Colin Kaepernick’s a hero.
Dissenters almost always are.
There are simply few single acts more patriotic for an American than reasoned dissent from the status quo of governance. (Claiming troops are hiding under a Walmart about to seize private guns, invading a National Wildlife Refuge in the name of liberty or claiming the president’s a Muslim terrorist are not among them).
But refusing to stand for the national anthem in support of oppressed people is. Of that there’s no doubt.
Kaepernick’s struck a First Amendment nerve. Keep hammering it, Colin. Others with the bully pulpit of celebrity should, too.
While his critics foam at the mouth about love of country and what they claim is disrespect, Kaepernick’s pointing out that people who aren’t fed up with police violence should be.
That he’s here, in California, a state with the country’s most secretive and draconian police personnel laws that ban the public from knowledge of how abusive cops are disciplined — or even if they are — thus enabling more misconduct, makes his protest even more poignant.
If only the outrage turned on Kaepernick by the hand-over-heart crowd were directed where it could do good. Many of the Tweets and online comments about him are sickening racial screeds.
What those people forget is that the issues of police violence aren’t new. It’s just that technology finally allows us to know more about them.
Was Walter Scott the first African-American shot in the back by a Southern cop when Michael Slager killed him last year?
Was Temir Rice the first African-American child given no benefit of the doubt when someone claimed he was armed, and Cleveland police came to shoot first and verify facts later?
Was Jayson Van Dyke, who’s charged with first-degree murder, the first Chicago cop to kill an African American for no good reason when he pumped 16 shots into teenager Laquan McDonald?
Of course not.
But they were among the killings captured and shown to the public, thanks to technological advancement. Only that we now regularly see such things is new.
In 2000, after New York cops killed Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old unarmed African immigrant, with a fusillade of bullets, Bruce Springsteen wrote a song entitled “American Skin” (41 Shots) about police shootings. While still a protest song, it did not directly criticize cops. But the backlash was still severe.
One New York police official called Springsteen “a floating fag” (whatever that is). Right-wing commentators went pre-Twittner nuts. Cops assigned to a Springsteen show at Shea Stadium led a convoy of SUVs carrying his E Street Band into a traffic jam and fled.
In 2008, police at Yankee Stadium assaulted and ejected a man for trying to go to the bathroom during the playing of “God Bless America.” He sued and won.
Now Kaepernick’s the villain, offending conservatives’ overbearing sense of political correctness.
The playing of the Star Spangled Banner at sporting events is a deep tradition. But Americans, being, well, Americans, give no thought to its rarely sung third stanza, which contains these words: “No refuge could save the hireling and slave — From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.”
It’s been pointed out now that Jackie Robinson also resisted the national anthem. “I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag,” Robinson wrote in his autobiography. “I know that I am a black man in a white world.”
Some have told Kaepernick to shut up because he’s wealthy and successful, as if the measure of an American is the girth of their wallet and not their character and intellect. It’s as if,if we all have ours, it should matter not to us what others have.
The group-think that everyone should snap to attention and salute at the sight of symbols, sing anthems on command and not criticize a nation whose founders emphasized the right to criticize it is un-American.
Those who don’t see divisions, flaws and injustice in this country that the First Amendment was created to combat are failing to look. Kaepernick did, and he did something.
Thomas Peele’s an investigative reporter for this newspaper and teaches a class on public records at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Follow him at Twitter.com/thomas_peele.
