Nike message deserves support not PC double-speak
Caucasians offering support for Colin Kaepernick, caught up in another U.S. racial crap storm since Nike announced his role as the center of an ad campaign that touts, “Believe in something; even if it means sacrificing everything,” need a better response.
Supporting Colin Kaepernick’s right of free speech sounds incredibly different than understanding issues that created this former NFL quarterback turned social activist. Kaepernick has morphed into another Caucasian-created black monster, a Willie Horton, O.J. Simpson, or President Barack Hussein Obama, with an emphasis on Hussein, black men who stand as gateways and metaphors that attract expressions of hate.
Many Caucasians defending Kaepernick offer perspectives regarding his right to free speech, never venturing into dark, salient issues of his protest regarding social injustice.
White people rarely say they support Kaepernick’s idea that many people, mostly minorities, suffer daily indignities including systemic oppression.
So, supporting Mr. Kaepernick’s rights for speaking and protest, keeps them from wading into the cold-blooded realm of prejudice, racism and a nation’s attempt for a return to Jim Crow rules.
Most people oblige white supremacists their right to speak freely, peacefully protest and a right to assemble. So, this perceived grand allowance for Kaepernick’s rights places him on level ground with David Duke and other wizards of white supremacy.
This white backlash to Nike and Kaepernick continues an overlook of atrocities committed by a nation that murdered, enslaved and employed a by any means necessary doctrine to take land, destroy lives and deny liberties for any nonwhite person.
Our latest indignity involved the separation of children from their undocumented parents, another U.S. transgression that adds to the soul-numbing list that includes past internments of Japanese-American and Italian-American citizens, plus, a continued anti-Semitic message woven into U.S. fabric soiled by injustice.
One of the most difficult challenges for any Caucasian involves standing up for right, knowing that to shoulder African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, etc. creates a risk of disassociation. Nothing hurts white folk more than being voted off the Caucasian island of power, exiled as a N-word lover.
Albert Einstein stands as personal hero, of course as a man of science, more importantly as a Jew who stood for justice, a civil rights activist with courage. Einstein befriended black songstress Marian Anderson and shared a mutual admiration relationship with Paul Robeson, a black actor, singer and civil rights activist.
An urban legend suggests Einstein spent significant time in Trenton, escaping racist Princeton for interactions with black people in this capital city.
In 1946, Einstein visited Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where the Nobel Prize-winning physicist gave a lecture on relativity to students at the all-black institution, also the alma mater of Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall.
Addressing students at the first school in America to grant college degrees to blacks, Einstein referenced racism as a “disease of white people”.
An Einstein essay explained, “There is, however, a somber point in the social outlook of Americans. Their sense of equality and human dignity is mainly limited to men of white skins. Even among these there are prejudices of which I as a Jew am clearly conscious; but they are unimportant in comparison with the attitude of the “Whites” toward their fellow-citizens of darker complexion, particularly toward Negroes. The more I feel an American, the more this situation pains me. I can escape the feeling of complicity in it only by speaking out.”
People with courage and conviction must step beyond political correctness. It’s not enough to offer Mr. Kaepernick his alleged inalienable right of free speech.
Racism, prejudice, and bigotry will never leave us until Caucasians comprehend the Kaepernick message and voice their support for truth and enlightenment.