O Kaepernick! My Kaepernick!
Colin Rand Kaepernick. I love this brother. I’ve been a fan since his first Superbowl appearance and stuck like glue ever since. I even took the liberty of appending his surname to my own for social media purposes. So yes, I do feel remiss that reflectionandreform.com has taken this long to feature him in a post (though I. Am. Over. The. Moon. he never needed the site to justify why he should do what he knew to be the right thing in the first place…*sigh*…he’s not just a pretty face—and a powerhouse on the gridiron—he’s also a driven, independent thinker:-). But today, I’m booted up, lasso in hand, wrists cuffed, invisible jet gassed and about to take to the skies to get his back. Hold up, though; where am I going? I realize I am unclear on what exactly I need to defend: everything Colin stands/kneels for is morally upright, completely incontrovertible. Putting personal affections aside, how could someone be mad with my CK1? Let me restate the question more objectively: how could anyone who has ever uttered the phrase “with liberty and justice for all” find Colin Kaepernick’s well-publicized form of and stated reason for protest objectionable?
We all like to think of ourselves as good people…Nazis, Huns, klansmen, Hutus…all of us. Frequently, what helps many of us to actually be good people is the awareness of how our being—in real time, on a quotidian basis—affects others. The violence and imposition of white supremacy has been such an integral part of this country’s formation that just about every American this country has formed is habituated to all of the many ways Black and Brown people are consistently adversely affected by this country’s very being. Let us consider what should happen in “one nation, under God, indivisible” if any group therein is protesting police brutality: the very first step would be to examine the merits of the argument. In this case, are police brutal to Black and Brown people? If the answer were a resounding “NO”, and America had genuinely striven toward the “more perfect union” as the Preamble to its Constitution had claimed, two things would have happened: 1) police anywhere/everywhere would have availed their records/logs for general scrutiny to happily evidence that Kaepernick’s protests were in error, then 2) the universe of law enforcement in this country would be equally outraged that allegations of violations existed, impelling them to redouble their efforts to support CK7’s campaign (lest we forget a law officer’s duty first and foremost is to protect “liberty and justice for all”). Hearts and minds should be aligned in wanting every member of society to feel safe, compelling police personnel to collaborate with concerned citizens to ensure that all members of society felt protected and served. The fact that neither of these two scenarios are at present occurring, nor have ever occurred in the entire history of law enforcement in the U.S. is damning enough evidence that Kaep’s kneel is not for naught. This country is most assuredly racist. The outlandish and absurd backlash against O Kaeptain! my Kaeptain! proves this point squarely.
I am not sure any other issue in this country is as hotly contested as the issue of race. For six years in the middle of the 19th century (and about the middle of the country’s existence, coincidentally), this Unit of States devolved itself into the Union and the Confederate States of America over the legal treatment of Black people. The two parties eventually reconciled and re-congealed back into the United States, but only after both tacitly agreed a) to avoid the topic, and most certainly never try b) to resolve the issue. For white people, this might seem like a solution...I guess… For Black people, it continues the largest and longest human rights’ abuse the planet has ever seen.
Author Tara Westover, a homeschooled daughter of survivalists who escaped a cult-like upbringing in the Rocky Mountain wilderness first to BYU, then to Cambridge University, picking up a Masters’ and a Ph.D. along the way, has come up with the best definition of ‘abuse’ I’ve heard to date: “…abuse is foremost an assault on the mind. When you abuse someone you trap them in your view of them or your view of the world.”[1] I would append to Westover’s definition of subjugating the abused to a worldview not his/her own: doing so to the victim’s detriment and/or for the abuser’s perceived advantage. Within this paradigm the abuser reduces the abused to object status, expecting the one objectified to perform and/or comply categorically with little or no input and certainly no agency, except to receive punishment for non-compliance and non-performance. Never is there bilateral critical engagement between the two parties. It has been within such captivity that Black people endured slavery, Jim Crow, the War on Drugs (which preceded the actual flooding of drugs into predominantly Black inner-cities across the country…can we say another government conspiracy to destroy a segment of its population it found problematic, anyone?), Mass Incarceration and a general occupation-style policing by law enforcement. Throughout this timeline of torture and terror called the history of Black people in America is almost complete social and legal approbation.
Contemporaneous paroxysms against Kaepernick and the Black Lives Matter movement is a continuation of the time-honored American tradition of abusing Black people—mayhap the key ingredient to making America great. Rather than engage rationally with the legitimate issues presented, the hegemony—in this case spearheaded by one tangerine megalomaniac and the very many mediocre, everyday citizens who voted for him—reflexively deflects from the issue Kaepernick’s protest raises by fabricating some farcical assault on veterans, the flag and whatever other inanity its spasmodic mind can grasp. It is offensive to the sensibilities—and beyond the capabilities—of the collective mind of the status quo to field any criticism or interrogation. How can people answer for themselves when they know they are wrong? They can’t. I posit that the asymmetry of policing for Blacks vs. white in the United States is indefensible; it is this country’s blatant commitment to racial apartheid. As well, it must also be profitable...for the hegemony…at the expense of Black people…as it has always been. For me the craziest aspect of this realization is the sheer obviousness of it: for all of the 399 years Black people have inhabited what would be American soil, we have always been abused, it has always been claimed that we are not (today fits the pattern perfectly), then some token lenitive is administered—the Emancipation Proclamation, Brown v. Brd of Ed, the passage of the Civil Rights’ & Voting Rights’ Acts, the elections of Barack Hussein Obama—as tacit apology [proving the abuse’s existence in the first place, though ever vehemently denied] woefully too little and far too late by those who have always known about the abuse precisely because they perpetrate and propagate it, relying upon the victimized’s existence for their own continued economic, political and psycho-social advantage.
