In a matter of hours Colin Kaepernick will have a football workout with several NFL team representatives on hand. They will be determining whether or not he will have the opportunity to play for one of their franchises. Some people are concerned because the workout is taking place on Saturday when most NFL teams are unavailable due to their respective games on Sunday. They wonder why it isn’t happening on a Tuesday which is the league protocol. Other people are praising Jay-Z. They state that his teaming up with Roger Goodell is the only reason Kaepernick is getting this opportunity. To be real, it all seems very disrespectful to the movement that Colin still desires to play in the league at all. Especially since he’s made enough money via his settlement and his deal with Nike to never have to work for the managain. Colin’s yearning to throw more touchdowns in front of tens of thousands of fans is obviously very essential to his being. The only question is why.
We must now revisit the childhood dream that so many little American boys have. 4th and Goal, 6 seconds on the clock, the ball is on your opponents fifteen-yard line. You take the snap. You look left. You look right. You see your favorite target. Touchdown. The crowd rushes the field. You have just led your home team to a Super Bowl victory. And now you’re going to Disneyland.
Colin almost achieved that dream in Super Bowl 47, but instead Kaepernick threw an interception to the Baltimore Ravens. Perhaps he wants that pass back. Perhaps he wants to play until he actually wins a Super Bowl title. This mode of thinking is extremely dangerous because it means that in order for Colin to achieve his dream he must be an employee of one of the many billion dollar companies that are a major reason why his people are suffering in the first place. The NFL has 32 teams. All of them are very profitable. All of them have a majority of black players and none of them have a black owner. At times we forget that the NFL is just as guilty as city planners, the prison guards’ association, the police, and the banks for keeping blacks in the ghetto. It’s the same exclusionary practices which keep all but one of the NFL owners white (Shahid Kahn of The Jacksonville Jaguars is Pakastani) that keep banks in the hood from lending money to African-Americans so that they can start a business. Therefore, it feels counterproductive for Colin to expose them as a racist good old boys’ network who colluded to keep him out of the league only to want to work for them once again. Thus, Colin has effectively allowed wealthy white men to have ownership of his dreams.
It’s very frustrating to know that with all of his social justice work and all of his support from the black community and progressives around the world, Colin Kaepernick may still be mentally enslaved. He still needs to be validated by a white organization in order to feel whole. It bothers me to see that this is what has become of knee that he took. And it frightens me to think that he may still be on his knees begging to work in the white man’s kingdom.
-Roger Porter
