From The Intersection of Madness and Reality:
There ain’t no white man in this room that will change places with me — and I’m rich. That’s how good it is to be white. There’s a one-legged busboy in here right now that’s going: ‘I don’t want to change. I’m gonna ride this white thing out and see where it takes me.’ — Chris Rock
Colin Kaepernick has received a tremendous amount of (racist) backlash because of his refusal to stand during the national anthem. In his words, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” Kaepernick told the media after the game. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way… There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” Personally, I find the negative backlash against Kaepernick indicative of the fact that we live in a white supremacist society. Let us be clear here: racism is about “whiteness,” it is about “white people.”
From my perspective and, I would venture the perspective of many African Americans and Latino, Kaepernick is speaking out about a factual aspect of life in white America. Racism exists.
It’s interesting that the same people who become apoplectic whenever someone refuses an opportunity to be superficially patriotic typically criticize others for being oversensitive and hating freedom. They even have their own reasons for thinking that the country is in a bad state, but they can’t stand to hear anyone else voice a similar opinion with different reasoning.
I have never understood the nationalistic obsession with flags, anthems, and the various other symbols of the country as if they were the country itself. And I neither think nor care about how much my neighbor loves his country unless I have some reason to believe that he hates it so much as to take action against it. I must be some sort of commie heathen Islamofascist unamerican hedonist tree-hugging fairy coward beta cuck–or maybe I just wish that we weren’t so sensitive about so many unimportant things.
Kaepernick has every right to not stand for the anthem. I have every right to disagree with him and think there are better ways for him to make his case than this.