Much has been discussed recently regarding former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and his silent protests during the 2016 National Football League season, where he knelt on one knee during the singing of the national anthem to protest police brutality. After opting out of his contract, Kaepernick became a free agent. Even though his career numbers put him around the middle of the pack as far as the quarterbacks currently available to play, except for a meeting with the Seattle Seahawks, no other NFL team has contacted Kaepernick for a meeting, and as of this writing he is still without a team. Sports television’s talking heads and many individuals with a Facebook account have cried foul. They say the NFL is blackballing Kaepernick, that he belongs on a team and that the league’s owners are all racist for choosing not to sign him. Last Wednesday, hundreds of disgruntled fans protested in front of the NFL offices, demanding that their grievance about Kaepernick be heard. Major, professional sports are white power structures. In the NFL 97 percent of the majority owners are white, 88 percent of the head coaches are white and 74 percent of the league’s front office is white, while 70 percent of the NFL players are Black. This is a common, American paradigm: white businesses flourish through the exploitation of Black prowess. The Black athlete is praised and lauded for his athletic feats, and, through lucrative endorsements,

becomes the face of your favorite sneaker company or kid’s cereal. However, team owners and corporate heads still consider athletes property to be bought and sold. They are not expected or required by their owners to have a political stance on anything, but are only expected to perform under the lights, and to smile for the cameras while endorsing material products. But these athletes are men, and some of these men understand basic social dynamics: As athletes they have the ability to reach millions of people by speaking out.

Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf was the third pick of the 1990 NBA draft. Starting in 1996, Abdul-Rauf refused to stand for the national anthem before games, citing that he saw the flag and the anthem as symbols of oppression. David Stern the NBA commissioner at that time suspended Abdul-Rauf for one game. Abdul-Rauf met with Stern, and as a compromise he agreed to stand during the anthem, but he was allowed to bow his head and pray as a silent protest. Even given his compromise Abdul-Rauf was considered by NBA owners to be too risky to sign, and he only played in 62 games after the 1996 season. The punishment that comes from speaking out is proof positive that the athlete isn’t free to be anything other than a pawn of sport. Muhammad Ali lost five years in the prime of his career for refusing induction into the Army. Tommy Smith and John Carlos were expelled from the Olympic Games in 1968 for their Black power salute on the medal podium. Over and over again, the owners and heads of sporting organizations have sent a clear and concise point to its chattel: If you use our brand and our platform to speak on social issues that are not in alignment with our ideals, we will make an example out of you. Many players have been asleep for too long, and know not their true power. If the top 30 Black NFL players decided to leave and form their own league, the NFL would be in serious danger.

All of this leads us back to the Kaepernick conundrum. The public demand to force the NFL to make a team hire him is a very peculiar way to show support for him. Since he has become a free agent, Kaepernick has been at work with his nonprofit organization, Kaepernick7. Through that organization, he has pledged to donate $1 million to organizations working in oppressed communities. He donated $25,000 to Black Veterans for Social Justice, an organization based in Brooklyn, that serves veterans and their families. The work he is doing right now is meaningful and necessary. To demand that he go back to being under the thumb of the NFL is counterproductive at best, and reeks of Black subordinateness at worst. We should not demand that he be brought back to the plantation to prove a point. We know that he is being passed over because owners don’t want to deal with hiring a socially conscious, middle-of-the-road quarterback, and his spirit to effect change in our communities is where we should be supporting him and other similarly minded athletes. So let’s choose today to support our athletes in protest, not by crying at the white power structure of sports to be lenient on our heroes, but by supporting their positions as our positions, so that other athletes understand the importance of speaking out.