What Colin Kaepernick Started

“Kneeling is both an act of defiance and resistance, but also of reverence, of mourning, but also honoring lives lost,” said Chad Williams, the chairman of the Department of African and Afro-American Studies at Brandeis University. “It is also simple and clear. Its simplicity gave it symbolic power, and as we see now, its power persists.”

So does the controversy surrounding it.

Starting in 2016, despite Kaepernick’s explanation that his kneeling during the national anthem was a call to end racial injustice and police brutality toward people of color, a backlash fomented, spurred largely by President Trump, who tried to recast Kaepernick and the predominantly African-American group of players who followed his lead as unpatriotic. That viewpoint persists.

New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees, when asked on Wednesday about kneeling during the anthem, told an interviewer, “I will never agree with anybody disrespecting the flag of the United States of America or our country.” (Brees did kneel on the sideline with teammates before a game in 2017 as an act of solidarity opposing Trump’s criticism of players, but he rose when the anthem was played.)

He then issued two apologies for his comments after an unusual wave of criticism from players, some of them his own teammates, at a time when athletes across the sports world have responded to the civil unrest by participating in marches and expressing support for combating racial injustice.

Many applauded Brees’s contrition but on Friday, Trump tweeted that Brees should not have shifted his stance, saying in all caps that there should be “NO KNEELING!” during a display of patriotism. Hours later, the league’s commissioner, Roger Goodell, apologized to his players for not listening to the concerns of African-American players earlier. He said he supported athletes in protesting peacefully, though he notably did not name Kaepernick directly.

Not long after that, Brees addressed an Instagram post to Trump that forcefully repudiated his original remark about disrespect, saying: “We can no longer use the flag to turn people away or distract them from the real issues that face our black communities.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/sports/football/george-floyd-kaepernick-kneeling-nfl-protests.html