The Feehery Theory

If Kaepernick Wants To Act Like a Jackass, More Power to Him

Posted on August 31, 2016

I don’t agree with Colin Kaepernick’s protest against the National Anthem, but I will defend to the death his right to wage it.

Frankly, I didn’t even know the San Francisco quarterback was black until he made every headline in America last week.

Of course, like many other things in this day and age, it’s more complicated than that.

Kaepernick’s parents were white. They adopted him. His birth parents are bi-racial, not unlike President Obama and to a certain extent Tiger Woods.

His heritage reflects where America is heading, where it always has been headed.  They are truly representative of the melting pot that makes up this crazy country.

There aren’t many pure-breads in America.  The Irish have intermarried with the Italians. The Jews have intermarried with the Gentiles.  I know Arabs who have married Christians. Indians have intermarried with Hispanics.

Some on the far-right and the far-left are very uncomfortable with this.  The White Lives Matter group has just been named a hate-group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.  I have some problems with the Marxists at the SPLC, but on this one, they are dead-on right.  White Lives Matter is a hate group and a White Supremacist organization.

There are some elements of racism in BLM too.  Sorry, I know that is controversial, but it is true.  Some in that movement hate cops, hate white people, hate the United States government.

But America is changing, before our eyes, just like it always does.

It used to be the WASP who was the target of derision.  For those who don’t recall, WASP stands for White Anglo Saxon Protestant.  But WASP’s don’t run things anymore.  Indeed, there is not one WASP on the Supreme Court, something that would have been unthinkable 25 years ago.

So, now instead of talking about WASP privilege, the liberal elite now talks about white privilege.

Of course, most white people don’t feel particularly privileged, especially those who are struggling to pay the bills a decade after the Financial Crash of 2007.

Kaepernick is protesting the killing of black people by white police officers, which, while it happens rarely, happens too often.

It would be nice if he also protested the fact that the media rarely covers how many black people get killed by other black people every day in places like Chicago.

The Chicago media covers it, of course, but the national media largely ignores it.

You have a white person kill a black person or a black person kill a white person, it gets widely covered by the MSM, but the routine murder that afflicts certain parts of our country never gets covered.  Nobody, including President Obama, seems to care.

Kaepernick is an unlikely political activist. As far as I know, he hasn’t spoken out much in the past.  He is in danger of getting cut with the 49ers because he isn’t as fast or as good as he used to be.

But in many ways, I admire the courage it takes to make a political statement in the context of the National Anthem.

I would make one observation though.

America is better than it ever has been when it comes to the issue of race.  We aren’t perfect, but we have made tremendous strides.   Those advances have occurred by working within the system, by preaching non-violence, by urging integration and by working to tear walls down and build understanding up.

Keep in mind, in my lifetime, it was illegal in some states for a black person and a white person to get married.   So, to say that we haven’t made progress in this most imperfect of unions is simply not accurate.

And while we need better policing, we need better cooperation with the police if we want to make our most dangerous neighborhoods safer.

I don't agree with Colin Kaepernick and I think that by showing disrespect to the National Anthem, he is showing disrespect to the progress we have all made as a nation.  But I have enough respect for our First Amendment and for our history of free expression that I fully support Kaepernick's right to  express himself in any way he sees fit, as long as it is consistent with our laws. If he wants to act like a Jackass, more power to him.