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Colin Kaepernick's Protest, And What Values Are Worth: David Roth's Weak In Review

Colin Kaepernick, in his protest, offers a challenge to a self-satisfied NFL: action instead of gesture, and a conversation instead of the usual noise.
Illustration by J.O. Applegate

On Thursday, Colin Kaepernick issued a statement regarding his socks. The public was owed nothing less. The public was very concerned about—or pretending to be very concerned about—the socks in question. The socks had little pig faces on them, and each pig was wearing a policeman's hat. Kaepernick had worn the socks at 49ers training camp on August 10, which was four days before he first sat down during the national anthem before a NFL preseason game, and more than three weeks before Steve Wyche asked Kaepernick to explain why he had been sitting during the national anthem.

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This looks, in the broad outlines—the pure blank goofiness inherent in the words Controversial Socks, the flags the size of football fields and all that delirious attention focused on a man who is presently backing up Blaine Gabbert on one of the NFL's worst teams—like the sort of story that blows through the last weeks of August every year. This is generally a grouchy, impatient, stupid time of year in the discourse. Summer is ending, there is nothing anyone can do about it, and everyone would rather be outside or asleep or drinking or on vacation or some combination of those. Because the discourse cannot do those things, the general tenor of the news swerves strongly towards the pissy and over-righteous as a result. This is absolutely the time of year when the NFL and its media apparatus, which as it happens are almost always already cruising along in the pissy/over-righteous lane, would grouse and seethe for an entire week about something a backup quarterback did. But the Colin Kaepernick story is not that.

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This story is not just another humid August News fartwave, because what Kaepernick did and why he did it are more serious than that. More than that, the actual seriousness of Kaepernick's protest has blown a hole, deep and wide, right through the pomp and pretense and vast self-seriousness of the NFL and the conversation it wraps around it. The result has been a pitched battle between Kaepernick's protest in itself, and the forces of that goonish rhetorical universe in which it occurred.

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The protest itself is telling. Kaepernick sat through "The Star-Spangled Banner" several times before Wyche asked him to explain why, and Kaepernick has not stopped explaining it since, explaining and re-explaining it concisely and coherently and with startling patience. That explanation resolves to Kaepernick's wish to bring attention to various longstanding national disgraces that, because they tend disproportionately to victimize poor people and people of color, are viewed by some people as more of a disgrace than they are by others. This is a wide-ranging critique—wide-ranging enough to include pointed criticism of both Presidential candidates, among other things—but not a terribly complicated one to understand. "Some people aren't given the same rights, given the same opportunities, as other people," Kaepernick said after Thursday's final preseason game. "That's really what the issue is."

Acknowledging and addressing this state of affairs is not a radical thing in itself; Kaepernick has been open about the fact that his goal is greater conversation, not the immediate and non-negotiable implementation of Colin Kaepernick's extremely specific seven-point plan to eliminate racism and reform community policing. The protest is, as the sociologist Harry Edwards wrote, fundamentally about a refusal to be silent. The NFL is a noisy thing, but it prefers its own symphonic soundtrack. This is, strictly speaking, some floridly psychotic music—there is the league's familiar rum-dummy-dum gladiator-movie rhythm section, but there are also a half-dozen squalling solos being played over it concurrently at any given time. The only way to make sense of the resulting din—the grim rumbling of a sour, scolding media apparatus, the airless synthesized americana of various NFL-aligned advertisers, the denatured waiting-room Mantovani of the league's own brand managers, some discordant and disturbing and increasingly loud noises coming from somewhere within the walls and ductwork—is to understand that it's the sort of music that the league's bizarre billionaire owners enjoy listening to.

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When paying attention to current events gets you in trouble with literally every NFL exec. Photo by John Hefti-USA TODAY Sports

The NFL has always been weird, in ways endearing and not, but it is never weirder than its most powerful people and their most powerfully weird beliefs. We get glimpses, at moments, of how strange these beliefs are, and even those little flashes reveal some astonishing depths of curdled vengefulness and deluded grandiosity. The NFL perceives of itself as a nation state within the United States, but somehow more American than America; it has its own unaccountable and mostly incompetent justice system, and that justice system is effectively without an appeals process.

But the defining aesthetic aspect over the league's ascent over the last decade and a half is the extent to which the NFL has come to see itself as a sort of unofficial auxiliary branch of the armed forces, and the attendant tendency to treat its games—which are, at the risk of belaboring an obvious point, games—as campaigns in an elaborately staged play-war. A state of permanent war is not healthy for any political body, as you have probably noticed, and the NFL's state of play-war has been corrosive in ways that parallel the broader culture's. In the same way that America is more sentimental than serious about the people that fight and die in our abstracted and boundless and endless wars—quick to pay solemn and tearful tribute to the heroism of The Troops, but notably less keen on paying for their more mundane and more concrete and more vital needs—the NFL is more sentimental than serious about its own vaunted values. The league's belief that it is important and stands for something important is unmistakably sincere; we might as well take at their ridiculous word the anonymous NFL execs who called Kaepernick a "traitor" and suggested they'd sooner resign than have him play for their teams. But just because the NFL believes its own wild rhetoric doesn't mean that rhetoric is believable. The NFL hasn't ever been very serious about defining what those important things are, or about actually standing for them. It has always been much more committed to gesture than actual action.

This is a defensive instinct dressed up as a series of bold stances and statements. In the NFL's rhetorical universe, where Kaepernick is concerned, that instinct has amounted to an increasingly panicked attempt to change the topic of conversation. Not so much to change it away from Kaepernick's focus on the old crushing problems of inequality and injustice and the violence they make, specifically, so much as just away, onto something else. There is something both pathetic and transparent in the quickness with which Kaepernick's protest was rewritten into a sneering insult directed at The Troops, as if the national anthem was the military's personal theme song. Too much time at war makes that strange conflation entirely too easy to make, but mostly it makes it convenient; it is an uncomfortable thing to consider that the facts on the ground in this nation have made the national anthem less anthemic for some Americans than others, and it is a relatively more comfortable one to mount, in response, a defense those brave and nebulous heroes we insist on continuing to throw in harm's way. The directions in which this exercise in changing the subject goes are familiar, and this week had them all—aridly expert conjecture about locker-room distractions, fervid assertions that Kaepernick's guaranteed salary somehow disproves the existence of systemic racism, a thousand different species of sorrowful or rageful tone-policing, and a frantic toggling between pop-eyed fury at Kaepernick's entitled whining and earnest umbrage at his very hurtful choice of socks that one time. They are all cul de sacs, but some people like to live on those.

For the time being, though, there is something encouraging about the fact we are still hearing Kaepernick at all. For all the determined signaling of the NFL and its many mouthpieces—those righteous boos and the comment-section Churchill of those anonymous executives, the attempts by branded bloviators to get things back on their own personal messages—there is a conversation going on independent of it. Kaepernick was joined in his protest by a teammate on Thursday night, and by a player on the Seahawks. Kaepernick's cause was taken up by some veterans and given a respectful close-quarters hearing by others. The goonish rhetorical universe of pro football has yet to consume Colin Kaepernick and the conversation he is trying to start.

It's hard to say what any of this is, at this point. It might just be August, and a middling quarterback's social consciousness briefly piercing the NFL's bulletproof surface. At any rate, the preseason is over. We know what is coming next, because it is what the NFL always gives us: the flyovers will fly over as scheduled, and the fields will still be blanked by American flags before kickoff; the anthem still plays at the appointed time. This is all part of the spectacle, but not anyone's favorite part. The exciting part, the one with all the promise, is what comes after that.

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