A Conscience in Sports

A Conscience in Sports

Benjamin Alva Polley

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Many sports fans are critical of Colin Kaepernick because he won’t stand during the national anthem, but kneels in protest to the police brutality happening in our country. He has not been offered a contract yet this year with any of the professional NFL teams because of his thoughts, feelings, and opinions being a liability for them. Previous to his first kneeling during the preseason on [Aug 14 and 20, 2016], he was considered a rising star and one that has won MVP awards and other awards because of his exceptional ability and skills as one of the league’s top quarterbacks. However, since then I have heard his critics say, “Love it or Leave it,” “Forty-niners should have signed him on and had him shut up,” “People like that need their ass kicked,” and “The U.S. has given the blacks so much.” They argue that athletes like Kaepernick are not patriotic. However, Kaepernick is well known for speaking up on behalf of patriotism with, “there’s a lot of racism in this country disguised as patriotism ." ...

The current critics seem to be superficially open to multiculturalism and diversity in sports as long as the athletes get in line, stay in line, perform, and shut up. Kaepernick isn’t quite fitting that form, nor are the others that are following with Kaepernick in protest. There seems to be no room in the minds of the critics for the athletes to have thoughts, emotions, or opinions. The critics want entertainment plain and simple, with no room for the complexity that occurs anytime you put humans together with differing backgrounds and thoughts. They don’t want their athletes to be human, it seems. They seem to want a physically elite collective of NFL players without voices, without anything beyond the task at hand, the game. The desire for an elite collective of humans who can physically perform well above the normal human average is uncomfortably reminiscent of another era in our country.

However, in the current era, even the most racist critics are game for paying the athletes whatever they want with contracts for multiple years at millions of dollars per year with one catch: They may not feel, ask uncomfortable questions, nor take a stance against “the real patriots.”

Taking a kneeling stance to honor the young blacks fallen since 2015, 2016, and now 2017 due to police brutality and lack of freedom for each of the estimated 2,000 deaths does nothing vile to the flag, does nothing disrespectful to the anthem, does not even offer up an angry voice to interrupt the words “O long may it wave / O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

To many, when Kaepernick kneels beneath those words that promise and offer a country of freedom to each of its patriotic citizens, it as though the words were written for those young men who have fallen to violence in the streets of St. Louis or Baltimore or many other cities where police continue to brutalize young blacks. When Kaepernick kneels, it is as though the young blacks with silenced voices, the elite multicultural athletes with muted voices, join all the other eras of muted voices that this country and this anthem has stood upon without regard for far too long, and sing the anthem like it is theirs too.