because a video started circulating on social media, bringing his death to a national platform.
Not everyone feels our pain and anguish, and Kaepernick certainly taught us there is a price to speaking up about what is going on in America regarding social injustice and police brutality.
Kaepernick sacrificed his playing career because he wouldn’t back off his movement, he wouldn’t stop kneeling, and the NFL made him an example for those who wanted to follow.
There’s a community of people suffering from what Kaepernick and other NFL players, many of whom where Dolphins players, have been trying to create awareness for.
The problem is many choose to ignore our plea like that officer ignored George Floyd.
Are you listening because these incidents, the deaths Arbery and Floyd, resonate in troubling and familiar ways?
How many more must die before America realizes people of color are treated beneath the protection of the law, and that our lives matter too?
What is happening is a reoccurring problem, and it will continue unless we confront it, properly examine the problem and the issues, and actually take a stand for the exact reason Kaepernick knelt.