“(Miller’s) not receiving the ridicule and public torture that Kaepernick is facing. “I am well aware of the third verse of the national anthem which is not usually sung, and I know that the words of the song were not originally meant to include people like me”, Tigers coach Preston Brown told NBC 10 on Saturday. But when people that are not of color speak up, it’s their right.
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Meanwhile, players from other sports have joined in, with soccer star Megan Rapinoe kneeling during the national anthem, telling American Soccer Now that the gesture was “a little nod to Kaepernick and everything that he’s standing for right now”. Muhammad Ali famously refused to fight in the Vietnam War in 1967, not just because it was against his faith but also, more bluntly, because the Vietnamese, as he said, never “called me [racial slur]”.
“Now when I’m thinking about the national anthem, and I hear that line, ‘for the land of the free, ‘ he wasn’t talking about me”, Woodson said. He told reporters, “We are disrespected and mistreated everywhere we go on a daily basis because of our skin color, and I’m sick of it”. That’s not to say he has to do it – although he has clear feelings on the issues, the way that he expresses his feelings is his choice.
“It’s his right as a citizen”, Sabathia said of Kaepernick’s decision to remain seated at the first three gamesof the preseason. I think he summed things up pretty well, a few days after the team followed Kaepernick’s lead and donated $1 million to a pair of organizations working to help disadvantaged communities in the Bay Area. “There’s a lot of stuff going on that’s not right; it’s just something that he chose to do”.
Just because it isn’t as apparent here at home as it is in the USA doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
But the sport known for breaking the color barrier in major American sports when Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, has yet to take action. “That’s why I took a stand”. I can not salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. As Nightengale wrote, “African-Americans comprise 68 percent of the player population in the National Football League and 74 percent in the NBA. All I’m saying is we want to educate those, the youth that’s coming up”.
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He did note, however, that he believes players can do whatever they want. “These guys are really making a conversation of something that’s a very important topic in this country, and I’m 100 percent supportive of them”.
