Any conversation leading toward an understanding of protest, presently or ever, within the borders of the United States, should reasonably begin with an image of backs and feet. Fleeing. All simply tearing away in all directions. Shouting in retreat. Sending flares up over and away from the focus of the protest, stripping the conversation of its core.
This is the American psychology. Rooted firmly in protecting the emotional safety of our physical majority, moneyed minority, and firmly established supremacy.
And so, we can reasonably agree that injustice of any kind is heinous, and should be opposed and challenged by thought and action. We can draw lines leading to a number of injustices around abuses of animals and children. Yet, the idea of destabilizing the systems, government down, which lead to the abuse, willful neglect, trauma and death of Black citizens, is met with immediate resistance. And fleeing. Full on retreat.
Before I continue, I should advise you that I am not arguing with any of you. The United States maintains an anti-Black element at its core. One which has filtered through to police practices, and school zoning, to emotional gaslighting in work and school spaces, and crafting poverty scenarios fashioned to guide disenfranchised Black bodies from their tenements on through to prisons. There is a shorter middle passage here, but when you include the identification numbers, chains, state ownership, yes, our justice system does have the flavor of slavery about it.
As you read, many of you are already preparing arguments to place these ills firmly at the feet of those in the Black community, as if that community somehow created the very conditions that it must survive. You choose, while also fleeing the obvious, to ignore that this system has determined that Black bodies and minds are fuel for consumption, not an asset or resource. A thing, always, to be owned. History supports that, but you may carry on as you see fit.
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That point being that the Black community has been a steady victim of the anti-Black, overtly hostile, and toxic practices of our nation.
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Into this fray came a professional football player, relatively high profile, who refused (by his right) to kneel for our national anthem. He never harbored ill will toward the men and women of the Armed Forces, but there were those who sent up that flare, who blew that dog whistle. Still do. Truly, for no other reason than to ground the charges, and soothe themselves, and to flee. And to discredit a citizen with a point to make drawn between us all.
That point being that the Black community has been a steady victim of the anti-Black, overtly hostile, and toxic practices of our nation. Steady, and unending. And yet, the community has chosen to maintain its relationship with our forcibly adopted land. We have offered service to that military, have owned our citizenship, paid into the system and invested emotionally in having an identity both Black and American.
Black people, through all of this nation’s development, have been subject to laws, policies, leadership, neighbors, literature, concepts, schooling, and unconditional negative regard, which we have been told to endure until White Supremacy falls and our neighbors have developed a truly empathetic approach to our humanity. Simply endure. Understand the struggle your neighbor has, also having been born into supremacy, and child-like, not being able to figure out how to steward us all toward a better unity. Endure. Trauma, all of it.
That same football player made a point worth considering, only. That Black people should and must speak to our American experience, and do not have to engage in the psychology of ultimate rightness and goodness that requires unconditional patriotism.
His question raised others. Why, in fact, would Black Americans, all Americans, not question the meaning of their own citizenship and their own patriotism, and why should they use this small moment to pretend when they know that they, all Black Americans, regardless of their social standing, can never enjoy a full unbothered human experience that doesn’t come tethered to allowances for personhood and feelings that aren’t formed by White people.
A man kneeling at a football game, an event that carries no real life significance, kneeling to raise awareness about injustice, abuse, and mistreatment of a community, has had his livelihood taken from him. And make no mistake, when you consider that names like Hoyer, Glennon, Fitzpatrick, G. Smith, Petty, McCown, Kessler and a sea of others—all lesser players than Kap—are drawing NFL paychecks, a system of thinking and doing has been set in motion to willfully ostracize and punish him and his message.
That has been extended to others who follow suit. And there have been more flares and dog whistles. Players and people locking arms to represent solidarity.
Most American of us.
This false branding of what solidarity actually is only hurts the conversation, and runs away from the truest of points. That we are not employing collected efforts around raising and training police forces which are suited to work in diverse communities, and that we are willing to maintain a perpetual Black underclass and deceive ourselves about the notion of a meritocracy, and beneath and above all of that, is a seething anti-Black hatred, grounded in Supremacy. We won’t see that Supremacy is everywhere, having infiltrated our highest offices, our homes, and all communities are breathing that in, and we are willing to openly and voluntarily co-exist with this.
Only because our majority can flee when it is time to see and dialogue about it and make plans for destabilizing it.
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Taken together, it is a form of emotional suicide.
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For those who raise the warning signal, that we are not unified, and traffic in hatred, and neglect others, and that injustice is the American way, there are severe penalties. There is the coercion, and the gaslighting, and the victim blaming, and the slurs, and having to watch your neighbors take what you know to be true, and tear it, and mend it, to create an emotionally safe and self-righteous landscape on which to shout at you from.
There is an intense self-serving cowardice in this approach, this faux patriotism.
That you are a proud American should not be a counter to a willingness to remove the yoke of oppression from other Americans. Your neighbors. Your pride and identity have no real place in that conversation.
You don’t get to dictate to Black Americans what being American means to them. You haven’t the emotional vocabulary to even begin to know where to start and share. You are a student in that matter, truly.
Ultimately, the response by us all to a man kneeling for others, and others joining and kneeling for others, walks us to the line of our illness around our nation family. That we largely only feel well and grounded when we have centered ourselves and our discourse around the comfort of our White neighbors, and simply make room for supremacy, patriarchy, racism, and prejudice. We would rather pretend that we have crafted safe spaces and that these don’t dwell with us. Until we see, painfully and publicly, that they do.
We show these our necks, craft only a fear plan for managing them, and transmit this to our children, and hide it within us.
It means, ultimately, the ongoing trauma—physical and emotional—of Black people. A dehumanizing rendering of their personhood, a practice of coercing our community into agreeing that we should be broken, and suffer these indignities in silence, or share these only in designated spaces away from a most sensitive White gaze. Taken together, it is a form of emotional suicide.
And one man with a small platform determined that he would raise the question, a question of us all in public. Immediately, someone wanted to make it something else. Anything but what he said.
And here is a leader, cozy with White Supremacy, and our neighbors in Puerto Rico suffering while that leader fails in his response, and a nation seeing those Americans suffering but refusing to take our leaders to task and force a response, and a broken justice system, and rampant and willful segregation and appropriation disguised as gentrification, and fables told aloud before each sporting event about our goodness.
And a Black woman threatened for telling the truth, and all women being forced to choose between the safety of their bodies and their allegiance to their American identities, and one of you somewhere reading this shouting at me, an American, a most proud one, to go back home.
Most American of us.
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Photo: Getty Images
