When and where?
Again, when and where? In my response to you, did I do any of that?! As a matter of fact my only response to you was so that I could get an understanding of your position and why you posted your link, hence my prying for you to elaborate on your link so I did not have to assume anything. LOL
The NFL has never been without politicization. Hell, professional sports is not immune to politicizing and has quite the history of politics. To sit here and act like Colin brought this unheard of politicizing to professional sports is crazy! The idea that because he makes money he should shutup is ludicrous. The reality is a lot of NFL players come from dysfunctional backgrounds and the idea that they can't use their platform, a platform which they normally do not have, to promote a better situation, whether it be cancer, police brutality, or whatever is crazy. Your comfort be damned. This idea that he should just shutup and "shuck and jive" is evidence of something underlying and embedded in our history. Would I kneel during the National Anthem? No, I would not. Not because of its disrespectful nature, but because the very power and people you are trying to tell your story to are pretty caught up in a nationalistic attitude that it would not get to them, despite how right you may be. I find it more disrespectful that people turn a blind eye to injustices at home and claim it is not happening and that it makes them uncomfortable. Imagine having to actually live that life? The national anthem is a crap song anyways. America the Beautiful is waaaaaayyyy better.
Can we not conflate Ricky Williams and Colin Kaepernick's protests? lol
Also, how can you, after the thousands of protests which span decades, sit here and say that this is not a serious subject? or one that is real? From my understanding you are saying that all of those people are imagining things, are lying, have been lied to, or are not honest with their intent? My cousin wasn't falsely arrested for being in a gang and driving drunk? I actually was stealing out of the store? My friend did curse at a cop and had drugs on him(I was there, he did none of that). My car did fit the description of the stolen 4 door black honda accord(i drove a two door silver solara). Or that fix-it ticket I got for tinted windows?(I've never had tinted windows, but I did have a fix-it ticket for them!) I can honestly say almost every black person I know (affluent or not) has been harassed by the police, just to see if they could get a rise out of them. This is not a game, these protests are not without merit. Maybe its just where I live. These interactions are decades old. With that being said, this is all anecdotal, but I don't know how to make people understand what is going on if they don't live it.
I definitely agree with communities working towards less violence. But the idea that this problem has to do with a culture of violence is just as bad as claiming all police are bad. The idea that my culture is somehow more violent than others is a slap in the face and a total disregard for the histories of our cultures. The idea that I am predisposed to violence because of my skin color is stupid. The reality is we live in a country that needs major work in creating jobs and mending relationship between the government and its people. We actually have things in place to deal with people who commit crimes in those communities, it's called the justice system. What we seem to lack, is the same system for crappy cops. They get suspended or transferred. So when someone in the community needs help, they run the possibility of having also to deal with the nature of a crooked and violent cop. Who do these people go to if the very people sworn to protect and serve them are not doing that?
But to your point, to say that there have been no protests (I'm not talking about rioting) is pure ignorance. Colin in the face of misplaced criticism of how people protested, applied a non-violent and silent protest and people absolutely lost it. The reality is, if you are not protesting, and this goes for historically too, you will always feel uncomfortable. Protests are not something you do on the sideline where people don't notice it and nothing gets changed. Protests are supposed to make people feel something, and the effective ones are always disruptive. All of them.
