In America, there’s a major type of public insistence that one’s “freedom” is essentially tied to 1’s wealth.
Much of the nation views America via an aspirational and transformative lens, a colorblind and bias-free utopia, whereby wealth conveys equality and acts as a panacea for social and racial ills. Once a person achieves large monetary success, or so the message goes, she or he will “transcend” the scourge of financial and racial inequality, actually turning into “free.”
Working in parallel with this reverence for this colorblind model of the “American Dream” is the idea that financial privilege mandates patriotic gratitude. Across industries and disciplines, Americans are informed to like their nation uncritically, be grateful that they’re distinctive sufficient to dwell in a rustic that enables residents the chance to succeed in astronomical heights of financial prosperity.
For the nation’s black residents, there’s usually a further racialized presumption lurking below the floor of those ideas: the notion that black success and wealth calls for public silence on systemic problems with inequality and oppression.
These are sturdy and fragile ideologies that prop up the idea of the American Dream – sturdy as a result of they’re encoded within the very cloth of American tradition (most Americans, together with African Americans, have readily embraced these ideologies as assumed information); but fragile as a result of it’s all too straightforward to see that one’s financial privilege is a awful barrier in opposition to each particular person and systemic discrimination and oppression.
Consequently, black folks have additionally been among the many most vocal challengers of those ideologies, as we’ve seen most not too long ago with the Colin Kaepernick and the NFL #TakeAKnee demonstrations. In a present of solidary with the free agent quarterback, skilled soccer gamers – the overwhelming majority of whom are black – have been kneeling in the course of the National Anthem as a way of protesting racial injustice and police brutality.
WATCH: NFL players team up in defiance and solidarity
Over the previous few weeks, the president of the United States has introduced renewed consideration to the inherent tensions that outline the ideologies of the “American Dream” via his repeated public criticisms of those kneeling NFL gamers.
“If a player wants the privilege of making millions of dollars in the NFL, or other leagues,” Trump not too long ago tweeted, she or he shouldn’t be allowed to kneel. Labeling the protestors actions “disrespectful” to the nation, flag and anthem, President Donald Trump has referred to as for gamers to be fired, inspired a boycott of the NFL, insisted that the league go a rule mandating that gamers stand for the anthem and derided the protestors as “sons of bitches.”
In a dramatic ploy extra befitting of a scripted actuality tv present, the president gloated that he had instructed Vice President Mike Pence to stroll out of an Indianapolis Colts recreation the second any participant kneeled. This was an orchestrated present of energy and outrage, designed to ship a flamboyant political message provided that Trump and Pence knew prematurely that on that exact day, the Colts have been taking part in the San Francisco 49ers – the group that at the moment has essentially the most protestors. The NFL’s announcement this week that the league has no plans to penalize protesting gamers is the latest occasion to impress the president’s fury; taking to social media in the course of the early morning, he as soon as once more equated kneeling with “total disrespect” for our nation.
As many have identified, the president’s moralizing outrage towards the NFL gamers is selective and deeply flawed – his obvious patriotic loyalty hasn’t stopped the billionaire politician from criticizing the elimination of Confederate statues, or attacking a Gold Star household, or mocking Sen. John McCain’s army service.
The NFL gamers and their defenders have repeatedly stated that the protests are meant to focus on racial inequality and oppression. They’ve additionally defined that their choice to kneel emerged from a need to protest peacefully and respectfully after a sustained dialog with military veterans.
Trump has chosen to disregard these rationales and the structural problems with inequality that encourage the protests and as a substitute, advance a story solely involved with overt shows of American patriotism and the “privilege” of the NFL gamers. As one in all president’s advisors defined, by aggressively focusing on the NFL gamers, Trump believes that he’s “winning the cultural war,” having made black “millionaire sport athletes his new [Hillary Clinton].”
