Colin Kaepernick does not stand during the US National Anthem preceding the third preseason game on August 26. Instead, he quietly sat in front of the Gatorade coolers by himself, seemingly without anyone noticing | Jennifer Lee Chan
By TONY SEED (Originally posted on Facebook on September 4, 2016)
An American athlete, Colin Kaepernick, has taken a just stand.
“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” Mr Kaepernick, a quarterback with the San Francisco 49ers, told NFL Media in an interview after Friday’s game during which he again rightly refused to stand at attention during the playing of the U.S. anthem accompanied by a military flypast. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.
“This is not something that I am going to run by anybody,” he said. “I am not looking for approval. I have to stand up for people that are oppressed. … If they take football away, my endorsements from me, I know that I stood up for what is right.”
Mr Kaepernicke’s stand should come as no surprise. He was been actively presenting his views “on social media about the social injustices that have been sweeping the headlines all over the country.”
Instead of simply supporting that just stand and the right to conscience and confronting the issues he has raised, every secondary issue is being raised in the most defensive and apologetic way by the “alternative” media, alongside the vitriolic reaction incited by the monopoly media. It wishes to debate whether his stand can be compared to that of Muhammad Ali and of the Black Power Salute at the 1968 Mexico Olympics* or not; the US anthem, a symbol of the U.S. state, as a pean to the slave system; Mr Kaepernick’s racial background; his salary; the form of his protest; the response of his team-mates, the owners, the fans, and so on and so forth. The aim of diversion is to sow doubt and create paralysis amongst the people instead of support for a just stand. [1]
That U.S. president Barrack Obama and the San Francisco NFL franchise are nominally agreeing with his “right to speak” expresses the deep-going crisis in American politics, which presents itself as the paragon of “democracy” that the world must emulate under the threat of the force of arms.
First, the blame for racism is put on individuals so as to hide the role of the state in organizing such racist attacks, and then people are to divide pro and con freedom of speech, and other diversions raised to justify increased use of police powers in the name of defending the U.S. Constitution.
But what is Obama agreeing on? He urged Colin Kaepernick to “think of the pain” he may cause by kneeling during the national anthem to protest killings by police. Obama cleverly asserted on September 4 from the G-20 meeting in China that it is the U.S. armed forces that “defend” what “Makes America Great”. He went out of his way to whip up U.S. chauvinism, so as to split and disinform the anti-war movement and the fight for the rights of all. He asserted that “it is a tough thing for men and women of the armed forces to get past,” thereby inciting them against the athlete and his stand. Obama then covered his tracks by making a pretence of Mr Kaepernick’s “constitutional right to make a statement” – as if democratic rights are not one, inalienable, interdependent and indivisible. Neither Obama nor anyone else mentions, let alone defends, freedom of conscience.
Obama deliberately confounds the role of speech in the development of human society. He presents freedom of speech as a civil right. This is to divert attention from the fact that freedom of speech and freedom of conscience are human rights, independent of whether or not civil rights are withdrawn. The criminalization of speech in the name of high ideals is far more than an indication that the rights recognized by the U.S. Constitution that created the civil society are finished. It is a re-enactment of the law of slavery, whereby human beings are to be defamed and outlawed, declared outside the law.
nba.com took Obama’s cue. It carried a veiled threat against the player and a warning to all other athletes: “However, refusal to support the American flag as a means to take a stand has brought incredible backlash before and likely will in this instance.”
The Friday night game where he and a team-mate took a knee was played at Levi Stadium in San Diego, itself a massive U.S. naval base. It was precisely on the occasion of yet one more NFL-Pentagon “Military Appreciation Night,” which have been normalized and presented as routine.
No one has raised as “controversial” just how far in bed the NFL, the most powerful sports cartel in the world and owned by some of the richest monopolies and billionaires, is in bed with the Pentagon – and enriched by it – and the drive for war and domination over other peoples and nations.
Along with the NHL, NBA and MLB, the NFL has received hundreds of millions of dollars over the last few years from the Pentagon in a pay-the-rich scheme to carry out so-called “patriotic displays” at football games as part of the intensive militarization of sport.
Before 2009, NFL teams did not stand on the sidelines during the playing of the U.S. national anthem.
This line of Make America Great is being promoted in a situation where Native Americans, who have long contended with U.S. genocide, are demanding their rights; where African Americans are being gunned down in the streets by police and people are so angered they are rightly refusing to stand for the national anthem, as members of sports teams from the NFL to Little League are doing. Make America Great aims to counter this growing consciousness that so long as the monopoly rulers remain in power, genocide, state racism and government impunity will characterize the U.S. behind the fig leaf of “constitutional right to make a statement.” The right of the peoples of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine and Yemen do not matter because of this American exceptionalism, that people-to-people relations of mutual respect and benefit do not matter and must be nurtured, as anti-war activists have been doing. This spirit of One Humanity, One Struggle for Our Rights, with people of the U.S. an integral part, is to be smashed – replaced with the notion that only the U.S. and its striving for empire matters and all must submit or face war and repression.
Mr Kaepernick’s principled stand has attracted the attention of the world sports media, coming as it does in the wake of the Rio Olympics and the uncouth and hooligan behaviour of some American athletes that degraded the festival of world youth.
Sport is not some hermetically sealed world. Athletes are members of the society. They have rights, which also come with responsibilities to the society. In fact, these private US sports empires face the spectre of more athletes taking just stands. [2] On Friday, Mr Kaepernick was joined by two more players, Eric Reid, a team-mate and another player from Seattle, Alex Lane, in his stand.
Megan Rapinoe knelt during the national anthem on September 4 in Chicago. She said it was intentional, “a nod to Kaepernick.” | John. D Halloran
On Sunday, soccer international Megan Rapinoe knelt during the national anthem before Seattle Reign’s NWSL game against the Chicago Red Stars. Ms Rapinoe said her gesture was a nod towards Mr Kaepernick. “It was very intentional,” Ms Rapinoe told American Soccer Now after the game. “It was a little nod to Kaepernick and everything that he’s standing for right now. I think it’s actually pretty disgusting the way he was treated and the way that a lot of the media has covered it and made it about something that it absolutely isn’t. We need to have a more thoughtful, two-sided conversation about racial issues in this country.”
All athletes should take a stand in defence of the rights of all.
Endnotes
[1] The stand of Muhammad Ali was against the U.S. war of aggression in Vietnam. He clearly linked it to his opposition to the oppression and enslavement of Afro-Americans.“I ain’t going no 10,000 miles to help murder and kill other poor people. If I want to die, I’ll die right here, right now, fightin’ you, if I want to die,” Ali said. “You my enemy, not no Chinese, no Vietcong, no Japanese.”
The Black Power Salute was defiantly made from the medal podium of the 1968 Mexico Olympics by two African-American athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, respectively first and third in the men’s 200 metres, with the often overlooked participation of Australian Peter Norman, the silver medal winner, as a statement of support to the fierce resistance of the Afro-American people to racial discrimination and oppression and was also made in the context of the massive and growing anti-war movement against the Vietnam War.
[2] Since the date of writing, other athletes have in indeed started following Mr Kaepernick’s lead. A teammate. A player on another team. Entire high school teams. Elementary school children. Across the U.S., people are taking sides.
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