San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has touched many nerves across the United States with his peaceful protest against anti-African-American police brutality by not standing during the National Anthem at his NFL games. And it’s noteworthy hearing and reading all the patriotic invective against his stance, shouted mostly by a segment of white America that frets about whether a second-string quarterback is standing during a patriotic song having nothing to do with ...the athletic event following, while at the same time typically ignoring all the lost lives and ruined families perpetrated by a tiny minority of police officers nationwide.
Last week's Oklahoma atrocity, the shooting of unarmed black man Terence Crutcher as he stood next to his stalled car in the roadway, is just the latest in an increasingly-long line of racist violence that has African-American parents across the country desperately and fearfully schooling their children in what to say and do to authority figures whenever they leave their house. This is now a self-defense necessity, far more important than the DWB (Driving While Black) measures that have been part-and-parcel with the black experience for decades. These are measures that Kaepernick's hand-wringing critics won't ever have to worry about learning, either for themselves or their loved ones.
And the ludicrous “manslaughter” charge that was hung on Tulsa Officer Betty Shelby on what was clearly a cold-blooded murder of a man with his back to her and his hands raised will do nothing to assuage the grief and anger of our under-siege African-American population, as well as decent people of ALL races.
Kaepernick has been joined in the past couple weeks by various American athletes from other professional sports leagues, all who have put their money and careers in jeopardy in the current national racial atmosphere that is threatening to degenerate into a pre-Civil Rights-era mindset. This has been a huge factor in the horrid rise of Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s overtly-racist presidential candidate who has been buttressed by an electorate plainly possessing an overwhelming widespread hatred of non-Caucasian humanity. This wasn’t in evidence years ago when Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke’s two ugly presidential campaigns fizzled almost before they even began. But unfortunately with 2016’s American right-wing, those days are long gone and harder to find.
Kaepernick has put his livelihood where his mouth is, and has called into plain view a national disgrace that swung into high gear after 2013’s aberrant Trayvon Martin verdict, an ongoing nightmare that his football-loving detractors would rather disparage with misplaced jingoistic zeal. And it shows no signs of ending.
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