In the next few hours we will learn whether Colin Kaepernick’s very public stance against police brutality over the past two weeks will cost him his job. For those of you who don’t follow football, let me be clear—before his protest, Kaepernick was controversial for on-field reasons. His performance has declined since his outstanding first two years in the league. Like most NFL teams, the 49ers are not exactly blessed with great talent at the quarterback position. But Kaepernick nearly won a Super Bowl, whereas his competitor for the starting job, Blaine Gabbert, has reportedly watched a Super Bowl (he likes the commercials, I think).
The 49ers just might be mad enough to cut Kaepernick anyway, and NFL Insiders suggest he will not find another job, because to NFL front offices protest is on par with paying to have your pregnant girlfriend murdered. You read that right.
I’m old enough to remember when his tattoos were what people objected to.
Activism has many dimensions, including the communicative goal of keeping issues like police brutality on the public agenda. The policing issues Kaepernick wants us to be talking about are a good example of this. Activists use the tools at their disposal — social media, direct action – to force the press to talk about their issues. It is the press that takes their claims to general audience. This is not a simple transaction because the news media does not transmit activists’ message exactly the way the senders might prefer. This is actually what we at a societal level want the press to do, taking up issues by fact-checking claims so that audiences understand a range of perspectives on an issue. The basic trade-off is that a communicator trades control over a message for reach.
But those who study media coverage of protest have found this is not often how it works. They have identified a series of techniques rooted in journalistic norms they call the protest paradigm, which, in practice, marginalize voices of opposition. The most common is simply ignoring protests altogether. Others include allowing officials to define the terms of the protest, critiquing tactics, treating activists as inherently unserious, and focusing on norm violations (violence, property destruction, etc)
But those who study media coverage of protest have found this is not often how it works. They have identified a series of techniques rooted in journalistic norms they call the protest paradigm, which, in practice, marginalize voices of opposition. The most common is simply ignoring protests altogether. Others include allowing officials to define the terms of the protest, critiquing tactics, treating activists as inherently unserious, and focusing on norm violations (violence, property destruction, etc)
A riot may be the language of the unheard, but journalistic norms prioritize violence and property damage, which means the goals of a protest that turns violent will be ignored by the press (Creative Commons).
Is that true of coverage of athlete protests too? In Kaepernick’s case, fairly traditional aspects of the protest paradigm are clearly applicable. Declining to stand for the anthem is a tactic meant to spur discussion of police brutality. Most of the public conversation, however, has fixated on the method of his protest rather than the issue he is protesting. The subject has effectively been changed to a debate about the meaning of standing for the national anthem. Is it about the troops? Is it to honor America? Is it a marketing ploy? Lots of things can be true at once.
Declining to stand for the anthem is a tactic meant to spur discussion. Fixating on the act of declining to stand is a means of changing the subject. Is standing for the anthem before the game about the troops? Is it to honor America? Is it a marketing ploy? Lots of things can be true at once. Within protest, tactics can clearly overwhelm message, but fixating on tactic is a choice.
Others have questioned Kaepernick’s right to speak for various reasons. Maybe he is no longer a good quarterback.
Maybe he makes too much money to have opinions on social justice (yep, in the 2016 election season).
Or he is plugged into Twitter’s activist community and therefore misinformed.
https://twitter.com/WhitlockJason/status/769563895543410688
Or he lost the right to call attention to discrimination against people of color when he was adopted by a white family.
As with any nonviolent protest, this backlash is part of the point. The quality of the critiques against him is there for everyone to see, keeping the discussion alive. And in that sense, Kaepernick has used his high visibility to good effect.
Yet, this episodes also highlights the ways some of the assumptions of the protest paradigm may not apply to athletes. Unlike most social movement actors, professional athletes have easy access to the media. Sports organizations, like political candidates and basically nothing else, have traveling press corps. As a quarterback, Colin Kaepernick will have no trouble finding a conduit for a message. The WNBA receives orders of magnitude less coverage than the NFL, but when players spoke out on the same issues it was pretty well covered.
The protest paradigm may manifest differently in sports because our athletic spaces have a different cultural resonance than a demonstration on a downtown street. Kaepernick’s norm violations go beyond declining to stand for the national anthem. What he (and other athletes) are challenging are the idea that sports and politics are separate.
That is probably why Kaepernick’s defenders are reframing his actions as a reflection of national values. Protest, speaking out against injustice is a fundamentally American impulse they argue, and those would object to that are the real un-Americans. As Kareem Adbul-Jabbar put it, standing and sitting for the anthem are essentially the same act. I am comfortable with this contradiction because it expresses my own view of patriotism; loving America means wanting it to get better.
But rhetorically, to posit something as American is to defuse some of its political charge. “American values” are the things we all agree on while we’re busy debating what the top marginal tax rate should be. But if critiquing the state is an expression of national pride then no oppositional politics can ever exist. If speaking out against perceptions of injustice is fundamentally American, then we can completely gloss over the specific injustices. It is enough to be talking. If the protest paradigm is, as some argue, rooted in minimizing threats to the status quo then the apoliticality of sports must be protected.
And that’s not Kaepernick’s point because he’s making a specific claim about a specific injustice. Abdul-Jabbar understands this of course, and he is trying to neutralize objections so people will listen to what Kaepernick is saying. His last paragraph makes that clear.
What should horrify Americans is not Kaepernick’s choice to remain seated during the national anthem, but that nearly 50 years after Ali was banned from boxing for his stance and Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s raised fists caused public ostracization and numerous death threats, we still need to call attention to the same racial inequities. Failure to fix this problem is what’s really un-American here.
Under present conditions, athletic activism can be especially potent because those articulating protest messages have both existing (if one-way) relationships with politically diverse audiences and access to the means of mass communication. Yet the convening of that audience and those media resources derives from this imagined apoliticality. Americans view sports as a common gathering space where everyone comes together to cheer on the home team. Everyone is mad at Colin Kaepernick and every other athlete who speaks out because he and they are bringing politics into sports. It threatens a lot of media and financial infrastructure, which has been built around establishing sports as apolitical. The protest paradigm preserves that infrastructure rather than endorsing any specific position.
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