Finally, the fans of America's most violent team sport have been provided with safe space where they are protected from words or actions that offend their delicate sensibilities. Wednesday, 5/23/18, the NFL owners, defending the freedoms of all Americans, established a new policy fining teams whose players kneel, sit or show disrespect during the National Anthem. Players will be permitted, however, to remain in the locker room, if they choose to.
In explaining the league's new policy, the fearlessly principled NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell parsed the policy's details with Solomonic logic: "We want people to be respectful of the national anthem. We want people to stand-that's all personnel- and make sure they treat this moment in a respectful fashion we think we owe. [But] we were also very sensitive to give the players' choices." How sensitive indeed.
The pressure by the league to end the players' protests against police brutality has nothing to do with respect or sensitivity. It is about money. A few years ago, the NFL management and owners feared revenues would decline as more scientific research revealed the degree of brain damage that results from even limited years of playing the game. Around the country, more parents began keeping their kids from joining "Pee-Wee" leagues or high school teams. Football's image as a means to inculcate discipline and masculinity in its young participants is being supplanted by images of middle-aged former players suffering the unbearable ravages of irreversible and progressive memory loss and cognitive impairment.
Then came Colin Kaepernick. Kaepernick, formerly of the San Francisco 49ers, knelt to protest police violence and racial inequality. His action offended many fans; many other fans applauded his courage. President Trump, who himself skilfully evaded the draft five times during the Vietnam War, exploited the issue to incense white Americans against the "millionaire" (predominantly black) players. He called for any player kneeling to be fired if they continued to protest during the anthem, for the owners to "get that son-of-bitch off the field right now."
I can understand the pride many Americans feel when hearing the National Anthem. It is not the country's best patriotic piece of music and verse, but it stirs sentiments that America, despite its checkered history of Africans brought here in chains and Native Americans driven from their lands, embodies democratic principles of equality that were withheld too long from so many, will in time shelter all who live here. I can understand their anger when anyone seems to denigrate a symbol they love with an almost religious fervor. As with religion, the flag is inseparable from who they are . To protest it is to assail the essence of their being.
To African Americans, however, the flag can, and indeed must, signify centuries of bondage, torture, rape, and murder. And even to this day, no one can legitimately argue that despite the Civil War and the civil rights' legislation being black in American does not impose a distinction that invariably results in being disproportionately subjected to abuse and violence by the police.
Of course, crime rates among young black men does exceed those of their white counterparts. Whites often point to these statistics, and to the impoverished circumstances of "their ancestors" who had lower crime rates, to suggest that the higher percentage of African American incarceration results from some character or social defects in blacks and/or black family structure. If such defects do exist, then a logical question would be to ask how they came to affect or infect that population? The answer is simple and all around us.
When the civil rights laws codified legal equality, they didn't eradicate racial prejudice, segregation and hatred. They didn't displace the system that sentences blacks at much higher rates to jail for marijuana possessions than whites. They didn't homogenize skin pigment as time did the foreign accents which kept Italians and the Irish held down in the underclasses. The laws and the passage of time have improved race relations in America; but more time must pass for the lasting effects of slavery and racial prejudice to dissolve in the "melting pot" that American can become.
In the meantime, those of us who have always felt reassured when we have encountered the police, who have never been trailed in a department store, who haven ever feared for our lives during a traffic stop, or have found ourselves roughly patted down on the street, should imagine what those experiences must be like and exercise some patience for our fellow Americans who know what we have never known. Summoning empathy toward our fellow citizens could furnish us with greater insight into the anxiety and anger felt by young black males encountering all the subtle and overt forms of racism circulating through American life and culture.
The NFL owners might have the legal authority as employers to enforce the rule and impose the fines against teams whose players kneel during the anthem. When challenged by the players' association, the courts will have decide whether or not this restriction of speech is constitutional. If such a case reached the Supreme Court, how, I wonder, would the conservative justices rule? They have already made clear that corporations have the right to free speech; would the conservative justices extend that same privilege to the individuals constitute the working parts of that organization?
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