C-Mag wrote:To be fair, I am searching for NFL Players Editorials on the subject.
Ed Reid wrote Sept 25th, 2017 and appears to speak for Kaepernick.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/opin ... tests.html
For those of you pissed at Trump for calling them out, I ask, would we have gotten this if Trump was silent ? BHO didn't call them on it, and we didn't get written argument. On with the Reid piece.
Why do they need to be "called out" by a president for peacefully protesting?
my teammate Colin Kaepernick chose to sit on the bench during the national anthem to protest police brutality. To be honest, I didn’t notice at the time, and neither did the news media.......
(after 2 weeks)We spoke at length about many of the issues that face our community, including systemic oppression against people of color, police brutality and the criminal justice system. We also discussed how we could use our platform, provided to us by being professional athletes in the N.F.L., to speak for those who are voiceless.
After hours of careful consideration, and even a visit from Nate Boyer, a retired Green Beret and former N.F.L. player, we came to the conclusion that we should kneel, rather than sit, the next day during the anthem as a peaceful protest. We chose to kneel because it’s a respectful gesture. I remember thinking our posture was like a flag flown at half-mast to mark a tragedy.
I guess to this I would say, you found justification for something you were already doing. And why didn't this Editorial accompany it ?
Did you take into consideration how your team felt about this, the people that give you your platform?
The Constitution gives them a platform. Their talent and hard work gives them an audience that is every bit as much THEIR audience as any white player on the team.
I have too often seen our efforts belittled with statements like “He should have listened to the officer,” after watching an unarmed black person get shot, or “There is no such thing as white privilege” and “Racism ended years ago.” We know that racism and white privilege are both very much alive today.
Reid is blinded by viewing everything through race. He doesn't understand how many white people get shot every year too, and the same thing is said. He should have listened to the officer.
How am I supposed to take this seriously when 6,000 blacks are violently killed by blacks every year. Maybe I'm sick of seeing Chicago's crime and gang violence as a blight on our country. How am I supposed to take this seriously when the disparity of White on Black violence to Black on White violence is ridiculous.
It is proven that black people are disproportionately shot by police. We should ALL be getting upset with aggressive and irresponsible police tactics, which do affect people of all color, but black people demonstrably disproportionately. And black on black violence has literally NOTHING to do with this, except I suppose indirectly as it is part of what shapes the implicit bias of police officers who feel more threatened by black people and especially black men. And why do you lump all black people in together? Why aren't you incensed at the case of Philando Castile, who had done nothing wrong, in fact did everything he could to help the cop feel not threatened, was a legal gun owner, and had his head blew off with MULTIPLE shots with a little kid in the car? What does that law abiding citizen have to do with Chicago violence? He had it coming because...Chicago is a "blight" on our country?
I am nevertheless encouraged to see my colleagues and other public figures respond to the president’s remarks with solidarity with us.
That's the Fucking Problem right there. You don't understand we are all in this together. We are on the same team. You are dividing the team.
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NO. Trump is dividing us. Its the main thing he has talent for as far as I can tell. He hammers and hammers at issues that are divisive and openly takes sides in a way that openly shows how much he literally hates or doesn't give a shit for over 1/2 the country. He cultivates a base that treats him as an infallible cult leader, then tells his base that everyone but him/them are crazy, lazy, stupid and wrong, so now that 38% of the country can now not even *listen* to what moderates or anyone to the left of moderate thinks. And he stays on this day after day after day, so that we are all just exhausted. When he loses interest on the NFL thing, which by the way is simply a lawful protest that DOESN'T MATTER in the grand scheme of actual issues he personally needs to care about, he'll start using something else to divide us. While whipping up the base and angering the rest, he also lies in a pathological manner so that even just saying, hey these are the facts of reality, becomes potentially divisive.
