Before leading his team to a loss against the Green Bay Packers, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick made a point of refusing to stand for the National Anthem.
“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 told NFL Media after the game. “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.”
It’s probably no coincidence that Kaepernick has developed his loud, publicity-gleaning social conscience just when his team is thinking of cutting him for playing badly. If he is booted by the 49ers, he can console himself and tell others that it’s retribution for his brave stand — er, sit — for justice.
Ironically, however, and presumably unknown to Kaepernick, black people in America don’t buy his tale of national hopelessness. Studies show that although they are more aware of facing discrimination than whites are, they are also more optimistic about their future. A 2015 study of survey data by Carol Graham at the Brookings Institution found poorer black respondents are nearly three times as likely to feel optimistic and only half as likely to feel stress as poorer whites.
This isn’t very shocking. Although blacks’ economic improvement has not been fast enough to catch up to other races, racial barriers have been crumbling fast. A black man is president. There is a large and vibrant black middle class. Blacks have higher levels of engagement in their communities than do members of other races.
The stereotype of blacks wallowing in self-pity over historical wrongs is mostly a virtue-signalling white invention.
The serious issue of excessive police violence to which Kaepernick alluded is already acknowledged and being addressed as never before. Video after video of black men being mistreated by police have, out of all proportion to their statistical significance, persuaded the nation that police reform is necessary. Indeed it is. And police forces all over the country have been reforming. Police chiefs and commissioners, many of them black, are leading the reforms.
In this respect, Kaepernick is not a leading indicator. He is not bravely drawing attention to a problem of which America was largely ignorant or to which it is indifferent. So he’s less a canary tweeting in a coal mine, more a lame duck making a show of his final quack.
His rich NFL lifestyle puts him out of touch with the concerns and experiences of ordinary people of any race. He does not understand the optimism that ordinary black people feel. He is lucky he lives in a country where he can be overcompensated for his waning talents, and in which the Constitution protects his right to behave like a jerk.
