If a rapper kneels, but the national anthem isn’t playing, does his protest make a sound?
Evidently not, as Eminem knelt during the Super Bowl halftime show, and it wouldn’t be clear that it was an homage to former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick if media outlets didn’t claim that it was.
Eminem kneeling while Dr. Dre played the piano looked more like a natural part of the act than it did a replication of Kaepernick’s protests. It looked more like pre-game prayers of former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow than Kaepernick. And, of course, no one really cared about it either way because Eminem wasn’t protesting the national anthem, which was the main part of Kaepernick’s ridiculous political stunt.
Indeed, it appears that no players knelt during the national anthem all season. The Rams and Bengals players at the Super Bowl didn’t kneel. Considering the number of players that protested the anthem last season, it would seem that players across the league decided that racism has finally been solved.
That, or we have yet another reminder that the protests were always about players pretending they were making a difference when they were doing nothing but unnecessarily dividing the country. The game was given away when more players knelt for the anthem the week after former President Donald Trump criticized the protests than had the week before. Racism had not magically become worse that week: Players just wanted to kneel to stick it to Trump.
Kneeling during the anthem was always slacktivism at its finest. Athletes incoherently insisted it had nothing to do with the national anthem or the country, even though Kaepernick expressly said that it did and several athletes then began complaining about the national anthem itself. No one noticed or cared about Eminem’s attempt at solidarity — if that really is what he was going for — precisely because his useless “protest” came during “Still D.R.E.,” not “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
