The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
NFL unity trumps hateful speech
It’s a pretty good guess President Trump didn’t count on the NFL’s response to his demand to fire or suspend players who kneel during the national anthem.
And quite frankly, after seeing what happened to Colin Kaepernick, I hadn’t either but my spirit soared Sunday as I watched owners and coaches locking arms with players in defiance of the president’s verbal lashing.
I wish they’d stood or kneeled as it were with Kaepernick sooner but better late than never.
Kaepernick, you may or may not recall, kneeled last season to draw attention to police violence against African-Americans and has since been blackballed, no longer allowed a place on any team’s roster despite being one of the best quarterbacks in the league. Now that Trump has gotten everyone’s attention, I wish for Kaepernick to get his job back. Today. And I wish from here on out the president will begin to exercise some degree of decorum.
That’s not likely to happen, though. Trump just can’t seem to control himself, least of all his tongue.
He seems to get his jollies insulting private citizens but comments at a political rally Friday in A labama trumps just about everything I’ve heard him utter to date: “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, t osay, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!’ ” Trump said. “You know, some owner is going to do that. He’s going to say, ‘That guy that disrespects our flag, he’s fired.’ And that owner, they don’t know it (but) they’ll be the most popular person in this country.”
Suggesting players be fired for exercising their constitutional right was bad enough but the President went so far as to call them “sons of (dogs).”
Somebody better tell 45 you don’t talk about black folks’ mamas. Those are fighting words.
What happened next was unprecedented and harked back to a time when African-American athletes like Kaepernick weren’t afraid to stand against racial injustice. Muhammed Ali.
And Jackie Robinson, who also refused to stand for the National Anthem.
The Syracuse 8, a group of African-American college football players who made history in 1970 for their boycott of the Syracuse University football team to demand equal treatment of black and white athletes.
The protest led to an overhaul of best practices associated with college sports programs across the country.
And more recently New York Knicks star Carmelo Anthony, who two years ago led a Black Lives Matter protest in Baltimore after the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, who died after sustaining severe spinal injuries during an arrest and subsequent police transport. Anthony was also one of four NBA players who delivered a call to action to all athletes, urging them to join the fight against police brutality and gun violence during the 2016 ESPYs.
But it took Trump’s incendiary comments to finally move fellow athletes to action. This weekend they stepped up in a way not seen since the 1960s.
The Associated Press estimated 204 players elected to either kneel or sit during the anthem.
Players from the Atlanta Falcons, New Orleans Saints, Oakland Raiders, Buffalo Bills, Denver Broncos, New York Giants, Detroit Lions, and New England Patriots were among those who chose not to stand for the anthem. And there were nearly a dozen other teams — the Chicago Bears, Miami Dolphins, Indianapolis Colts, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Minnesota Vikings, Philadelphia Eagles, New York Jets, Los Angeles Chargers, Green Bay Packers and Washington Redskins — who stood with arms locked while some of their teammates chose to kneel.
Seeing players, coaches and even some owners join in defiance of the president was tantamount to a blowout. Not everyone sees it that way.
The President and his supporters consider the protests disrespectful of our country and our military.
Jeanne Flavin, a professor of sociology at Fordham University, said few things are more patriotic than acting to call larger attention to this, and to defend our
First Amendment right — as Colin Kaepernick and so many others are doing in their peaceful protests.
“I’m concerned that Trump’s remarks (and the heated discussions about patriotism and free speech that have predictably sprung up around them) threaten to overshadow the reason that Colin Kaepernick and others are exercising their First Amendment right to freedom of expression in the first place: namely, to take a stand against the racism and brutality that corrupt our system of justice,” Flavin said in an email.
She said the abuses of power that we see on the part of a disturbing number of law enforcement officers, prosecutors, judges, and other state agents — and the denial and lack of accountability that too often accompany it — are not incidental to our understanding of how justice works in the United States.
“They are defining characteristics of it, and this is not new,” Flavin said. “Discriminatory laws and systems of surveillance and
punishment are not an aberration. These systems were designed this way. Oppressive, brutalizing, dehumanizing practices have been written into our systems of law and justice from the beginning.”
By Saturday Trump was doubling down on Twitter: “If a player wants the privilege of making millions of dollars in the NFL, or other leagues, he or she should not be allowed to disrespect our Great American Flag (or Country) and should stand for the National Anthem,” Trump wrote. “If not, YOU’RE FIRED. Find something else to do!”
It’s the president who needs to find something else to do. I suggest he start by shutting down his twitter account and LEAD the call for unity he made last month in a speech to the American Legion.
As bad all this seemed to me, in this instance at least, I’m almost grateful for 45. What he meant for evil, God clearly turned to good.