When Donald Trump started to use Colin Kaepernick as his own personal Willie Horton, the message of taking that knee immediately morphed into something else. No longer, in the debates and discussions pinging from CNN to sports radio, was the debate about racial inequity and police violence. Now it was about the flag, the troops, and racial demonization.
Yet as Trump’s attacks on black dissenters became more shrill, with a series of tweets and calls for players to be fired (“Get that son-of-a-bitch off the field”), as well as a clumsily choreographed stunt involving Vice President Mike Pence’s walking out of a game in Indianapolis after players knelt for the anthem, something remarkable happened. Like a clear note breaking through the cacophony, the message has broken through, and most people are actually able to identify why players were taking a knee in the first place.
According to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll, that’s exactly what has happened. As reporter Ariel Edwards-Levy summarized, “Asked to identify from a list the main reason the players are protesting, a 57 percent majority of Americans surveyed said it was in response to ‘police violence.’ That’s up from 48 percent in a HuffPost/YouGov poll taken in late September.”
This flies in the face of much conventional wisdom. We have been led to believe that most people exist in an echo chamber where rightwing talking points ricochet through the mainstream media without examination. Or that all you have to say is “troops,” “anthem,” and “America,” and whoever is trying to make a salient point will be hopelessly backed into a corner.
That this has not happened is due, above all else, to the players themselves. It would have been easy—not to mention tempting—for the players to go tit-for-tat with Trump and use their own mammoth social media followings to simply bash him back. Instead, they have managed to convey, “This is not about Donald Trump. This is about racism. This is about criminal justice. This is about police violence.”
It would have been easy for the players to go tit-for-tat with Trump on social media. Instead, they have conveyed, “This is not about Donald Trump. This is about racism. This is about criminal justice. This is about police violence.”
And consider what happened after Houston Texans owner (and billionaire Trump backer) Bob McNair referred to players’ activism as “the inmates running the prison.” Here’s what Philadelphia Eagle Malcolm Jenkins said in response:
“Obviously his comments will represent him, but from a player’s standpoint, we’re focused on our goals, we feel like we still have an opportunity to move forward with whoever is interested in doing that, and so hopefully we can get that same type of commitment from those in league leadership. That’s our goal. It’s not to appease one another, it’s not to change someone’s personal opinion, it’s just to get some actual work done and change done.”
Another hopeful sign is the number of vets who have stood up—or taken a knee—in support of these protests. They have fought to ensure that their time in the armed forces is not used as a shibboleth to bash players for exercising rights that are protected by both the Constitution and their collective bargaining agreements.
Last year, in response to Kaepernick’s protest, Veterans for Peace issued a statement calling on “others with high visibility to speak out and take action in various ways for peace and justice and demand a fair and just national response to address these and many other critical issues faced by people” in the United States and abroad.
Rory Fanning, a member of Veterans for Peace and a former Army Ranger who served with the late NFL player Pat Tillman, killed in Afghanistan in 2004, also supports the protests. He tells me, “Veterans who understand that there is a gap between what that flag promises and the lived experiences of black Americans have a critical role to play.”
That role, as he explains it, is to “make sure that this discussion does not get hijacked. It’s to make it clear that veterans are not of one mind on this issue, and it is to make sure that this discussion is exactly where it needs to be: about racism and police brutality.”
Dave Zirin
Dave Zirin
There is also a lesson in this for the rest of us: If we are clear in our goals, tenacious in our methods, and don’t lose ourselves to the daily social media wars of the moment, we can beat back the Trump agenda.
Dave Zirin is the host of the popular Edge of Sports podcast and sports editor of The Nation.