Eagles

Another Column on Anthem Protests, and Why Everyone is Missing the Point

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Sep 27th, 2017 · 4:02 PM EDT

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People say that NFL players shouldn’t protest during the National Anthem because they just want to watch football without the political messages.

yeah, okay, but…

THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT OF THE PROTEST!

That’s how you get someone’s attention.

They want you to be uncomfortable.

Jesus Christ, how hard is this to understand?

No protest ever worked because some guy sat in the corner and said, “gee, I don’t want to make anyone angry.” Rosa Parks didn’t say, “well, I don’t want to upset folks at the front of the bus.”

The NFL anthem protests aren’t demonstrations against the flag, or the military, or the white man. They’re meant to shed light on social injustice in the United States of America. Colin Kaepernick decided to use his platform as a prominent athlete to bring awareness to the issue. His position as a successful and well known black man provided an opportunity to reach more people than, say, some guy who might feel the same way but works a run-of-the-mill, nine to five office job.

That’s it. That’s the protest. He wants people to be aware of the treatment of minorities in this country, and he understood that it might cost him his job.

But Kaepernick didn’t help himself when he went foot-in-mouth with a couple of hypocritical and dumb choices.

When you wear socks depicting the police as cartoon pigs, then you lose credibility. When you wear a shirt with the image of Fidel Castro (a Communist mass murderer), then bullshit your way through an explanation, you lose credibility.

Now, on the other hand, you’ve got Malcolm Jenkins doing all of the community related things that Kaepernick does without the pig sock/Commie routine.

You understand why some people take one guy more seriously than the other?

Anyhow, when the Eagles safety raises a fist before the anthem, it’s not some Black Panther, “kill whitey!” routine. There might an anti-police element to some fringes of the social justice movement, which became bastardized in the same way that “Occupy Wall Street” somehow morphed into a catch-all protest for anything and everything. But just because someone is pro-black doesn’t mean they’re anti-white.

Sunday’s protest had nothing to do with social injustice. The reason NFL owners took part is because they were telling Donald Trump to piss off. Most of these billionaires are Republican Trump voters anyway. They didn’t join the protest when it was solely about social injustice. They joined the protest as a rebuke to the President of the United States telling them what to do. This was the NFL pulling a Lavar Ball and telling Trump, “stay in your lane.” This message of “we’re together!” didn’t do anything to advance the cause of minority mistreatment.

Shannon Sharpe absolutely nailed it on “Undisputed” this week:

“While some might be moved by the conscience of these NFL owners, it wasn’t their conscience that moved them. It was the cash. Because, see Skip, what we know about people with money, they don’t like being told what to do. They don’t like being bullied.”

“When (Trump) was looking down upon everybody else, the owners never had a problem with that. It wasn’t until he came for the NFL that their conscience was shocked. ‘How dare you tell us what we should do! You think you can tell us that we should fire somebody?'”

Watch the clip below but ignore his co-host:

https://twitter.com/Jonyrico/status/912685060892921857

Not that anyone cares, but I’m a registered independent and not some self-loathing liberal. The extreme left and extreme right are both divisive and useless, just like Congress. I think the late Lemmy Kilmister had it right when he said, “I think all politicians are assholes.”

Now, white privilege DOES exist. If you’re a Caucasian and can’t understand how minorities might have a more difficult path to success than we do, then you’re a moron. That doesn’t mean you didn’t work your tail off to get to where you are, it just means that the average white person had a different starting point than the average black person or Latino.

White guilt, however, is laughable. No one should feel guilty about something they can’t control. We were all spit out of the womb as innocent human beings.

“Sorry for being white! I couldn’t help it!”

I grew up in Boyertown when the district featured one black kid, two Asians, and an Indian (not a Native American, a guy from the country of India). The other 475 people in my graduating class were all white. How much exposure did we have to different cultures and different ideas? None really. We weren’t bad people, we were just insulated.

I went to college in West Virginia, where the only black men and women on campus were athletes. It was a little more diverse, but that’s not saying much when Berks County is your frame of reference.

Things really became clear when I moved to Augusta, Georgia, a town that was 60% black and 40% white. For the first time in my life, I was the minority.

And guess what?

It didn’t matter! Nothing changed!

I went to work, played in a band, walked around, and did everything I’d normally do in any other city. In a way, the Deep South was more progressive than the sticks of Pennsylvania, simply because people were exposed to different cultures and different people at a younger age. The Mason-Dixon line means nothing in 2017.

I’ve lived long enough to know that douchebags come in all shapes, sizes, and skin colors. Idiocy knows no boundaries. If you pay your taxes, don’t act like an asshole, and treat people the way you’d like to be treated, then that’s good enough for me and it should be good enough for you.

These protests are supposed to make you uncomfortable and bring the topic of social injustice to the forefront of public discourse.

That’s the whole point.

Whether or not this actually results in change is another topic entirely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQRwcHtQzyg