Originally Posted by greenjp
Originally Posted by grampi
Originally Posted by greenjp
White guys who have never been pulled over for driving while black are ill equipped to intelligently comment on matters like the players' protests.
Disrespect to our national anthem/flag knows no skin color...
Are you willing to entertain some information that may cause you to reconsidered your opinion?
Colin Kaepernick elected to kneel during the anthem after discussing it with a Green Beret named Nate Boyer, who suggested that kneeling would be appropriate and not disrespectful of the military. This fit Kaepernick's objective as the subject of his protest is structural inequalities and not "the flag" or "the troops". To the contrary. By the way he donated $1,000,000 to charity last year, when he wasn't even on an NFL roster.
Good article about the Eagles' Malcolm Jenkins:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/a...jenkinss-message-for-those-not-listening
You made a remark above that started "To listen to the kneelers..."; I've got the sense that you haven't actually done that. (Granted Jenkins' preferred symbol is a raised fist vs. kneeling but the point stands) By the way this occured in June, during the offseason that someone earlier remarked we don't see any such activity. So much for that.
Here's an interview with him:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/05/malcolm-jenkins-philadelphia-eagles/556886/
Sample question and answer:
"Q: To you, what do police accountability and transparency look like? What do you think you can reasonably accomplish?
A: It's pretty simple. If there's a shooting or something that didn't need to happen, we want law-enforcement officers to be held accountable, just like any other citizen would be. When there is corruption in a police department, we want [the department] to be held accountable. But at the same time, we don't want to isolate the police. It's not an attack on the police; we need to rebuild the relationship between our communities and law enforcement, rebuild that trust.
We've been interacting with this group out of Florida called rite [Racial Intelligence Training and Engagement] Academy. We're trying to figure out what the best practices are when it comes to training officers to engage in the community, to understand themselves and some of the trauma they've been going through, to make sure they can properly do their job and treat everybody with the same respect.
The police go through trauma, too. They're seeing victims, 16-year-old kids being shot—they see that, and before they can even process that and deal with that as a human being, they have to go on to the next call, and the next call, and the next call. Mental health is not something that they think about, or that they deal with as a department. So with the rite training, before officers even go out, they have to do a self-evaluation of where they are that day and know where their trigger points are. That's an approach I hadn't thought about, and I thought it was pretty brilliant."
Here's his statement (
https://twitter.com/MalcolmJenkins/status/1004049505812172800) after the President mischaracterized what they're doing when he cancelled the White House visit after the Super Bowl.
If you can read this stuff and conclude that they're simplistically protesting "the flag" or "the anthem" then there's really nothing worth discussing.
My argument isn't that these people don't have a reason to protest. My argument is they are directing their protest at the wrong thing. Protesting the national anthem/flag has nothing to do with police wrongfully treating suspects, or innocent people belonging to certain ethnic groups. If they want to protest against police, then they should be organizing peaceful protests outside of police stations. What they're currently doing is the same as me flipping off the president, but then claiming I mean no disrespect to him personally, I'm am just protesting against his policies...
