White America, It’s Time to Take a Knee [View all]

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White America, It’s Time to Take a Knee
September 20, 2016 / John Pavlovitz


For the past month I’ve watched lots of white Americans lose their minds in response to Colin Kaepernick and other NFL player’s peaceful National Anthem protests. I’ve seen them question these young men’s patriotism, malign their motives, attack their methods, and treat them with the kind of open contempt usually reserved for serial killers and child molesters.

For simply taking a knee during a football pre game in an effort to foster a conversation about the deaths of young men of color at the hands of police, these men have been made into the enemy by so much of white America. In some twisted, ironic, almost laughable missing of the point—it’s somehow become the angry black man’s fault for disparaging his country.

And today, as the footage of unarmed father of four Terence Crutcher’s public execution goes viral, I’ve been looking to these same people for some semblance of grief at his passing, some anger at the circumstances of his death, some outrage at the sickening deja vu these images are manufacturing.

But I’m finding none of these things. Instead I’m finding victim blaming and rationalizing and lots of efforts to tell us why our eyes aren’t seeing what they’re seeing.

I know what my eyes see.

They see humanity ignored, they see fear metastasized, and they see white people excusing away murder instead of facing the brutal truth that maybe institutional racism is real and maybe Colin Kaepernick and his brethren are worth listening to, and maybe they shouldn’t be vilified outliers that we’re trying to shut-up.

Maybe we should all be kneeling right now.

White friends, if your immediate response to the shooting of Terence Crutcher is to try and justify why he’s dead, you may be the problem here. If you aren’t greatly burdened with grief for his family and you aren’t moved with compassion for the way scenes like this repeatedly kick people of color in the gut, you need to ask yourself some difficult questions about your own patriotism, your own appreciation of freedom, your own civic responsibility. You need to ask yourself whether you’re really for Liberty—or just white comfort.

Because from where I’m standing, I see Colin Kaepernick and those like him doing what many of you aren’t doing. I see them trying to keep more people from dying. I see them doing something to stop the bleeding instead of trying to make peace with it. I see them being the best of America in the face of the worst of America.

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