Black Lives Matter
Why is he protesting?
One of Colin Kaepernick’s main facets of his protest against racial injustice and inequality is that of police brutality. There have always been extrajudicial killings by law enforcement, but the trends show a drastically high proportion of recent killings that occur are to unarmed, innocent black men. It also does not help that the workers’ unions for police forces are extremely influential and good at keeping their members in work. “For the past fifty years, police unions have done their best to block policing reforms of all kinds. They opposed officers’ having to wear name tags… They’ve opposed the use of body cameras and have protested proposals to document racial profiling and to track excessive-force complaints,” (Surowiecki 36). Police unions are willing to keep an officer in the field and in work, even if it means unjustly acquitting that officer after a killing or some other misdemeanor. One example of particular disorder was the actions and consequences of Hector Jimenez, who killed two unarmed black men, was dismissed from field work as an officer, but two years later was reinstated with no change in pay or treatment (36).
Several of these incidents have incited various types of protest as well, including the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager. This incident in particular sparked mass protests and even violent riots in his hometown of Ferguson, Missouri, denoting the fact that people were enraged by the killing and ensuing acquittal of the officer who killed him, Darren Wilson. It is arguable that the ever-growing Black Lives Matter movement has its strongest roots in these high-profile murders, as the protests that result are highly centered in the issues that the movement focuses on. Community involvement with the group is at times overwhelming and surprising, gathering over 25,000 marchers in Washington DC in December of 2015, when only 5,000 were expected, for example (Okafor 46). This goes to show that the passion of Black Lives Matter sympathizers is widespread and intense, fueled by the notions of injustice toward people of color and the impending brutality that comes from them.
Image courtesy of “Michael Brown.” Angels For Justice Music RSS, angelsforjusticemusic.com/michael-brown.
Colin Kaepernick has several times mentioned his interest and involvement in the Black Lives Matter movement and even once mentioned that the first million dollars he made this year would be donated to the movement’s causes. We believe that he is justified in being involved with this group, as the crimes committed against black people by police officers is disproportionately aggressive. Being a person of color puts him in a situation where he is able to sympathize with the victims of racial injustice as he has expressed that he had definitely been a victim as well. It is justified that Kaepernick would want to show his support for a group of people that is so consistently marginalized and punished for being born the way that they are. “In poorer black and brown communities, cops serve to monitor and subjugate rather than, ‘to serve and protect’”(Rickford 38). Even from an outside perspective, most people can admit to the fact that police brutality exists and that actions against people of color are automatically more intense and aggressive than necessary. Kaepernick’s kneeling during the national anthem is a nonviolent response to a large range of violent actions. In this sense of the situation, Kaepernick is completely justified in kneeling during the national anthem, as he is harming no one, and his actions were meant to express his opinions and incite conversation, which it has done exactly.
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Another issue that Kaepernick protests against is the large umbrella term of racial privilege and injustice. White privilege is a very misunderstood term that is able to be well utilized in this context. “A privilege is special treatment that goes beyond a right… Not fearing that the police will kill your child for no reason isn’t a privilege, it’s a right,”(Lever 1129). Therefore, the term white privilege is adversely misleading, as the connotation of the term suggests lack of rights for people of color, rather than special treatment for whites. This new way of considering the term makes it much more poignant than it was before, as it proposes the perception that perhaps black people, in fact, don’t have as many rights as white people. After evaluating this perspective, naturally it seems that Kaepernick is not only hostile toward police officers and police brutality, but he acknowledges the fact that the United States has a real issue concerning its citizens’ rights. He has said many times that he will not stand for a country that doesn’t give equal rights to all of its citizens, and after truly paying attention, it becomes very obvious that people of color are inherently at a disadvantage. There are endless statistics displaying salaries and likelihood of job hiring and retention between different racial groups, as well as several other factors of adult life, with whites consistently being dramatically more fortunate than any other group. While this may not be a problem solely with the US government, Kaepernick still kneels during the national anthem to encourage Americans to reevaluate and truly think about the way that people of color are treated in their own country.
Image courtesy of “ABC News.” ABC News, ABC News Network, abcnews.go.com/topics/news/issues/black-lives-matter-protests.htm.
The issue of white privilege has its roots in a general lack of understanding of racism itself. Since white people have no experience of racism or the wide range of effects it has on one's everyday life, there is no way for them to truly understand it on a personal level. This is imaginatively one of the reasons that racism still exists at all, for if white people could feel the extent of harm that racism inflicts on so many aspects of society in so many ways, one can assume that empathetically, those people would at least make an effort to better themselves. Racism exists in so many ways that are not blatantly obvious to those who do not experience it; for example, it is not likely that most white people will consider themselves “racist”, as they do not consciously act racist or behave like someone who may be considered racist. However, racism is displayed in most circumstances through subconscious actions and words. For example, in an article by John Metta, a quote from The Independent is quoted: “Charleston shooting: Black and Muslims killers are ‘terrorists’ and ‘thugs’. Why are white shooters called ‘mentally ill’?”. Metta notes the fact that even though the author is calling out the subtle racism in reports about shooters between differing ethnicities and races, the author still regards the “Blacks” and “Muslims” as killers and the Whites as shooters. This is a prime example of how deeply rooted and how extremely subconscious the microaggressions inflicted upon people of color truly are.
Colin Kaepernick, being a person of color, is very familiar with the small acts of racist nature as well as the large ones. The reason that media and the large, white majority of America refuse to focus on the purpose of the protest is because racism is a hard thing to acknowledge when it is something that whites simply cannot relate to or experience. Naturally, people wouldn’t want to be accused of something that they didn’t do, and white people’s inability to recognize that their actions actually do affect the lives of people of color leads to a hostility and defensiveness when they are accused of racism. However, Kaepernick’s protest focuses highly on institutional racism, for he references the 20 to 1 proportion of black people versus white people in prisons, or the the upward mobility that white people have that black people do not. Overall, people of color are exposed to constant instances of racism from the moment they are born, and it truly affects their ability to live as a truly free person in their own country, and people who are white do not experience this and therefore are unwilling to fix the issues they have created. Kaepernick encourages people who are white to look deeply into the concept of racism, and to take into account the hard evidence and statistics that prove that people of color are inherently disadvantaged in their own country.
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Throughout Kaepernick’s protest, he has been belittled and criticized ceaselessly, constantly criticized for every action he takes whether it be on or off the football field. The overall message that he wishes to portray is that living situations for people of color are drastically less fortunate than their white counterparts. He has endless evidence and life experience dealing with these issues himself, and he inevitably observed unfair treatment all around him his whole life. Even if this ultimately ends up being a publicity stunt, Kaepernick’s protest has still started conversations and raised awareness for this wide range of issues in people throughout the country. He has reached a wide audience, who may have otherwise not been informed about the protested issues as most other Americans. The protest itself is well-executed, has plenty of background, and causes no harm to anyone around him, and he has gained thousands of supporters by being so peaceful about such a non-peaceful subject.