Primemeridian- I am okay with protests as I said. I do not want public schools to be able to fire or punish teachers that protest so yes I am okay with it. I am also okay with the private school that announced their would be consequences for anyone that did not stand for the anthem.
I also realize that people do not agree with me on every issue and I still support their right to non-violent protest.
Prime- I do because he is being paid to coach and whether he stands or not during the anthem does not impact what he is being paid for.
I think a good protest would be they stand and rather than right hand over their heart they place their left hand over their right breast.
Isn’t it ironic that those who don’t kneel on Sundays are upset when football players kneel on the sidelines?
I believe that any protest behavior during the anthem is going to only make racial divisions worse. People are choosing sides and digging in. As a country, it appears there is a great underlying and displaced anger among many,many people that is just waiting for a big enough tear in the fabric to billow out. I get what is trying to be achieved. I just believe this particular mode of protest will spark unintended consequences. I pray I am wrong.
This could get very,very ugly.
We need unity. Not division.
This brings us back to the same old question --when, where, and just how subtle do you want protests to be? What events should they not interfere with? What topics should they not cover? What’s the lowest level of comfort you’re willing to reach?
Rather, let’s get to the root cause of why an athlete choose to protest during such an American moment. What made them be so disrespectful to such a great country?
Come on now. We need unity, yes, but let’s take a moment and analyze what’s making the largest impacts on division. It’s not a player kneeling during the national anthem.
sax people who protested against mistreatment have always taken the chance that their actions could make things worse. It is easy for those not facing this mistreatment to say why do you have to agitate like that, you should do it another way, give it time.
You know sometimes you need to just push back.
The best research evidence about this, by a black Harvard professor, suggests that the statement that blacks get shot more often during police interactions is false. This is only one study, albeit a fairly careful one. It is certainly not all roses for blacks though, as the same study shows that non-lethal force is used more often.
Actually police kill far too many Americans, of all colors, who pose no threat. So far, there are no statistics that suggest police kill blacks who pose no threat more often than they do whites for example.
@PrimeMeridian I don’t really know what is appropriate for the coach. I was referring to Kapernick himself. Should his status as a school employee not allow him to protest an issue he sees as important? It doesn’t sound like he forced anyone to kneel. Influenced sure, but I could think of a list of things I would be uncomfortable being influenced about in schools, but I don’t think most people would agree they should be gotten rid of. Should being a school employee automatically make him be forced to be patriotic?
I think the problem is that the American flag and the anthem mean very different things to many different people.
The football player kneels to say America is not treating black Americans equally. But many people don’t understand this. They see it with their own filter.
I think it is just too open to misunderstanding.
One person sees this and agrees.
One person feels this is a direct attack on the military and believes the protester does not respect their sacrifice.
And on and on.
I was flipping through the radio stations on my way home from work and was shocked and disgusted with the rhetoric and fear mongering I was hearing. Slanted lies just stirring this pot into a real lather.
I will admit the timing of this particular protest with the very heated political race is maybe too much for me.
Its like the perfect storm.
The calls for “unity” and pushbacks against protests because they "only divide’ were addressed by MLK, Jr. in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” eloquently.
I think everyone ought to read that yearly. It’s a masterpiece, and explains why protest, both direct and indirect, is sometimes necessary.
@hebegebe:
This isn’t just about blacks being killed by police, it is about systemic racism that often involves the police. If you have any black friends, ask them about being pulled over for ‘driving when black’, when a cop pulls them over because they are driving a fancy car or are in 'the wrong area". It is about Trayvon Martin, who was targeted and killed by George Zimmerman because he was a black kid walking in a ‘white’ area. It is about someone who has a small vial of crack cocaine on them getting 10 years in jail, whereas someone who is white who gets caught with the same amount of powder cocaine, would get lighter sentence? I haven’t seen any statistical study of police shootings that indicates that whites or other non blacks get shot at the same rate, without a citing of the actual study it is hard to judge whether in fact they are or aren’t. On the other hand, how often are blacks pulled over, with no other evidence of a crime or a thing like a broken taillight that would justify pulling them over, versus non blacks?
