On Colin Kaepernick and public statements about personal politics in sports – Washington Post

One would think that the nation’s sports media and fans might be intrigued, even grateful, for San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick on Monday.

Kaepernick, a less-than-perfect football player in the California region that gave America both the Black Lives Matter movement and the mess that is O.J. Simpson, decided (as most readers by now know) to sit during the national anthem at a Friday 49ers game. Kaepernick remained seated, he said, in an act of public protest against police misconduct and its largely unpunished toll on people of color in the United States. Kaepernick has been known as an avid avoider of the media and by extension, the public. He’s been criticized for not talking enough, or saying enough, to and for 49ers fans.

Not this time. He shared thoughts with the fans and gave the nation’s sports columnists plenty to write about.

After the game, instead of regaling the sports press with the usual stuff of postgame interviews — ‘We left it all on the field,’ ‘I gave 120 percent,’ and the always-useful ‘This is a team sport’ — Kaepernick went on to tell reporters:

I’ll continue to stand with the people who are being oppressed. To me, this is something that has to change, and when there’s significant change — and I feel like that flag represents what it’s supposed to represent, and this country is representing people the way it’s supposed to — I’ll stand.

And with that, the unmitigated praise and castigation flew. The latter have seemed most plentiful and therefore telling. They speak to the way that more than a few Americans think and respond to public statements about politics in sports.

One variety celebrates silence in a country where freedom of speech and the capacity of private citizens to foment social change are allegedly defining values. It often moves dangerously close to asking why the gratitude that Kaepernick ought to feel for his bank balance does not buy sports fans some reprieve from this tiresome prattle about black lives. Or, better yet, shouldn’t all the praise from a cross-racial array of fans who speak about players and teams in familial, even proprietary, terms be enough? Why must sports fans be subjected to the less-than-glossy features of black life, including the lives of many athletes and their families and friends, off the field?

It all kind of collectively said how dare Kaepernick “speak.” Athletes should be fast, firm and affirming about home team and country. Those who can’t should say little to nothing about the broader social conditions in which sports are watched and played.

Kaepernick’s was a move connected to a past and present that are worth noting briefly here. Before Kapernick’s stance on the national anthem this year came a July speech delivered jointly by Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul, Dwyane Wade and LeBron James at the ESPY Awards about the need to reduce gun violence and reduce police violence against certain Americans. That time, four leading lights in basketball all but said, “You can’t expect us to show up and be your silent and grateful brown entertainment with all that is happening in this country around us. We will speak up, and we are calling on other athletes whom the masses admire and follow closely to do the same.” And then, there were the WNBA players who donned black warm-up shirts — a change in their uniforms — which bore a modern form of public protest — hashtags connected the growing slate of people of color killed by police and the slaughter of police officers in Dallas. The women’s basketball league fined the players then reversed that decision amid a walkout by fellow players and criticism that included this salient bit tweeted by one of the players involved.

In 2015, student athletes at the University of Missouri managed to force administrative change and efforts to redress campus problems with race that years of complaints and waves of student activity had not. In 2014, sports-obsessed Americans ranged from deeply angry to appreciative of an effort that prompted a series of NBA players to don plain black T-shirts or shirts bearing the words, “I can’t breathe” as a reminder that the mostly black bodies that run up and down NBA courts are connected to human beings with brains filled with worry and despair.

These athletes have every reason to be acutely aware and concerned about the fact that when a New York City police officer used a forbidden choke hold in an effort to detain Eric Garner, a black man, for selling loose cigarettes, this moment was just one of many like it around the country. And in 2013, members of the Miami Heat wore hoodies, the piece of clothing that became symbolic of the youth and the warped perception of threat posed by an unarmed 17-year-old named Trayvon Martin, who was shot and killed in Sanford, Fla. by a man who would not only go free, but also later brag about the shooting in public. With the hoodies, the athletes said that they, too, would not be silent. There are matters bigger and, yes, even more important than sports.

Then there is the grander list, the list of athletes who refused to be silent about the indignities faced by nonwhite Americans and paid for it dearly. In 1968, John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised their gloved fists and bowed their heads while on the Mexico City Olympics medal stand as the national anthem played. The two were booed as they walked away from the ceremony, mostly lambasted in the press immediately thereafter, and faced a litany of long-running personal and economic consequences. And in 1966, Muhammad Ali faced jail time and lost the heavyweight boxing title and financial rewards that went with it after he refused to fight in the Vietnam War. Ali’s reasoning: He would not seek to kill people of color or otherwise represent a government that provided Ali and people like him uncertain access to the benefits of citizenship at home.

There have been others, for sure. It’s not yet clear what will become of Kaepernick. But let’s not miss the thing that all of the above have in common.

They are moments the nation remembers, or will likely remember, because they remain rare. And that shines a bright light on what happens at almost every game and entertainment event, when those onstage embrace their task and the advice to remain silent about everything else for the endorsement deals, public support and pay.

This, too, is a type of politics. That it is so clearly preferred by so many Americans is more than interesting.