I am not a sports fan. I grew up in Alabama under the Holy Trinity – Jesus Christ, Paul Bear Bryant, and George Wallace (and if you don’t recognize those names, you’re either young or not from the South, or public-school educated in the last 20 years, or all of the above…just Google it) – so it is perhaps more accurate to call myself a recovering sports addict. I grew up in the shadow of the mighty SEC – Southeastern Conference, not the Securities and Exchange Commission – which includes such college football powerhouses as the University of Alabama, Auburn, University of Florida, University of Georgia, and the like (it is all coming back to me as I write). I attended the Florida State University during the heyday of Bobby Bowden during the never-ending college career of Dion Sanders who was a student at FSU when I got there, was a student at FSU when I graduated, was a student at FSU when I worked for a year, was a student at FSU when I went back, and was a student at FSU when I left with a second bachelor’s degree. In the days of Bear Bryant and Shug Jordan, every newborn left the hospital wrapped in a receiving blanket of his family’s chosen team – red and white for the Crimson Tide of the University of Alabama or orange and blue for the War Eagles of Auburn University.
My life’s path began to take me away from the Southeast in 1988, and though I was back in Alabama for six years in the late 90s, I have spent the past sixteen years in the Pacific Northwest, so the SEC and its focus on football have long faded to a distant memory, and I’ve just never replaced it with an allegiance to any of the local options available to me.
I offer this particular retrospective as a foundation upon which to launch my comments over the current kerfuffle over kneeling or standing or standing and locking arms over the National Anthem by professional athletes.
Even though we do not have cable TV – don’t even own a television at the moment – even we could not escape the cyber outrage over (I’m looking up his name, because otherwise, his name means nothing to me) Colin Kaepernick sitting, then kneeling for the National Anthem. While I haven’t discussed it with the man himself, it appears his intent is to protest “social injustice and police brutality.”
Even though I don’t watch sports, I gotta’ say that my first thought when I hear such things is, “Really? How dare you!” A little further “googling” into Kaepernick’s personal background only intensifies this perspective.
According to Wikipedia (yeah, I know…it was either Wikipedia or the New York Times…I couldn’t decide between which fictional source to choose), Mr. Social Injustice was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to a 19-year-old white woman who was “single and destitute at the time.” His African-American father (if she is “white,” why isn’t he called “black?”) apparently never made an appearance after doing the deed. Realizing she had little or nothing to offer her son, his birth mother gave him up, and he was adopted by a white family who raised him along with their two birth children.
Now, at age 29, Mr. Social Injustice finds himself being brutalized and discriminated against at every turn…being held down by “the man”…his hopes and dreams for a better future destroyed by a system that refuses to allow the common man to get ahead, right? Think again.
More googling reveals that Colin Kaepernick signed a 6 year, $114,000,000 contract with the San Francisco 49ers, including a $12,328,766 signing bonus, $61,000,000 guaranteed, and an average annual salary of $19,000,000.
Kaepernick is being hailed as some hero because he has pledged to donate the first $1 million of his $12 million signing bonus to charity. Based on the projected $19 million annual average, that’s $1 million for charity, and $18 million for him – roughly $1.5 million a month- give or take a hundred-thousand or two. One article I read boasts, “Kaepernick to Put His Money Where His Mouth Is.” Based on these numbers (a nickel out of every dollar he makes), I’d say it was more along the lines of putting his money where his middle finger is, but that’s just me. It also appears that he will donate 100% of the money he makes off jersey sales (two-thirds of the profit from every jersey sale according to Fortune Magazine) will go “back into the community,” but no one seems to know what that really means.
At the heart of it all, I find it totally ironic – if not more than a little offensive – that someone whose own life so boldly demonstrates the American dream in all its red, white, and blue glory has the balls to sit (kneel) there and whine about “social injustice.” Does it exist? Certainly it exists. Has Kaepernick experienced it? Well, not so’s you’d notice.
While I fully recognize his Constitutional right to exercise free speech and sit or kneel or stand on his head (or any other way he’d like to make an ass out of himself) during the playing of the National Anthem, and the charities and communities into which he will toss his loose change are no doubt grateful for the pledged-but-as-not-yet-delivered dollars, I am saddened that Kaepernick misses the whole solution to social injustice and the power of the individual that membership in this incredible nation called America offers each of us. Kaepernick more than most of us, doesn’t have far to look to find the real solution to social injustice – namely to the parents who raised him. Rick and Teresa Kaepernick – a white couple – took a mix-race child in 1987 and invested everything they had into him such that this child, born to a single teen mother in 1987 kneels before you today with a $114 million contract clenched tightly in the fist he so freely raises (philosophically, if not literally) in the name of social injustice.
The freedom that America offers each of us is not about a professional athlete using his platform of privilege to protest a flawed system (though that is a byproduct, no doubt), but rather the power of America is about the power of each individual to make a difference right where he or she lives, whether that be a white couple in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, or one in a place such as Council, Idaho.