A Reason to Sit With Colin Kaepernick

We are all on the bench for the opening of the 49ers first game this season. These United States are in the throws of a heated conversation about what an “insider” like Hillary Clinton and an “outsider” like Donald Trump may bring to the table in November. Polls show Trump’s open and candid approach is divisive, as is Clinton’s alleged hidden information.

We are torn between wanting to watch the game and not wanting to think about how the gladiators on the field are susceptible to life-damaging concussions, and whether the pom pom shaking cheerleaders are contributing to the rape culture that makes an amateur athlete like Brock Turner a household name.

Further, our citizens of the capital of this free and brave nation still are missing the right to vote.

Kaepernick personifies this battle, this reason to give pause and consider what is truly valuable as we shift in power from our first African-American president among increasing concern over climate change, missile testing, and the economic well being of our own. Kaepernick, though only recently a household name himself, is already an expert in this field, having been born biracial and adopted into a now melting pot of a family some 29 years ago.

For the “Two or More” humans, like him, it is not always easy to know who your team is. Only in the year 2000, 16 years ago — some 224 years after our declaration of independence that all men are created equal, 80 years since white women were included in that discussion, and 35 years since admitting that, oh yes, that includes Black men and women too — did we, the government, grant him permission to truly identify himself.

It was the year 2000 when the Census Bureau stopped forcing us into one cell of Black or White, and allowed us to check more. And Kaepernick has spent the last few weeks, at least, being both celebrated and taunted for revealing that in addition to his White household and his house Negro complexion, #KapSoBlack.

For him to sit during the National Anthem, during the National Football League’s preseason was his deciding moment to choose, in public, fro on fluff, that he is not in a single cell. He is a man, of many cells who is free, and courageous since obviously, this is the American way. The U.S. was founded upon the idealism of protest, after all. The Declaration’s opening paragraph oft forgotten:

“When in the Course of human events,” it states, “it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

Kaepernick knows this and agrees. “It’s not a protest against America,” he told USA TODAY Sports. “It’s a protest against oppression and injustices and the equality that’s not being given to all people.”

This oppression he speaks of, dear United States, is undeniable reality. There is systemic destruction of those who were not included in the initial conversation — some 12 scores ago. It is difficult to comeback from such a loss, like police brutality against a certain population when it is all of our tax dollars invested in protection and service, like the decimation of Native Americans despite our recorded generosity (Thanksgiving), like corporate slavery and food deserts and the U.S. having the highest rate of incarceration of any nation in the world (nearly 22 percent of global prisoners). Kaepernick, at least, still suits up and performs and chooses to use his “White guilt” to pay it forward.

Yes, even as he sat in the face of a Black marine singing the Anthem.

For him, and the military, and all of our civilian and service people — black, white, red — not standing during San Francisco’s opening today, September 12th, against the Los Angeles Rams is essential. It is the engagement of our most common sense to take this stand with him  — and Eric Reid; Brandon Marshall; the high school and college athletes; and Jed York, owner of the Niners — from our couches (or stadium chairs) to contemplate that we, too, are not immune to persecution by an “Other,” lest we realize that we are Other ourselves. Only then, may we get up and successfully aim for the goal of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, as a previously injured star quarterback has shown is possible.

— By Sia Tiambi Barnes