It started with Colin Kaepernick and his silent protest against social injustice. Now it’s about more than that: It’s about Donald Trump, a corrupt system, and the type of country we want to be.
And so I say to athletes and others across the country: take that knee. Sit on those hands when the anthem is played. The most patriotic thing you can do right now is not salute the flag.
While it’s true that our soldiers – those risking their lives to protect us – are great heroes, it’s also true that America has another type of great hero: those willing to speak out when they see wrongdoing – even when it’s unpopular, even when it hurts. Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Henry David Thoreau, Cesar Chavez, Alice Paul, and Abraham Lincoln all fall into that category.
Parks refused to give up her seat and sparked a movement. In the 1950s, Evers took perhaps the most dangerous job in America: as head of the NAACP in Mississippi. It would lead to his assassination at the tender age of 37. MLK was killed at 39. Both Thoreau and Lincoln spoke out strongly against the Mexican-American War; one risking his liberty and the other his political career. To improve the plight of farm workers, Caser Chavez went on hunger strikes, which possibly helped bring about his death. Alice Paul also went on a hunger strike, after being arrested for her efforts to bring about women’s suffrage.
These people were no less heroic, in their own way, than our soldiers. They exemplify what it means to be American. After all, protesting against injustices is the American Way. It was injustice that brought us to the American Revolution – that caused us, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, to “dissolve the political bands” between ourselves and England.
And there’s a lot to protest right now.
Our system does not reflect the popular will of the people: We have a president who lost the popular vote by three million; a House that’s ridiculously gerrymandered; a Senate that disproportionately favors white, rural states; a Supreme Court with a conservative bent due solely to a stolen seat; non-uniform national voting standards that allow some states to disenfranchise voters and make voting difficult for the poor; and far too much money in politics, enabling corporations and the wealthy to wield inordinate influence over our politics.
When it comes to upward mobility, the Brookings Institution has found that 42 percent of individuals in the U.S. born into the bottom income quintile will remain there as adults, and only 8 percent will ever make it to the top fifth. In European countries, the first number tends to be 25 to 30 percent and the latter 11 to 14 percent.
Part of this may have something to do with union membership numbers, which, due to laws that favor management, have plummeted. At one point, following the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935, union membership broke 35 percent of non-agricultural workers. But the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 and other subsequent legislation reversed the trend. Overall union membership is now 10.7 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about half of what it was in 1983, when it was 20.1 percent.
Our educational system is also nothing to brag about. In the latest round of PISA testing conducted by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the U.S. ranked 24th in reading, 25th in science, and 38th in math – just above the average scores for OECD countries in the first two categories and well below the average in the third. A different assessment, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, showed that only 37 percent of our high school seniors are proficient in reading, 25 percent were proficient in math, 20 percent proficient in geography, and only 12 percent proficient in U.S. History.
Our justice system doesn’t fare much better. The U.S. ranks second in the world in terms of prison population (by percentage). We ranked 18th on the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index. When the WJP asked survey takers about equal treatment under the law, the U.S. scored an awful .52, compared with a .71 for the UK and a .59 for Russia. For access and affordability when it comes to civil justice, we scored a .41, while France garnered a .62.
These numbers are not encouraging and they certainly don’t speak of a “land of opportunity.” Right now, we have a damaged and corrupt political system and an economic model that strongly favors the wealthy at the expense of the indigent. We can’t even manage to ensure healthcare for all. And our president has a well-established record of hatred and discrimination against Muslims, Mexicans, black people, women, and the disabled.
It’s definitely time to stand up by sitting down when that anthem plays.
Ross Rosenfeld is an educator and freelance writer based in New York.
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