This Thanksgiving After Dinner There Will Be No Football For Me…

I haven’t watched a sin­gle pre-sea­son or reg­u­lar sea­son NFL game this year and trust me I love football.
Nevertheless, I made the deci­sion not to ever turn anoth­er Television set on to anoth­er NFL game for one reason.
The league black­list­ing of Colin Kaepernick.

Whenever I say I will nev­er watch anoth­er NFL game, my white asso­ciates, nod in agree­ment obvi­ous­ly believ­ing that I am mad that a few NFL play­ers led by Kaepernick dared to kneel for what they believe.
I nev­er missed a chance to quick­ly explain to them that I haven’t stopped watch­ing because I believe that kneel­ing dur­ing the National anthem is a sign of dis­re­spect to the flag or worse is some kind of con­vo­lut­ed dis­re­gard for the Military.
They gen­er­al­ly nod “oh I see” and that’s the end of that.
A sil­ly lit­tle restau­rant in La Grange Ville has a sign dis­played [No foot­ball games here] obvi­ous­ly a way of say­ing they stand with the Military.
I have nev­er been there to spend a pen­ny and will nev­er ever set foot in there. You see it’s only in cas­es like these that you get to see the true char­ac­ter of people.
Unfortunately, African-Americans large­ly have no con­cept of the strength they wield through the pow­er of their wal­lets and pocketbooks.

The fact of the mat­ter is that there is absolute­ly no con­nec­tion between the Military, the National Anthem, and foot­ball, out­side the spon­sor­ship the NFL receives from the Defense Department.
There’s nei­ther a con­sti­tu­tion­al or moral require­ment to stand for the nation­al anthem, it is sim­ply some­thing peo­ple do out of love of country.
Nevertheless, there are sev­er­al ways to love coun­try out­side get­ting liquored up at a foot­ball game wrapped in the flag and pre­tend­ing that the mil­i­tary is next to God.
We can begin by lov­ing and car­ing for our fel­low man regard­less of who they are, what col­or they have or what their sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion is.
We can begin by shed­ding hatred and the awful igno­rance which caus­es the igno­ble char­ac­ter flaw called racism with­in us.

Many who wrap them­selves in the flag and pre­tend to have a monop­oly on patri­o­tism would nev­er sign up to serve their coun­try. Others in high offices found myr­i­ad excus­es to avoid fight­ing for the very coun­try they now claim to love.
So lets cut to the chase Colin Kaepernick is no vil­lain for kneel­ing nei­ther was Rosa Parks a vil­lain on December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama when she was arrest­ed for refus­ing to give up her seat to a white man.

Muhhamed Ali was no vil­lain when he refused Army induc­tion on Apr 28, 1967. and nei­ther were Tommy Smith and John Carlos’ when they made the black pow­er salute at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.
The unde­ni­able truth of the mat­ter is that more than a half a cen­tu­ry after Jim Crow, Segregation, the march on Washington, sep­a­rate but equal and the assas­si­na­tion of Dr. Martin Luther King there is a stub­born per­cent­age of white America which igno­rant­ly believes that blacks should be rel­e­gat­ed to the back of the Bus.

They fun­da­men­tal­ly believe in social order but cares noth­ing about jus­tice for the downtrodden.
These are they who decry bro­ken win­dows and civ­il dis­obe­di­ence but does not bat an eye at the bla­tan­cy and the vicious­ness of state sanc­tioned oppres­sion of mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ties of color.
This kind of bla­tant oppres­sion and racial supe­ri­or­i­ty is now giv­en new life when out of the high­est office comes the call to black­list and pun­ish cit­i­zens who dare to stand up or in this case kneel to bring atten­tion to sys­temic racial oppression.

Writing for (the Nation​.com) Dave Zirin said :
This NFL sea­son has blazed new polit­i­cal trails as play­ers have used their plat­form to stand up to racism in the face of a fero­cious back­lash. It has tru­ly been a sea­son of firsts. But there is anoth­er “first” on the imme­di­ate hori­zon that speaks to the league’s bald­ly reac­tionary his­to­ry in regards to race.

The NFL — for all their cor­po­rate rhetoric about being some­thing that “brings the coun­try togeth­er” — of course, has a team named after a Native American racial slur in the nation’s cap­i­tal. That’s not news. What is news is that on Thanksgiving, for the first time in league his­to­ry, this team in Washington will be play­ing host. That means as we fin­ish our food, slip into sweat­pants, and to gath­er around the tele­vi­sion to watch NFL foot­ball, a tra­di­tion only slight­ly less ubiq­ui­tous than pump­kin pie, the R*dskins slur— a name that exists only because of geno­cide and dis­place­ment—will have cen­ter stage.

For many in the Black Community at all lev­els of the spec­trum none of this mat­ters, they will con­tin­ue watch­ing the games and hoot­ing and hol­ler­ing because after all , miss­ing the game is not an option.
For a cou­ple hours of enter­tain­ment, they are quite will­ing to con­tin­ue to sup­port the per­pet­u­a­tion of a sys­tem which will con­tin­ue to enslave their chil­dren and grand­chil­dren in perpetuity.

After all, in the African-American com­mu­ni­ty, noth­ing [trumps] enter­tain­ment, not even the future of gen­er­a­tions to come.