Take A Knee for Racial Justice

Imagine being black and standing for the national anthem and looking “proudly” at the American flag. A flag that waved and an anthem that was played when your ancestors were being kidnapped in Africa and brought over to this country in chains. The same anthem and flag in use when your ancestors were being sold on auction blocks, worked in fields, whipped, raped and denied decent quarters, good food and an education. The same anthem and flag in use when your ancestors suffered under the oppressive Black Codes, the Jim Crow laws and the arbitrary and cruel injustice of the lynch mobs. The same anthem and flag in use when your ancestors were denied equality in housing, schools, transportation and entertainment. The same anthem and flag in use when your ancestors were subjected to fire hoses, batons, and angry dogs when they dared march and protest for equality. Imagine standing for that anthem. Yet they did, because despite it all they saw hope and opportunity and progress and believed in their future. But when some young black brothers in the National Football League grew weary of a criminal justice system and law enforcement officers who denied them their civil rights and made a mockery of their hard won freedoms, refused to stand for the anthem, they were vilified. Their leader, Colin Kaepernick was blackballed from the NFL.

In the antebellum south, slave owners and overseers would “break” young black men and women. Those who stood up to them and refused to yield were beaten and whipped until they were compliant. Today there resides in the White House a racist president who wants to see black NFL players who refuse to stand for the flag and the anthem, broken. He wants them suspended. He calls them names like “son-of-a-bitches.” This man wants to deny them their constitutionally guaranteed right to freedom of speech, he wants their NFL “owners” to punish them. He wants them broken. He wants them subjugated.

(In the mid 1960s a young boxer named Cassius Clay won the heavyweight boxing championship. This was fine with white America, especially since he had beaten another black man, Sonny Liston. But when Clay became a Muslim and changed his name to Muhammad Ali, the white American establishment recoiled. Then when Ali, on religious and moral grounds, refused to be inducted into the US army, they’d had enough. They thought they could break him by taking away his championship. They were wrong. After two and half years in boxing exile the courts ruled in his favor, Ali did not have to join the army and was finally able to box again. He eventually regained the championship.)

African Americans are currently incarcerated at a rate five times higher than that for whites. Prisons are the new slave plantations. It starts earlier with African Americans suspended and expelled from public schools at a rate three times higher than white students. When I was teaching in a public school I was told that the goal with “challenging students” as they were euphemistically called, was to get them enough days of suspension so that the district could move for expulsion. Then those students would go to another district were the cycle would be repeated. School budgets are slashed yearly eliminating programs that could help at risk students. Not that there is equality in schools. Just compare an inner city school with one in rich suburban areas. The difference is striking. Meanwhile money for prisons is plentiful.

Then there are the police — those charged with serving and “protecting” the citizenry are part of 21st century version of the lynch mob. According to an analysis of 2015 police killings by the Guardian. Racial minorities made up about 37.4 percent of the general population in the US and 46.6 percent of armed and unarmed victims, but they made up 62.7 percent of unarmed people killed by police.

How can anyone, white or black, NOT join in symbolic protests against both the overt and institutionalized racism that plagues this country?

Of course our bigot-in-chief, like many others, wishes that black athletes would find other means of expressing their discontent. You know, in a way that no one has to actually see it. I can think of no better way to call attention to this nation’s ills than refusing to stand for a song and a flag that to many have stood for so much that is wrong with this country.

I urge all Americans with a conscience to take a knee until there is real progress in addressing the bigotry that still infests this country and that horrible racist is driven out of the presidency. Power to the people.