In response to “Just Enjoy The Game”
This article is a response to “Just Enjoy the Game” by David Harbeck.
To think that politics should be separated from sports is an outdated and narrow perspective. Essentially, athletes are still people, and even more so they are people with identities that extend far beyond their net worth. To understand the protest fully and to understand why players are taking a knee, or staying in the locker rooms altogether, one has to examine the dynamics behind the NFL and how they relate to America’s racial and political climate.
First, say and think what you want, but Colin Kaepernick was not a mediocre player. Yes, he became more popular after his protests put him more in the public eye, but he had impressive achievements throughout his college career and led the 49ers to their first Super Bowl game in almost twenty years.
In 2016 when he took a knee during the national anthem, not many Americans understood why. It was not that he was disrespecting our country, but instead standing up for all those who had been victims of such racial injustices, specifically police brutality. To see it as disrespectful or not appropriate for the football field is to disregard Kaepernick’s or any other African American NFL player’s identity as a black man in this country.
The ironic aspect of this is that Colin Kaepernick was essentially protesting systematic racism, but it is exactly the systematic racism found in the NFL that has placed him in his current position. The recent protests have stood against our country’s current political and racial climate. To believe that the NFL, which is owned by majority white males and consists of primarily black players, is completely detached from politics and our current racial climate is ignorant point blank. The meaning of these protests reaches far beyond players linking arms or sitting in locker rooms. They address and attack a problem that has existed for decades, but has not been talked about by the American people until one man sacrificed his own career for the sake of his identity.
As one who enjoys engaging in politics, I understand the other side of the argument as well. It’s weird and seems inappropriate to have the president input his opinion and try to determine the fate of NFL players based on events that seemingly should not be happening in the first place. It almost seems as if everything is political nowadays, or that everything is a protest. This perspective is warranted, but is narrow. It does not attest to the fact that you cannot ignore the current racial events and the commentary surrounding it, and that it does affect many of the players on and off the field. NFL football games are a public stage, and now that protests have happened across the country, Americans are starting to engage in a dialogue, in relation to the inherent nature of the NFL, that should have been had years ago.
So, no, we cannot just stop arguing and play the game. Believe me, I enjoy watching football with my friends and family just as much as the next person, it is one of the central experiences of American culture. However, in this nuanced political climate we are living in, sports cannot just be in a bubble with no other intersections or interruptions. Playing sports is many of these players’ occupation and career for a set amount of time, but their identity is who they have been their entire lives, and those can never be separated. No one would have believed that a racially motivated protest would have started on a bus in 1955, so why can’t we accept that it can also happen on a field in 2017?
