Reid: Pence exit sends disheartening message
INDIANAPOLIS >> Eric Reid and 22 other members of the 49ers took a knee while the national anthem played Sunday.
So the vice president of the United States left the game.
For Reid, it was one of the best examples to date of one of the issues he’s trying to highlight.
To Reid, Vice President Mike Pence leaving Sunday’s game upon seeing the 49ers taking a knee during the anthem was a “PR stunt” and a “case in point for systematic oppression.”
And before you start firing off angry tweets and emails, my recommendation is this: hear Reid out.
That’s something the vice president didn’t do.
And 14 months into Reid’s protest, it seems like something few people have tried to do.
“I think we are reaching people, and there’s another handful of people who chose not to hear us. Those people, you can’t change their mind — they’ll never listen to you, you’ll never win with them,” Reid told me after the 49ers’ 26-23 overtime loss, in which he didn’t play because of injury.
Reid is tired — unfazed, but tired — of having to explain how he, his teammates and his peers around the NFL taking a knee during the anthem isn’t a protest of the flag, or the national anthem or the military.
Reid’s said his mother was in the armed services. He said his uncles served in the armed services. He has said it time and time again: he’s not anti-military, he’s not anti-flag and he’s not anti-America.
But he is against racial injustice in America and police brutality toward minorities. And that’s why for the last 14 months — save for the first two weeks this preseason — he’s taken a knee during the national anthem before 49ers games. He was the first to do it with Colin Kaepernick last year, and he’s not going to stop now.
But it doesn’t seem like Pence is getting the message. The vice president made it clear with his protest: he is against Reid’s kind of peaceful demonstration. And that’s where things become disheartening for Reid:
“For me, that’s case in point for systematic oppression. He’s a powerful man — has a huge following, has a huge platform, and this is what he chooses to do: Fly in on taxpayer money to confuse the message that we’ve been working so hard to control the narrative on?
“It’s really disheartening when everything that you were raised on, everything I was raised on, was to be the best person I could be — to help people that need help — and the vice president of the United States is trying to confuse the message that we’re trying to put out there.”
There’s no indication that Pence flew into Indianapolis to do anything other than watch Sunday’s game, and his statement — which was hardly off-the-cuff and was sent out almost immediately upon his leaving of the game — raised the question: Did Pence fly from Las Vegas to Indianapolis for the sole purpose of walking out of a football game?
Reid thinks so: “Until somebody tells me that he goes to NFL games on a regular basis, I think this is a PR stunt because he knows our team has had the most players protest, so he stopped in to watch us do it and left with an effort to thwart what we’ve been trying to accomplish.”
If Pence’s goal Sunday was to stop NFL players from kneeling during the anthem, he failed.
If Pence’s goal was to better understand the protests and find a mutually acceptable solution to end the controversy around them, he failed there, too. Pence could have talked to Reid or any protesting Niner about the protest when they both were in town — they would have welcomed the opportunity. He didn’t even try. Perhaps Pence didn’t want to understand Reid’s cause.
Or perhaps he understands exactly what Reid is protesting and wanted to come out against it.
We don’t know which it is — Pence wasn’t at Lucas Oil Stadium long enough for us to find out.