READ MORE: As ‘America’s sport,’ the NFL cannot escape politics
It’s a cynical assertion, revealing the president’s notion of the jingoism of his base of supporters who envision him as a crusader for American values and symbols.
In casting the black protestors because the antithesis of all of this, Trump has marked the gamers as unpatriotic elites and enemies of the nation. For a president who has persistently fumbled his approach via home and overseas coverage since he was elected, a tradition warfare between “hard-working” and “virtuous” working-class and middle-class white Americans and wealthy, ungrateful black soccer gamers is a welcome public distraction.
Trump’s assaults on the NFL protestors are rooted in these competing tensions inherent to the American Dream: that wealth equals freedom; that financial privilege calls for patriotic gratitude; and most significantly, that black folks’s particular person financial prosperity invalidates their considerations about systemic injustice and requires their silence on racial oppression.
Among the protestors’ detractors, this has change into a standard line of assault, a way of disparaging the black NFL gamers’ activism by pointing to their obvious wealth. The incontrovertible fact that systemic racism is demonstrably actual and that particular person prosperity doesn’t make one proof against racial discrimination seems to be misplaced on the protestors’ critics.
Theirs is a grievance that implies that black athletes needs to be grateful to dwell on this nation; that racism can’t exist in America since black skilled athletes are allowed to play and signal contracts for appreciable sums of cash; that black gamers owe the nation their silence since America “gave” them alternative and entry; that black athletes haven’t any ethical authority on problems with race and inequality due to their particular person success; and that black athletes’ success was by no means theirs to earn, however as a substitute, was given to them and may simply as simply be taken away.
This tradition warfare being waged over black athletes shouldn’t be new. Black athletes – and entertainers – have lengthy been hyper-aware of their peculiar place in American society as people beloved for his or her athletic and creative abilities, but reviled the second they use their public platform to protest systemic racial inequality. The parallels between the #TakeAKnee protests and the protests of Muhammad Ali or John Carlos and Tommie Smith are readily obvious; so too are there necessary similarities to the case of Paul Robeson.
An outspoken civil rights activist, collegiate {and professional} soccer participant, lawyer, opera singer and actor, Robeson had his passport revoked in 1950 due to his political activism and speech – actions that every one however destroyed his profession. The star athlete and entertainer, “who had exemplified American upward mobility” shortly “became public enemy number one” as establishments cancelled his concert events, the general public referred to as for his loss of life and anti-Robeson mobs burned effigies of him.
During a 1956 congressional listening to, the chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities beat a well-known chorus with Robeson, difficult the entertainer’s accusations of American racism and racial oppression. He noticed no signal of prejudice, he argued, since Robeson was privileged, having gone to elite universities and taking part in collegiate {and professional} soccer.
READ MORE: Poll: Americans divided on NFL protests
Black athletes, even the silent ones, largely perceive that their financial privilege doesn’t insulate them from the realities of racial discrimination. They additionally perceive that their wealth and success is precarious and is usually dependent not solely upon their athletic efficiency, but in addition upon them remaining silent on problems with racial injustice, particularly those who seem to query the “American Dream” or implicate the American public by affiliation.
It ought to come as no shock then that Colin Kaepernick, whose protests turned him right into a nationwide pariah regardless of his on-the-field abilities, has filed a grievance in opposition to the NFL, accusing the league and its groups of blackballing him due to his political views. “Principled and peaceful political protest,” Kaepernick’s legal professionals argued in a press release, “should not be punished and athletes should not be denied employment based on partisan political provocation by the Executive Branch of our government.” Whether the ostracized Kaepernick will win his grievance is unknown, however it’s actually telling that he and his legal professionals have rooted their claims in contested definitions of freedom and the precarious financial privilege of outspoken NFL gamers.
For the loudest and most vocal critics of black protestors, particularly, outspokenness is tantamount to treason, grounds for the harshest of punishments. Perhaps they might profit from a detailed studying of James Baldwin, who as soon as argued: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