“I believe that any protest behavior during the anthem is going to only make racial divisions worse. People are choosing sides and digging in.” To quote John Adams in ‘1776’, when someone objected to language that might insult Parliament, he said “We are in the middle of a revolution, damn it, someone is going to be offended”. I doubt protesting during the Anthem is going to split the country any more than it has, very few people I suspect who understand why BLM exists, what the anger is about, are going to be turned off by Kapernick kneeling, based on my own experiences with what people say, those getting upset at Kapernick protesting are likely also people who look at the BLM movement and say (in not so nice terms) “that is a load of BS, blacks are being targeted because they commit more crimes than others, they aren’t being targeted because they are black” and the like, their positions are already hardened. A lot of this is based in the same divides we see with class and education, at work the people I work with/among are mostly white collar, educated (and spread all over the country, our main headquarters in down south), and they don’t see a problem with the protest for the most part, whereas the people that are more blue collar, clerical and technicians and the like, tend to be more upset about the protest…
Public school teachers are in a unique position with things, and there is a delicate line there. Because public school teachers are public employees, they enjoy a right to freedom of speech that employees at private businesses don’t (court rulings have upheld this across the board). Where it does get tricky is that right to free speech, including politics, is limited where it might create an uncomfortable classroom environment, where the teacher could be construed as being biased towards certain people. A teacher can support kids rights to boycott standing for the National Anthem on the grounds that is their right without expressing his/her own position, but they also have the right to express their opinion as long as they don’t turn it into “I am right, and any of you who believe differently are wrong, racists, etc”…there is a difference. To the counter of this, I have heard from religious conservatives who say if a teacher has the rights under the 1st amendment (public school here, remember), why can’t they express their beliefs about gays or about evolution in the classroom? The answer lies in my first paragraph, that if expressing those opinions creates the impression of bias on the teacher’s part, or that they are worse, trying to use that to convince kids they are wrong, or that if they do they won’t be treated fairly, it is about an ‘orderly classroom’.
BTW, with the national anthem or the pledge, the school cannot force the teacher to lead the pledge or to stand for the national anthem. Leaving out the right to protest (that might be murky) there is a long, long line of court decisions that forbids compelling people to say the pledge (which would likely be extended to the national anthem and standing for it), you don’t need a religious excuse for it, kids can’t be compelled to do either, and neither can be coaches. They could tell the coach for example not to raise his right fist, or to wear a BLM T shirt, but with the pledge or anthem there already is precedent about that right. And yes, the reason there were court cases is there have been states that have made saying the pledge mandatory and/or singing the Anthem, and those laws have all been heaved out. I wouldn’t be surprised in light of the Colin Kapernick thing that some dim congressperson introduces a constitutional amendment to make it mandatory to say the pledge or stand for the anthem, there are always those that think Patriotism can be forced, and it isn’t just the leader of North Korea or Putin.
Well, it’s better than burning and looting.
@garland Great point. I read that in one of my English classes and it was an impressive piece of writing. But those divisions were a lot more obvious - the days of blatant segregation. I think there is still some reasonable doubt that this whole thing is really a systematic problem rather than a collection of isolated incidents that has been blown up by the media to fan the fire. I’m not saying cops were right in all situations, in several I feel their actions were criminal and should have been/should be prosecuted. But I also know not all cops are racist and/or trigger happy. It’s a very volatile situation that likely isn’t as black and white (pardon the pun) as some would seem to believe.
But maybe I’m wrong. Only time will tell if the kneeling protests will have an effect or not.
I believe it is important to be accurate. Because it is only with issues are discussed accurately that problems are properly identified and can be addressed. Inaccurate statements can be used to both bolster and discredit a movement.
When an earlier poster suggested that black people pulled over are more likely to be shot, I pointed out that this commonly held assertion appears to be false, I am not stating that innocent blacks and whites get pulled over at the same rates.
I participate in political protests. But I don’t do it on my employer’s dime.
@hebegebe:
I understand what you are saying, and myth often can be harmful. For example, there is a widespread myth out there that Dr. Drew, a black doctor and researcher, who was credited with the development of the blood bank system we use today during WWII, he also was a researcher and surgeon of some note. He was in an automobile accident in 1950 and died, and the popular myth is he was refused treatment by a white only hospital, that they refused to put “white blood” in a black man, which wasn’t true (the other 3 people in the car were doctors, and they said his injuries were such that likely nothing could have saved him).
