Sunday Replay: Thoughts on Kneeling, the NFL and Race
What follows appeared a year ago on my now dormant blog, Channel Surfing. I decide to repost it here at The Medium for three reasons: 1…
What follows appeared a year ago on my now dormant blog, Channel Surfing. I decide to repost it here at The Medium for three reasons: 1. Today is the first full Sunday of NFL football this season (I’m not watching); 2. Colin Kaerpernick has been made the face of Nike’s Just Do It anniversary campaign; and 3. A Facebook conversation I engaged in yesterday reminded me how necessary it is that we discuss these issues.
Colin Kaepernick began what was at the time a lonely protest in the summer of 2016. Barack Obama was president. Hillary Clinton was expected to succeed him.
At first, he just quietly sat during the national anthem, didn’t make a fuss, didn’t announce his intention, didn’t call attention to his action. He just opted to sit as a silent and personal protest against the shootings of black men and women by police. As a protest against a legacy of racism that infects all of our institutions, that continues to deny opportunities to the vast majority of African Americans, that can best be summed up in a comment made by the noxious Jeanine Piro on Fox: “America has been incredibly good to you. From the time you displayed talent in sports as a youth America allowed you to shine and become financially prosperous.” Good to you. Allowed you. This is the language of privilege, language structured around the idea that African Americans must be granted permission to prosper, that we — white Americans — have ultimate control over their economic fate.
Sadly, we do. The history of racism in the United States may appear to State with slavery and end with the end of Jim Crow, but the legacy of those institutions still runs deep in the systematic stripping of wealth from African American neighborhoods — redlining and white flight created a de facto segregation that still haunts us. African Americans — along with other poor brown people — are still overwhelmingly packed into urban ghettos that have been stripped of funding by archaic tax systems that ignore need and generate revenue based on property wealth.
This creates a structural impediment — some can rise above poorly funded education systems and the lack of everyday opportunity. Ice Cube in “It Was a Good Day” paints a brilliant picture of a dysfunctional community by recounting the events of a good day — one most of us would also view as a normal, unremarkable day.
History shows that dysfunction follows poverty. Crime, drugs, alcohol, violence — the very “sins” railed at by politicians of all stripes in the United States today — are not modern inventions. Read Charles Dickens. Read William Thackeray. Look up the Five Points neighborhood in New York in the early 1800s.
These “sins” follow desperation and lack of opportunity, though I won’t go so far to describe them as cultural (Michael Harrington was right about many things, but he erred in introducing the phrase “culture of poverty” to the modern sociological and political lexicon). That would imply something endemic, when I don’t think it is, and it allows for the economic scolds — on the right, to be sure, but also among Wall Street Democrats like Bill Clinton — to blame the victims of an economic system that can only function by creating winners and losers. Poverty like racism is systemic. It is the result of choices — and not just those made by the poor themselves. Yes, each of us can fall through the cracks, but the decisions made by the larger political culture on how to structure the economy magnify these individual choices. The lack of wealth in African American communities, which is a result not of individual decisions by black Americans but the intended outcome of hundreds of years of political and business decisions designed to control where and how African Americans can live, work, and go to school — means there is little in the way of a safety net for African Americans or the poor of all races.
In terms of the “sins” — my quotation marks are intentional because we only view these behaviors as sins among those without privilege. Crime is perfectly acceptable when the criminal is a banker or a big company and it is committed in the service of profit and stock value. Occasionally, we will make an example of one or two of these corporate criminals, either with a criminal prosecution or a civil case, but more often we respond by saying these corporations and their executives are “too big to fail” and “too big to jail.”
Take the “opioid crisis,” which had caused a massive mobilization and a response that is different in its focus than earlier “black” or “urban” epidemics like the crack scare of the ‘90s or the heroin crisis of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Opioid abuse is a genuine public health issue — the Centers for Disease Control say 91 Americans die everyday from opioid abuse, but opioids are used far less than other drugs and their impact pales in comparison to tobacco and alcohol, both of which cause more widespread damage and cost the healthcare system millions of dollars. My point is not to minimize opioids as a danger, or to press for prohibition of alcohol, but to call attention to the way race has informed our response.
Opioid use has elicited a legitimate call for treatment. It is rightly seen as a public health problem and not a law-enforcement one — in marked contrast to the earlier epidemics, which were met with war rhetoric, a ramping up of criminal penalties and the militarization of police. Part of the reason for this shift is that we may be smarter about drug abuse, and we can pat ourselves on the back for this evolution. But we should not ignore the racial dynamics — opioids are seen as a white problem, crack and heroin as black ones. Opioid users get our empathy and treatment; crack and heroin users are met with no-knock raids, threats of military-style round ups (see Ross Perot’s comments on condoning off black neighborhoods to “vacuum up drugs”), and increased penalties for even the smallest quantity of drugs as part of a broader “war on drugs.”
The rhetoric of war and the targeting of black communities remains a central facet of American political and police culture. President Donald Trump has made Chicago the poster boy for his argument that American cities are “war zones” experiencing “carnage,” even though crime is down. We can dismiss Trump’s language as campaign hyperbole — except he continues to make these claims and, more importantly, he does not offer this argument in a vacuum. His comments are the logical culmination of a five-decade effort to paint American cities as war zones and to turn police departments into occupying agencies. It’s why the focus on individual officers’ racism so misses the point. It is systemic. The war on drugs and a culture in which the safety of individual officers outweighs that of all else has led cops to police communities of color as though they are occupied territories and the denizens of these zones as potential enemies. James Baldwin wrote about this dynamic as far back as the 1960s. Ta Nehisi Coates and others continue to make this argument. This is a recipe for violence by police — and the list of the dead makes clear this is far from theoretical.
This is what NFL players protest when they take a knee. Kaepernick was not protesting Trump. Michael Bennett, who was assaulted by Las Vegas police, has not been protesting Trump. And it’s why we miss the point — and much of the NFL missed the point this past weekend when it opted for unity in the face of Trump’s rambling attack at an Alabama rally on the free speech of players and his ignorance of the racism that has forced many to use their platform to draw attention to what has been happening in their communities.
This is not about Trump. This is not about the military. This is about the systemic murder of African Americans on American streets, about the persistence of de facto segregation and the racist assumptions of a society that refuses to truly come to grips with its history and the effect that this history has on the present.
This is about racism and whiteness, about the continued subjugation of much of black and brown America and the unstated and too-often unexamined benefits that come with having white skin.
This is America. Anyone can make it. But we should be honest and admit that some of us get to start the marathon of existence at the 13-mile mark, while others are expected to run a 35-mile race.