Taking a Knee

He's 34 years old. He's worth about $20 million dollars and was a quarterback in the NFL for six seasons.

The internet tells me the average length of an NFL career is just 3.3 years or 4.44 years for quarterbacks. My general understanding is those careers are so short on average because injuries take a lot of people out and a lot of football players end up permanently brain damaged from repeated concussions.

That's from a piece that asks Does he agree with the world framing him as a victim?

Some weeks or months before writing that piece in May 2022, I happened to look up information about Colin Kaepernick. I was surprised at the picture it painted of a sincere Christian, a soft-spoken individual who didn't intend to start a movement and just quietly sat out the pledge of allegiance because he's Black and wasn't feeling it, given how Black Americans get treated.

The impression I got at that time was very different from the histrionic drama queen I imagined him to be from having only seen the headlines without really following the story.

I was molested and raped as a child by my brother and attended the wedding of a close friend of the family where I got sat with my brother over my objections. I was a teenager. I don't know how else I might have handled it. I sat there and quietly cried and felt violated and disrespected all over again.

I completely sympathize with a Black man FEELING like "I don't really wish to show my respects for a country that CLEARLY has no respect for me and my people."

And then it blew up. 

It's been nearly four years since I first looked up information about him. My views of the whole thing and of him have changed over time.

He wasn't trying to publicize that. As far as I know, prior to that he wasn't writing editorials or running a blog about Black Americans and Civil Rights or similar.

I don't know WHY he seemingly went along with it. He's a Black guy born out of wedlock to a teen mother and raised by a White family. As a guess, his decision to let the world railroad him was rooted in a desire to get accepted by the Black community.

It probably didn't actually get him the sense of belonging he may have been hoping for.

I felt cut off from my heritage as someone who had a German mother who didn't want to teach me German. I lived in Germany in my twenties. I visited relatives. I improved my German. I got over the hole in my soul.

But, no, I didn't develop lifelong German friends or stay in touch with any of the relatives I briefly visited or establish some sense of belonging.

I think most people don't really have that. There's a story about one of the members of The Beatles going to another member and complaining "I'm out. YOU three are so tight and I'm not really included." and being told "I thought it was you three."

He was given a humanitarian award for that. I don't really know WHY. I'm not aware of any hard evidence of meaningful improvements in the status of Black Americans because of this symbolic gesture.

He initially quietly sat it out on a bench on the sidelines. Taking a knee is him bending his knee to criticisms that he was disrespecting American veterans.

So he tried to find some means to both object to what this country is doing and show his respect for veterans.

It perhaps would have been better for him to tell the press to leave him alone. He's not interested in being used as a symbol -- AKA made into a TARGET -- for problems that will not be solved by a symbolic gesture. He's just not feeling it and not doing it.

I have no reason to believe his NFL career was truly "cut short" by this bullshit. I don't know the man. Maybe he sat down because "My knees are killing me and THIS pointless bullshit showing respect for this RACIST country isn't worth enduring the knee pain."

Maybe it was actually solely knee pain that caused him to sit on his ass and he didn't FEEL like admitting that and came up with a better sounding reason: I'm Black. This country is racist as hell. That's why!

Maybe the truth is this was a convenient cover story for the fact that he was at the end of his NFL career anyway and knew it. And then let people railroad him into being a symbol because he expected the NFL to fire him and he thought that was somehow better than blowing out a knee like so many other football players have done and then retiring and trying to start life over doing something more ordinary.

The NFL requires all football players to take financial education because they are young and have short careers and most of them will never again make this kind of money. Perhaps he saw it as a way to have a post-football career bigger than his already impressive football career that I only know about because he got famous for taking a knee.

In most cases, "amazing football career" still means "Probably most people have never heard of you and don't really care what you accomplished."

The reality is that most people are far more willing to back an empty symbolic gesture that gets a lot of press than to tolerate any meaningful improvements in the status of oppressed peoples. His gesture almost certainly benefited him more than "the status of Black Americans."

He got known as a paragon of virtue and sincere Christian while being a young hot shot multimillionaire shacked up out of wedlock with some chick who most likely was with him for his money. He doesn't appear to have been convinced she loved him because he appears to have married her only after she got knocked up.

Shotgun weddings are a means to tell irresponsible assholes to grow the fuck up and do right now that you got a girl in trouble. This detail about his life conflicts with the narrative that he's some paragon of virtue.

Your takeaway from his story should not be "Symbolically taking a stand on an important ethical issue is extremely important! He's a role model!"

It should be that if you care about the people, symbolic gestures probably don't really help the people. They merely serve the agenda of -- in this case -- racist White Supremacist overlords THRILLED to have headlines in every paper focused on someone who supposedly CARES while no meaningful changes occur for Black Americans who aren't talented athletes making millions.

I don't think he set out to make a difference for the Black community. I don't think he deserves a humanitarian award. I don't think he's a paragon of virtue.

He's either an asshole who saw opportunity to benefit himself when it blew up and spin the end of his dying NFL career as something better for him than "My knees gave out." Or he's a naive fool who IMAGINED that allowing himself to be railroaded and martyred would somehow be worth it as "for the greater good."

I'm not Christian. My father was a two-time decorated veteran. I'm well aware that there are circumstances where someone needs to be sacrificed for a cause.

Everything I know about Christianity suggests it has bizarre, dysfunctional ideas about such things. And I believe it actively fosters a lot of bad stuff by encouraging people to "play hero" and look like the good guy for personal gain.

That's probably the story here. Because as far as I can tell, the only person who significantly benefited from Colin Kaepernick taking a knee is Colin Kaepernick.