The NFL kneeling issue seems to be about country, flag, police brutality, and racial oppression.
OK.
When this country was formed, its flag first made, and United States citizenship was first made possible, the people we refer to as “black” who lived in the South were enslaved and, individually, counted as only 3/5 of a free person and, of course, had no citizenship. Freed blacks were considered whole, 5/5, people but were eventually also denied United States citizenship with the Dred Scott decision of 1857.
By 1857, 160 years ago and 70 years after the founding of the nation, the American flag no longer flew for any black person in the United States.
Blacks were then constitutionally guaranteed the right to vote in 1870 but this magnificent right was not fully protected by law until 95 years later with the Voting rights act of 1965, 52 years ago and 178 years after the nation’s founding. And during this period the degree of the suppression of black voting was perhaps second only to the degree of the outright persecution of the voters being suppressed.
So, using simple math, blacks have had full, working citizenship available to them for less than one-third the time of whites even though they’ve lived in the United States for just as long.
With such enormous discrepancies in historical paths to citizenship, it is simply not rational to think or believe there is not disproportionate profiling, discrimination, or oppression now, even if we don’t consider all of the other violated Civil Rights.
So, with all of this in mind, on a scale of 0-100, where would you put the present-day degree of successful citizenship for blacks as a group? 30? 60? More? Less?
How about for whites?
If you’ve been honest with yourself until now, you should understand–if you didn’t already–why people have been kneeling in protest of racial inequality and for a lot longer than anyone in the NFL has.
Within this historical context, taking a knee shows, IMHO, a level of class that is, at the very least, not ordinary and is far, far above the class of the criticisms thrown at it.
Rather than feeling offended at this exercise of First Amendment rights, perhaps we should feel fortunate that we live in a land where there also live so many of such grace and courage.
All it takes is a little class.