On Friday night in Alabama, Donald Trump said if an NFL owner saw one his players kneeling in protest during the national anthem he should make that “son of a bitch” leave the field. The NFL responded Sunday by showing solidarity. That solidarity came under the branding of “unity.”
‘Unity’: The word the NFL is using to avoid talking about Colin Kaepernick
Players responded to Trump’s words on Twitter after the comments were made on Friday. Then on Sunday, many teams and individual players engaged in some form of protest against his words. Some took a knee like Colin Kaepernick, who was the originator for the protest. Others linked arms. Some teams stayed inside the tunnel during the anthem. Dolphins players wore shirts in support of Kaepernick, and some players raised their fists in the air during the anthem or after scoring touchdowns.
Owners and teams and even the league itself released statements condemning the divisive words of the president. These statements made clear that the NFL has always been a unified community that asks its employees to do their part in helping the greater community. Shad Khan, owner of the Jaguars, joined his players in linking arms. Dan Snyder, owner of the Washington NFL team, did the same with his players.
Trump, in trying to encourage punishment against protesters and divide the country even more, unified the NFL in a way that hasn’t been seen before.
But then, it’s bemusing why it took Trump for this to happen. Or rather, this unity seems more about the league standing behind an empty word — unity — rather than standing behind the original reason for Kaepernick’s protest. The deep irony of this entire situation is all of this is happening while Kaepernick himself is unemployed, and owners who refused to give him a chance because of his protest, now stand, arms linked, in protest to Trump saying that protesters should be fired.
It’s become a protest against Trump, rather than what it was intended to be.
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It’s worth revisiting that Kaepernick’s protest was so divisive that he did so alone and was condemned by owners, talking heads, fans, and anonymous NFL executives; a protest that’s been discussed and picked over so many times that it has been distorted into something it was never about.
Kaepernick was protesting racism. He kneeled during the anthem because he thought the United States was not living up to its own ideals of freedom. The form of racism that he was concerned with was police brutality. Kaepernick thought that unarmed and harmless minorities, black people especially, shouldn’t be killed by the same police officers tasked with protecting them. And the officers shouldn’t do so with impunity.
Kaepernick kneeled as a plea for humanity. He thought that human beings of a different race should be given the same respect, compassion, and fair treatment as other human beings. He wanted police officers to not profile or kill minorities in a disproportionate fashion. He asked this because he loves the U.S. and knows that love isn’t pretending that what you love is perfect, but shows itself in wanting the object of your love to be the best version of itself.
That plea for compassion, in a country that believes itself to be the greatest civilization, is what is at the heart of all of this anger. That people should be treated fairly seems like a mundane sentiment, or it would be if the U.S. was more like the ideal of itself and not the work in progress that it is right now.
His protest was never in disrespect to the flag. It wasn’t about those who serve in the armed forces. It wasn’t against police; it was against police brutality. It wasn’t about the NFL and it most certainly wasn’t about Donald Trump.
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If the word “unity” that the NFL now stands behind meant something, then Kaepernick should have been backed by the entire league from the beginning. He should still have a job. But what happened was that he saw a fault in the country that he loved, said that we should be unified in an effort to fix it, and was roundly condemned for it.
Now, removed from Kaepernick, who is on the outside looking in, with his stance distorted by arguments cowardly trying to look away from the original issue — claiming he kneeled against things that he didn’t — and with the spotlight pointed at Trump rather than police brutality, the NFL has decided to protest without really protesting anything. The same people who thought a call for equal treatment was too divisive to keep Kaepernick employed are now saying they’re unified against an ambiguous something that’s definitely not racism. It’s less of a protest now and more of a branding exercise.
