Analysis Of Colin Kaepernick's Speech

Roughly a month ago, Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, elected to not stand during the playing of the national anthem. For those who may be unaware, that is an unprecedented action in the National Football League. At first, nobody really noticed, but after repeating his actions in the successive weeks, social media exploded with all sorts of opinions on the situation. With the spotlight suddenly glaring on him, in a series of statements and interviews, Kaepernick explained that he refused to stand up during the national anthem and show pride in a country that oppresses people of color, especially blacks. Fellow athletes across the nation joined him in various ways to show solidarity, and were met with both tremendous

The first condition necessary to create and promote this system of white superiority was a lack of education amongst blacks. Many blacks thus supported Booker T. Washington’s mentality, one that promoted passive acquiescence to white power by learning basic skills such as reading and writing, and then attending vocational schools. In Washington’s own words, delivered at the 1895 Atlanta Exposition Address, “Cast down your bucket where you are… No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top” (Washington 219-220). It seems absurd for Washington to claim that blacks needed to begin at the bottom of life, when they had always been at the bottom of life in America. Although his view was widely accepted, it was antithetical and full of pitfalls compared to that proposed by the supremely educated scholar W.E.B.

However, because of the continued and systematic marginalization of black people in the United States, many find themselves in a similar dispute that Washington and Du Bois were arguing over; what’s better, to forgo education or forgo menial financial stability. But, white people haven’t been living in that system, nor are they taught about it, therefore they don’t understand it. This has given way to a domination of implicit racism and subconscious stereotypes, which circles back to the Kaepernick situation. Many people view Kaepernick’s actions as disrespectful and egregious because they don’t understand the plight of black people. Furthermore, it seems that the faction who oppose Kaepernick are unable to realize that it’s possible to simultaneously love the United States and acknowledge that there are tremendous problems here. My father was a first responder at the Pentagon on 9/11, and my grandfather was in the military, yet I still support Colin Kaepernick. I do, not because I don’t have a tremendous respect for the service men and women of our country, but because I understand that the veil is still alive and controlling our society. Although Du Bois would be detested with the current state of racial relations in the United States, he would support people like myself who strive to live in an America that