Responding to My Family About Colin Kaepernick
Find out what happens when people stop being polite…and start responding to crazy emails from family members.
Recently, my uncle sent me a conservative talking point-heavy diatribe about Colin Kaepernick and kneeling in the NFL, along with many “editorial” comments. His most egregious editorial comments are quoted below. In light of our President’s…similar comments…I present below a lightly edited version of my response.
Dear [name redacted],
You often proclaim not to care about sports, so why do you now care deeply that “sports people”, most of whom are black, are kneeling to protest police brutality? And why did neither the chain email nor your commentary ever acknowledge why these athletes are kneeling?
Personally, I think it’s due to three things: a) wanting promoting order over justice; b) a desire to police black, but not white, speech; and c) poor understanding of how white people benefit from a history of white supremacy.
You say that when black athletes kneel they “disrespect the flag”, plant a “seed of growing violence is (sic) our society”, and “taunt America”. Your anger at black athletes for expressing constitutionally protected speech is the latest in a long history of white people suppressing black speech. As late as the civil rights movement, white “moderates” loudly called on black people to stop agitating for basic human rights.
Dr. King, in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, felt that white moderates were more dangerous to civil rights than the Ku Klux Klan, because the white moderate, “paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom…and constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’” He also warned that white moderates were, ‘more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice…prefer[ing] a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
Is your desire to silence black athletes just another attempt to force black people to wait for a “more convenient season”? Or are they race neutral, applied to all who “disrespect America” without bias?
To answer this question, let’s explore a counterfactual. What if some white people constantly and aggressively disrespected our nation and its symbols? What would be the response?
Fortunately, we know the answer to this question. About a month ago, white nationalists protested the removal of monuments to Confederate leaders, while flying the Confederate Battle Flag: a symbol of open rebellion against the United States. How did conservatives, like yourself, respond? With a collective shrug. The President blamed “both sides”, while Fox News complained about Black Lives Matter.
In fact, a 2017 poll found that 87% of Republicans thought that monuments to Confederates (read: traitors) should continue to stand, A full 67% felt that the Confederate Battle Flag should be flown from government property, essentially saying that the government should be forced to fly the flag of those who took up arms against it. Perhaps Republicans think that kneeling for the National Anthem is worse that siding with traitors over their own country, but that stretches credulity.
More likely is that conservative desire to police black speech for “disrespecting America” does not extend to white people, nor does it come from a desire to instill respect for our nation. Rather we see a double standard: acceptance and acknowledgement for white people, and condemnation for black people.
Why do white people feel the need to police black speech? I argue that it is a holdover from when white people could police black speech through actual police, all-white juries, and lynch mobs. As an optimist, however, I choose to believe that this behavior is out of ignorance, rather than malice. I hope that knowledge of how today’s white people benefit from 400 years of white supremacy can change those minds.
To understand the conservative argument, let’s pull a quote from your email “As for their Grandparents being segregated by the government of the time, not “this government”, I am getting tired of feeling sorry for today’s Great, great Grandchildren of this era”. The claim is that because black and white people are de jure equals, that they are also de facto equals.
Polling data supports that many conservatives think this: only 22% of Trump voters think that black people face “a lot of discrimination”. To counter, liberals point to educational, policing or income disparities to refute this idea. Yet, these arguments fall on deaf ears. The only way to prove the point for conservatives is to “make it personal”.
In most cases, “making it personal” is quite difficult, since one rarely knows the personal and family history of their audience. In this case, however, my family is my audience. Therefore, I’m going to point out the various ways, of which I know, that our family has tangibly, and directly, benefited from 400 years of white supremacy. This is not to shame us, rather I seek to point out the very real benefits that our family has realized because of white supremacy. Hold on to your hats, this is a lot of bullet points:
· My wife and I inherited money from the sale of a house that, at the time it was purchased, only white people could buy. Because of racial covenants, black people could not buy houses in white neighborhoods built between 1926 and 1968.
· You and my mother attended a segregated high school; it was not desegregated until 1966.
· You attended a university that was only de facto integrated in 1985(!), as a result of a court order.
· The houses that your parents (my grandparents) bought before 1968 would have had racial covenants.
· Your father learned a useful skill in the military (he was a radio operator), something denied to black men. Black men were overwhelmingly employed as cooks.
· Your father also attended Auburn, which was an all-white university at the time he attended.
· The GI Bill paid for your father’s tuition; Jim Crow laws denied black people GI Bill benefits.
· Our family received free and heavily discounted land from the federal government in Missouri and Illinois in the 1850s. Most black people were literal property at the time.
· And the kicker, our family owned slaves in Missouri.
Let’s run a counterfactual: what if our family was black? And for the sake of simplicity, let’s just start with your father, my grandfather. He wouldn’t have been able to get a technical job in the military, go to Auburn, have his tuition paid, or purchase a house.
Neither you nor my mom would not have been allowed to go to the high school you attended. In fact, you would not have been allowed to go high school at all, unless you went to the segregated high school across town, not that you would have been allowed to live in the “white part of town” anyway.
According to the lawsuit against Auburn, it’s probable that you would have been shunted to Alabama A&M or dissuaded from Auburn’s engineering program.
How would our family’s opportunities have changed in my generation, if my grandfather had been denied an education and if it had been much harder for you and my mom to get high school or college educations? In my children’s generation? All six grandchildren have college degrees, many of us have graduate degrees. Would that culture of education have found such deep roots if our patriarch had been denied such rich opportunities?
Those are rhetorical questions… (but to answer: worse, worse still, and no.) So yes, historical white supremacy still affects people, including us, today.
To come back to the original question of “why do white conservatives care about the actions of professional athletes?”, white people have a long tradition of promoting order over justice, policing black speech, and denying the current and ongoing legacy of white supremacy. Conservative uproar over black athletes is the continuation of attempts to deny black people their rightful place at what Dr. King called the “table of brotherhood”.
Fortunately, people who hold these beliefs are old. Their ideology will decline as more accepting, knowledgeable, and diverse young people take their place. Perhaps then our nation will finally live up to the “more perfect union” that Madison, Lincoln, and Obama envisioned, as we come to terms with our terribly racist past.
Sincerely,
Taylor
