What sticks out about the parade of talking heads and the “take a knee” movement in the NFL is their age.
And their high-jacking the term “racism”.
You see, the central “take a knee” issue in the NFL issue is all about race as seen from its proponents.
Didn’t know that? Well, just like the first Civil War where Midwest farm boys enlisted to fight a war to end slavery while deep south farm boys enlisted to defend their “rats”, neither side of the shooting end of that war was entirely sure what the war was all about beyond their one belief. Although Abraham Lincoln was almost monotonous about “preserving the Union”, that was never a topic of fireside conversation in places where soldiers camped.
Take-a-knee was most definitely about race, specifically cops shooting “innocent” black men, only most NFL players don’t know that. It was about race because Colin Kaepernick said it was about race, in the August, 2016 pre-season, when he took that first knee.
“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” Kaepernick said, via NFL.com. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
None of what CK said is so, but hey, almost nothing Black Lives Matter tells us is ever so, and obviously, Kaepernick is very impressionable, especially if the BLM position is pleaded to him by a beautiful young woman.
2016 was an election year, and BLM was supposed to have had an impact. It didn’t. But as with 25 years of shakedowns by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the unwillingness of corporate America to speak out against it in dozens of venues should have given us some clue as to what was bound to happen once a man like Donald Trump came into office.
We should have known how the NFL and owners might react.
A few facts about police shootings and race.
In most blue cities, but especially Chicago, the city governments don’t really care if young black men kill each other. (After all, they’re almost all gang-bangers.) In Chi-town and New York this is holdover thinking from the mob days of the 30s when mostly Italian and Irish gangs did the same thing, only dressed in suits, fedoras and white spats, armed with Thompson machine guns, blazing away while standing on the running boards of a ’31 Buick. How cool is that!…to an 18-year old gang-banger?
Only when an innocent child is shot on a porch in a crossfire do media pick up the story, and cops rush in to take statements and try to find anyone who can make an identification. Like Little Italy, most people “see nothing”. Cops can rarely find any evidence to go on, and after awhile, a few each week, it becomes routine…a body taken to the morgue for ID, then turned over to a family for burial. No public outrage. Just life-on-the-streets as usual.
But when a black kid robs a 7/11 with a gun, and it does seem that the vast majority of 7/11 pistol robberies are by young black men…and we have the 7-11 film footage to prove it…the cops actually have to go and try to catch that thief. Sometimes in real time, if someone peeps in the window or presses an under-counter buzzer. This increases a hundred-fold that there will be a confrontation between the poor innocent villain just trying to get Pampers for his baby sister, and the police.
Now while our modern day race experts may think they know what’s in the mind of cops when confronting black kids, they don’t know much about the real statistics.
Or they lie.
Colin Kaepernick doesn’t know, for sure, and may not even be bright enough to understand it if explained on a chalkboard. But the real statistics are startling, as I noted in my 7-11 piece, (above) but laid our much more authoritatively by Peter Kisanow, attorney for US Civil Rights Commission on The Tucker Carlson show (9/29/17). It seems blacks are committing violent gun crimes today several times greater than they will be confronted by police. While cop shootings appear high, actually they are very low compared to actual gun crimes committed by blacks. This suggests that cops in many cities are actually holding back, trying to avoid confrontations, probably based on politics downtown, as when the mayor of Baltimore told her police to stand down and let the rioters burn and loot. Which they did. What we ended up with finally were police assassinations, such as five in Dallas in July, 2016, just a month before Kaepernick began his protest, and the anti-cop narrative first began to go mainstream.
Coincidence? Maybe, only I doubt Kaepernick knew it. He doesn’t seem that bright. Ask his girl friend.
In all likelihood the majority of NFL players who have now taken a knee probably haven’t connected any dots either; Uninformed “useful idiots” only, lacking the one thing money can’t buy, a critical mind.
Going forward, on every team in the League “take-a-knee” will play out in the locker rooms , and since he guided his San Francisco 49ers to a 1-9 record in the ten games he appeared in the 2016 season, we may find other teams torn by internal discord this season. Not to mention empty stands, lost endorsements, and advertisers. The NFL will lose financially as well as brand integrity.
While you can excuse, at least to a point, those millionaire athletes who’d never read a book, or connected a single dot, been baby-coddled since high school because of that singular athletic talent, and sure as hell never gave a second thought to that Star Spangled Banner mangled by their high school bands for four years before they ever got that scholarship, or before they finally got a professional agent, the same cannot be said about those smarter-than-thou lawyers who inherited the NFL from Pete Rozelle in 1989 and turned it into a personal nest egg, or those billionaire owners who earned a team through a career in hedge-funds, or making ladies underwear.
With a few exceptions, it seems there are very few NFL owners in this post-Rozelle generation who pay much attention to that quaint pre-game ceremony either. Who the hell could get upset over a little thing like that, these men who never wore a uniform or walked down a dark street at midnight, and then breathed a sigh of relief when they saw a cop?
Never forget these owners and commissioners also are standing on the shoulders of generations who sure as hell did know what the Star Spangled Banner was all about, just as Dr Martin Luther King, Jr did.
Joe Robbie formed the Miami Dolphins in 1966 at the behest of Joe Foss, a decorated WWII Navy fighter ace and first commissioner of the old AFL, who he’d served with in the Navy. With two NFC championships and the only undefeated team in NFL history, he built Joe Robbie Stadium in 1987. Then he died in 1990, the year after Pete Rozelle retired. Then his family had to sell the team in 1996 to pay estate taxes. The stadium has since changed names several times, and the memory of former NFL team owners who knew what that flag stands for a distant memory.
