Confusion

The NFL recently announced its decision to curtail protests during the national anthem by mandating that all players stand while it is played or remain in the locker room should they not be willing to do so. This decision, which has been praised by the White House and decried by the NFL Players Association, comes after two seasons of turmoil created by Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the anthem as a form of protest against oppression and police brutality in the United States, a protest which spread at times to dozens, if not hundreds, of NFL players.

It is simply indisputable that NFL players have a massive stage from which to spread any message, political or otherwise. The League is the largest professional sports organization in the world (by revenue), and its marquee games are routinely among the very most watched television programming nationally. While individual NFL players may struggle to reach the superstar status of their unhelmeted NBA brethren, the popularity of the NFL and its various employees (from players to coaches to even front office personnel) reaches across economic and demographic lines. Simply put, the NFL provides its players a substantial platform from which to voice whatever their views are.

Over the last several years, many of these players (mostly but not exclusively African American) have utilized this platform to express their dissatisfaction with police brutality directed towards the country’s black population and the lack of concerted action to address this problem. While Mr. Kaepernick’s initial and unexpected protest placed a spotlight on this topic, the continuing protests have bogged down into something of a quagmire between President Trump and the cultural right (who view themselves as “supporting the police”) and the players and the cultural left (who see many police departments as all too often a scourge of the African American community).

Setting aside Mr. Kaepernick’s initial protest which helped to surface the debate on this issue, the continued kneeling during the national anthem is misplaced. The playing of the national anthem and its association with the Stars and Stripes is designed to honor our nation and its ideals, even if just for a few minutes. Most Americans likely affiliate the national anthem with the US military (it was, in fact, written by Francis Scott Key during a battle in Baltimore harbor between the Americans and British during the War of 1812), and perceive it as a direct honor for those who have and continue to serve their country on the fields of battle.

Why, then, have NFL players – whose grievances with certain policing practices are well-established – insisted on the continuation of the anthem protests after their position on police brutality against minorities is well known? Unlike the military, law enforcement does not embody America’s collective spirit. In fact, the military has been a progressive force on issues of race, and desegregated nearly a generation prior to Bull Connor’s attack on peaceful civil rights protestors with firehoses and dogs. Moving past historical examples of local law enforcement hostility to civil rights, much of the Bill of Rights (the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eight Amendments) are dedicated to curbing potential excesses of the State’s policing powers. Even American culture, which celebrates from the outlaw Jesse James to the iconoclast Malcolm X, often depicts law enforcement in a complicated manner. While local police serve a vital role in the functioning of American society (and generally deserve the citizenry’s respect for the proper performance of this role), the police are neither a unifying force in American life nor the embodiment of the ideals of America. On the other hand, the Armed Forces can claim both mantles.

In essence, then, the continued use of kneeling during the national anthem has confused the portions of the American public not deeply invested in this debate by tying discontent with local police to the anthem and flag many associate generally with the ideals of America and specifically with the soldiers defending the freedoms this country holds dear. While it is certainly unwitting, the NFL protestors have accordingly ceded the high ground on the issue of police behavior very much worthy of a public debate. In fact, as Dr. Martin Luther King understood with his repeated urges of peaceful protest in the face of sickening state violence across the South, a protest is almost certainly doomed to fail without a demonstration of its greater morality than the opposition.

While likely undertaken in good faith, the dragging out of the NFL anthem protest dispute into its third autumn serves very little purpose for those advocating the reform of police behavior towards the black community. Should NFL players have truly desired to effectuate change, they had ample leverage and opportunity to turn the protests into something meaningful, where the players rose from their knees in return for a league-wide use of the NFL platform to advocate real policing and criminal justice reform. Instead, a protest about an issue very worthy of public debate became a protest standing for little more than the act of protesting. Sadly, based upon the initial reaction to the NFL’s limitations regarding anthem protests, football-crazy America may very well be in for a third consecutive fall of an empty fight about player protests themselves and not the underlying matters of substance the protests were originally intended to address.