The protests are not just about killing blacks, it is also about unfair treatment by cops and other things blacks still face, system racism. I don’t know whether blacks are shot and killed more often by white cops or not, but I also haven’t seen too many cases where a cop pulls someone over, and kills a guy on video, where the victim was white and there was no seeming justification for doing it, or the way it was with the guy in minnesota who told the cop he was legally carrying and the cop shot and killed him. Maybe the cases of whites being killed aren’t made a big deal of, that could be possible.
As far as the argument about the protests potentially turning some people off, dividing us, Dr. King did address it. And yes, this political campaign has shown just how ugly the divisions are (though to be honest, they make it seem like this came out of nowhere, this ugliness has been out there all along, it has been an undercurrent for a long, long time, it only is now it is out in the open because the ugliness is out there in black and white).
However, the argument that the protest would do more harm then good was out there in Dr. King’s time, and the argument that people made against the civil rights movement and the civil rights laws and the like was that that would just get people angry, it would alienate those supporting Jim Crow and rent apart ‘their society’ (those words are not mine, they were either Barry Goldwater or Buckley I believe), there are politicians to this day who argued it would have been better to let the Jim Crow states come to the right decision ‘naturally’, whatever the heck that means, that the civil rights movement left angry people, divisions, that ‘wouldn’t have happened had we tred lightly’ and the like (the last is a paraphrase). While there is no doubt they were right that it left people angry (and many of the politicians who were against the protests and the civil rights laws used that anger to their advantage later,while those who supported it paid a price), the reality is that if the protests hadn’t happened, if Jim Crow hadn’t been destroyed the way it was, we would be dealing with another kind of anger today and much more vicious than people kneeling at the Anthem if we hadn’t of done what was done.
Peaceful protest changed people’s perception of race and Jim Crow, it didn’t solve all the problems or many of them, but when people saw peaceful protestors killed, hit by firehoses, when they heard and saw the hate of the segregationists, it changed perceptions. I don’t know if kneeling at the anthem will change anything, I don’t know if BLM protests or t shirts will change anything, but at the very least it keeps it out in the open and doesn’t let it be buried as a blurb in a paper or on a news website.
Let me ask a related q. Should a public school teacher/coach be allowed to wear a pro-Trump or a pro-Clinton t shirt while on duty? Or course he has the right to do so on his own time. I don’t know what the “ruling” is but it would seem it would be linked to whether a public school teacher/coach should be “allowed” to protest while on duty.
Something I heard a long time ago I try to remember when asked to take a position on this:
“The best reason not to burn the flag is because you are allowed to”.
Taking a strong position on either side is a kind of hypocrisy. Let everyone do their thing if it hurts no one else. That’s America.
For those who say there is no evidence of police racism, I have an anecdotal story from two weeks ago when my wife and son were pulled over in an Uber they were in. Cop said “Oh this is an Uber? OK, I pulled you over because your license plate bracket obscures the top part of the name of the state”.
And not because it was a young black man driving a brand new Mercedes. Of course.
Children do not have true “freedom of speech” at school/events.
Adults do not have the “freedom of speech” at work and/or in work uniform.
Rob Lowe made a good point about those players who don’t want to stand during the anthem…Remain in the locker room until after the anthem.
Actually, the Supreme Court ruled otherwise regarding patriotic ceremonies in schools in the following 1943 case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_State_Board_of_Education_v._Barnette
Incidentally, the case was brought by Jehovah’s Witnesses, but the ruling was made mostly on free speech grounds.
In short, any school official attempting to punish students for failure to stand for the anthem or participate in the Pledge of Allegiance would be violating the free speech rights of the students to not participate.
Prior to 9/11, it wasn’t uncommon for entire teams (at least on the college level) to be in the locker room when the national anthem was played. Just how pregame process often worked. Since that date though pretty much every team that I have seen (on all levels) is out of the locker room for the national anthem.
You typically see some people talking to friends around them, checking their phones, etc. during the national anthem. The idea that a few team members (or entire teams) taking a knee during the anthem is so problematic that it should be avoided seems silly to me. Let the players/coaches do that they want (at least as long as not done in a disruptive manner). If it bothers you, boycott the player/team/league. Boycott sponsors of the players (on the pro level at least). Same thing people do when players/teams/leagues do something else that bothers you. Or just let it go and entire the rest of the show.
Same is true of actors. I know people who will not see any movies if they disagree with views/statements (typically political) of an actor/actress in the movie or director of a movie. So be it.