BRIT BENNETT
In August 2016, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick made headlines and, later, history when he chose to sit during the pregame national anthem. When asked later, he told NFL Media, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.” A week later, Kaepernick, joined by teammate Eric Reid, knelt during the national anthem. The two players, concerned that their protest might be considered antimilitary or antipolice, chose to kneel instead of sit when Nate Boyer, a former NFL player and Green Beret, suggested it. “We chose to kneel because it’s a respectful gesture,” Reid later wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times. “I remember thinking our posture was like a flag flown at half-mast to mark a tragedy.”
I used to wear an enamel pin on my backpack that featured the iconic image of Kaepernick, afro picked, kneeling. Sometimes I would forget it was there until I heard white people, standing in a line behind me, grumble about it. The suddenness of their anger always surprised me. Kneeling is, almost universally, considered a gesture of humility and respect. On the football field, players take a knee when someone gets injured. In different faiths, kneeling is a common posture of prayer. Servitude, even. And yet, kneeling during the anthem inspires rage because the issue, of course, is not the anthem or flag or military. The problem is black disobedience. A kneeling black body becomes dangerous because a disobedient black body is dangerous.
At the time, Kaepernick’s protest seemed as if it might be just one controversial moment in a long NFL season. Few of us imagined then that Kaepernick’s simple act would inspire hundreds of athletes to follow suit, across sports and nations; his protest created such a public firestorm that NFL team owners, worried it was crashing ratings, held crisis meetings, and the president of the United States capitalized on it as a polarizing issue that rallied his political base. Two years later, Colin Kaepernick is no longer what he has always been—a football player—and has instead transformed into something else: a hero or a traitor, a martyr or a pariah, depending on who you ask.
Several writers, including the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, have wisely connected Kaepernick’s protest to a landmark 1943 Supreme Court case, West Virginia v. Barnette. The West Virginia Board of Education required public schools to include the salute to the flag as a mandatory school activity, and when children in a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose religion forbade them from pledging to symbols, refused to perform the salute, they were sent home, threatened with reform school, and their parents faced prosecutions for causing juvenile delinquency. In a 6–3 decision, the Court overruled its previous decision and held that forcing schoolchildren to salute the flag is unconstitutional. In an opinion written by Robert Houghwout Jackson, the Court found that reverence for a national symbol like the flag does not trump the constitutional right to free expression.
“Though the Flag Salute Cases are generally seen as involving freedom of religion,” John W. Johnson writes in Historic U.S. Cases: An Encyclopedia, “that issue is virtually absent from Jackson’s majority opinion.” Instead, Jackson grounds his opinion as one of freedom of speech and expression. “Struggles to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential to their time and country have been waged by many good, as well as by evil, men,” Jackson wrote. “Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters.”
Even further, Jackson argues that not only is it unconstitutional for the state to compel patriotic speech from its citizens but it is also ineffective. Forcing an NFL player to stand for the anthem, as President Trump has repeatedly suggested, cheapens the gesture altogether. “To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous, instead of a compulsory routine, is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds,” Jackson wrote. In other words, standing for the anthem actually means more as an expression of patriotism if players have the right to choose not to.
In February 2019, Kaepernick and Reid reached a confidential settlement with the NFL after alleging that team owners worked together to keep them off the field due to their protest. Days later, a news story went viral about a sixth grader in Lakeland, Florida, who faced misdemeanor charges after an altercation with a teacher began when he refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Recently, during a literary festival in Vincennes, a French reader asked if I ever said the pledge in school and, if so, why I did not refuse. “You know those words are not true,” she said, meaning, you as a black person know that there is not liberty and justice for all. I did know and yet I stood, every morning at 9:00 a.m., along with the rest of my class. Every so often, there were a few dissenters who remained seated. Always white kids, goths and punks, whose protest seemed to me then as just another way to be edgy. They could afford to broadcast all the ways in which they were different, but sometimes, when you were one of three black kids in a classroom, you just wanted to put your head down and get along. I grew up in a military town in a time of war. I still remember yellow ribbons on those black classroom doors.
The fact of it is, I wanted to tell the French reader, that I knew as a child what Kaepernick knew: kneeling, which is that dissent from my black body, is not safe. The same way I knew, standing, during a San Diego State football game, as the crowd cheered for military jets thundering overhead and service members marched onto the field to present the flag. And don’t I sometimes find these symbols beautiful? Aren’t I moved during Whitney Houston’s National Anthem? Don’t we keep a folded flag for my grandfather on the mantel? You can live this way, finding beauty within violence. But eventually it bowls you over, knocking you down to your knees.