So, about those important things, it seems we have a corporate and legal culture who are almost as in the dark about the significance of national institutions as their players, only much more cynically.
If not money, what is it that does float their boat? I’d wager social status, a better circle of friends. But trust me, no one at a gala art exhibit opening is whispering sentimental sweet nothings about the Flag, but, indirectly defame it in at least a dozen different contexts throughout the room.
What is all the more remarkable is that Donald Trump would have attended hundreds of these events over the years, and even participated in the banter, yet never once drank the Kool-Aid that is so necessary for a social life in New York.
These elites’ ignorance is all the more willful, for they do know the facts, and can connect the dots, only have chosen to ignore them.
Enter the new generation of race-baiters and shakedown artists.
Unlike Jesse, who actually was up on that Memphis balcony somewhere in the vicinity of Dr King when he was shot, and has built a fair stash scamming Americans that he is a genuine “heir” to Dr King, these modern mouthy African-American race experts can claim no street creds at all. They seem to have no personal knowledge of the subject of race, other than what they heard round the dinner table, or in college lectures or read in a book.
(Hint: these are the same three venues white children were taught racism in the Jim Crow South, c1920s, and German children were taught about Jews, 1930s)
Their racism is almost totally contrived, just as the “Hands-Up, Don’t Shoot” lie is.
Most had never grown up in a mixed-race community or schools, but were raised in affluent black neighborhoods and attended largely black colleges and universities. What a lot of southerners never knew was that in those northern blue cities there were all sorts of black middle-class, even upper middle class, enclaves, going back to 1950s. That changed very little after the Civil Rights acts. (This deserves lengthier treatment at a later time.)
People who saw the Civil Rights Acts and education legislation of the 1960s mostly through the lens of the Old Confederacy being punished for Jim Crow, never saw this inverted system in the North. But Dr King did, and Dick Gregory showed it to him.
Dick Gregory was one of my early heroes from the ’60s. He often remarked that northern whites didn’t care how much wealth blacks could make just so long as they didn’t get too close, while in the south, which I can attest to, aside from gentry, people didn’t even mind black kids coming to sleep over, or sitting down at the supper table, just so long as they didn’t get too big. (And God damn Maxine Waters for using the occasion of his eulogy to go a several-minute rant against Donald Trump, never pausing to say anything wonderful about a man whose shoes she wasn’t fit to shine. God, what an ugly show by such an ugly woman.)
Today, in the South, almost every suburban neighborhood is mixed. I know people in $80K homes and $200K homes and up, and all are pretty much the same, proportionately white and black.
Before the passage of the Civil Rights Acts and the attendant anti-poverty programs, 87% of blacks were intact families. Today they are less than 20%. That was not an accident. Nor were the maze of government programs that followed, none of which were ever directed at reversing the situation, but rather employing armies of educated blacks from those affluent black neighborhoods, and whose children now work almost exclusively in the public sector, from teaching school, and college, to government policy and law, to watching porn and playing Mahjong Tiles on government computers at the Department of Education …without having one iota of information about, or empathy for the lost people of the plantation the great United States government and the states of Illinois, California, etc, etc,, have hired them to administer.
Now, after three generations, high-visibility race experts have never lived in a multi-racial society, yet know all about racism. Their racial knowledge is all theory just as Bernie Sanders economic knowledge is all theory.
So when a black-activist lawyer like Monique Pressley screeches that we don’t know what it’s like to be viewed through racist white eyes, well actually, never has she either…at least until she took up the sledgehammer of racial justice, which, even African-Americans who rub elbows with whites every day are pretty tired of hearing as well. They know better.
Scott Bolden, with the $1000 cufflinks, a lawyer son of a lawyer, also tells us “we don’t know what it’s like to be black”. These people were barely alive when Dr King was doing his real ministry for social justice.
The most-tired battle scar these spoiled elitist blacks like to use to prove their wounds in the racial wars is being pulled over by a cop. Eric Holder told us about the deep scar a New Jersey highway patrolmen left on him when he rolled down the window and the police officer peered in (and didn’t recognize him!!).and said “Sir, may I see your drivers license and registration.” Oh the humanity!
Ms Pressley has cited similar incidents, so have others, so I’m guessing the traffic pullover is the standard-issue Purple Heart for battlefield heroism since rednecks stopped using the “N” word to black peoples’ face, oh, around 50 years ago. Those people are dead.
None of these people know what it’s like to be black, so please don’t preach to us that we don’t either. Most of us know about black and white people living together, as friends and neighbors, and have for over forty years, even in the Old Confederacy, and that is something the new Race-Baiters cannot know, but insist it doesn’t exist.
But wait, there’s a Next Generation, Black Snowflakes, appearing on a Fox New outlet near you soon. This interview by Tucker Carlson and a college kid from Denison University in Ohio is otherworldly, if you want to know where “racism” is going in the next twenty years.
God help us if we, meaning all of us, don’t get a handle on this.
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VASSAR BUSHMILLS
Contact: vbushmills@yahoo.com
Publications: Famous Common People I Have Known and Other Essays
Donald Trump, the Common Man and the American Theology of Liberty
(Both books in Kindle format only, Publishers and agents welcome, as both need to revised)
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