This is America.
www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/till-killers-confession/
Above is the link PBS.org carries of the Look magazine article (24 January 1956) recounting J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant’s version of the circumstances the two murderers felt excused their abduction, torturing and execution of 14 year old Emmett Till; crimes for which they had been acquitted just months before. Included in the link is the original article’s “Letters to the Editors” section which drew national feedback. Reflect on the fact that most, if not all, of those comments were handwritten—or typewritten on an actual typewriter—enclosed in an envelope, stamped, then mailed via USPS to Look’s offices. Those who submitted feedback went to some lengths to have their views expressed. Today, we express our views far more instantaneously, simply typing our opinions at the bottom of the screen, after experiencing whatever was the medium (article, video, podcast…) with which we engaged. I point out the obvious technological differences between the mid-1950s and late 2018 to underscore the irony of what remains the same: people in America openly espousing racist views with neither self-awareness, nor self-consciousness; strident and convinced their attitudes and behaviors are upright and acceptable…even helpful to Black people.
The comment from the Look magazine article which I find most compelling comes from one Lee B. Weathers, publisher of the Shelby (North Carolina) Daily Star:
The South and many other sections of the country...thank you for your article...The killing was a most unfortunate affair to be true. More unfortunate was the failure of the press to give an unbiased, objective report of the whole incident. No race in the world has made as much progress as the Southern Negro since he was set free as a slave 90 years ago. The southern white man has contributed gladly to that advancement and will continue to do so, if social reformers who know little about our problem will let us work it out in our own way.
Astonishing to me is the self-assessment of having “contributed gladly” to Black people’s progress. I wonder if the ‘contribution’ to which Mr/s. Weathers refers is the “separate but equal” clause which was the law of the land from 1896 to 1954, justifying the egregious asymmetry in public disbursement for schoolchildren’s education based on race, frequently resulting in some multiple more of funding for whites vs. Blacks? Or perhaps it was the progress made for Black people from the 1857 Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford decision wherein the court ruled that Dred Scott was not only still a slave, but as a non-person and, therefore non-citizen he was ineligible to bring any suits before the Supreme Court, with Chief Justice Roger Taney further opining that Blacks were “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect;” to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, supposedly freeing all slaves, though actual freedom was technically delayed to after the South surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865, two years later (…then the 90 years of Jim Crow after that…)?[2] Whatever the publisher of the Shelby Daily Star understood as Black progress, what is incontrovertible is that if Lee B. Weathers was white, the conditions which created his/her progress and advancement by law, could not and would not have been the same for anyone Black in this country—if it can be claimed that there were conditions which created progress and advancement for Black people in the United States from 1865 to 1956 at all. This begs a more basic question for the American citizenry: how could it be in the “southern white man’s” power to contribute or not to contribute to the advancement of Black people, particularly since the southern white man played so crucial a role in hindering and choking out the growth of Black people in the first place? Being responsible for so much depravity and crimes against humanity should have dictated that the southern man be removed from influencing in any way Black people’s progress, let alone having any authority over it. Clearly the former had already demonstrated fully and completely an ineptitude to do so responsibly.
Taking the next logical step, the southern [northern, western, even Pacific northwestern (see the State of Oregon’s original Constitution)] white man [and woman] should have been overcome by the profundity of evidence, spanning centuries, of his/her inability to contribute to the advancement of any Negro in this country. What should have been abundantly clear was the white man’s rapacious predation of Blackness, period. But of course, as the Negro was already held hostage inside the white man’s view of Blacks and the white man’s view of the world, that self-reflection never reached the light of day. Even more tragically, the white man’s view of Blacks and his view of the world became the order of the day. So when heirs to the white man’s vision are interrogated about this worldview they hold as greatness, they become defensive and hostile and violent, burning sneakers and demanding that those who do not acquiesce to their view be fired and blacklisted. They cannot bear being exposed for their repugnant behavior; repugnant, criminal behavior for which there is no rational or virtuous explanation, for which there has been no stoppage, and for which there still needs to be an accounting.
By the by, if ever there was a population which needed to be vigilantly policed and scrutinized—perhaps bordering on ‘brutality’?— “in the land of the free and the home of the brave” should it not be the one with a centuries’-long track record of impeding life, liberty and the pursuit of prosperity for, and regularly and repeatedly committing crimes against others?
[1] Hadley Freeman, “A World Away” Vogue March 2018, 284
[2] Robert Sutton, John Latschar, and Rick Beard, Slavery in the United States (Ft. Washington, PA: Eastern National, 2013) 42