OT: NFL and the Anthem -

[DRZRM]

Originally Posted by gdw

How many of these "protesters" are actually doing anything other than taking a knee during the anthem? Are they working in their communities to bring about change? Donating money to the cause? Have any joined in the marches?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/s...s.html?mcubz=0

Activism Outside the Spotlight

While Kaepernick waits to play, he has hardly been idle. Fulfilling a “million-dollar” pledge he made during the heat of the anthem flap last September, he has donated $100,000 every month since October to up to four charities, with little notice beyond Kaepernick’s website.

The beneficiaries are usually small, relatively unknown and surprised.

“We had no idea how Colin Kaepernick heard about our organization,” said Carolyn A. Watson, founder and executive director of Helping Oppressed Mothers Endure, or H.O.M.E., a foundation supporting single mothers in Georgia. Someone representing Kaepernick contacted the group, Watson said, “and before we knew it, we were giving them the appropriate information and received a $25,000 check in the mail.”

Muhibb Dyer, a co-founder of the I Will Not Die Young Campaign in Milwaukee, thought the $25,000 donation was a prank.

“What is unique is that he identified grass-roots organizations like my own that are hanging on by a thread trying to do the work,” Dyer said. “But a lot of the time we are face-to-face, in the trenches, with some of the most at-risk youth in this country. Having him reach out to us is like a lifeline to continue the work that we do that is oftentimes not highlighted, but very much essential to the life and death of youth every day.”

The range of charities Kaepernick supports is broad. In January, for example, he gave $25,000 each to a Brooklyn group called Black Veterans for Social Justice, a clean-energy advocacy group called 350.org, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, and the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York.

Michelle Horovitz, a co-founder of Appetite for Change, which promotes healthy food through urban gardens and cooking seminars in Minneapolis, said the donation they received was “huge on an emotional level.”

She added: “We are huge fans of him and I personally have decided to boycott the N.F.L.”

Kaepernick has also held three “Know Your Rights” free camps for children. About 200 came to the one in Chicago in May, at the DuSable Museum of African American History, and others have been held in Oakland and New York. The goal, according to the website, is “to raise awareness on higher education, self empowerment, and instruction to properly interact with law enforcement in various scenarios.”

Children received free breakfasts and T-shirts listing 10 rights: The right to be free, healthy, brilliant, safe, loved, courageous, alive, trusted and educated, plus “the right to know your rights.”

There were seminars and sessions on black history, including segregation and Jim Crow laws. There were lessons on healthy eating and household finances. There was advice on speaking and dressing for respect, and for how to calmly handle interactions with the police.

Among the speakers were Eric Reid, Kaepernick’s former teammate in San Francisco, and Common, the hip-hop star. Near the end, Kaepernick shared his personal story to campers in Chicago.

“I love my family to death,” he said, according to Dave Zirin of The Nation. “They’re the most amazing people I know. But when I looked in the mirror, I knew I was different. Learning what it meant to be an African man in America, not a black man but an African man, was critical for me. Through this knowledge, I was able to identify myself and my community differently.”

He explained that he was giving the campers a kit to test their own DNA, to better understand their background, The Nation reported.

“I thought I was from Milwaukee,” Kaepernick said. “I thought my ancestry started at slavery and I was taught in school that we were all supposed to be grateful just because we aren’t slaves. But what I was able to do was trace my ancestry and DNA lineage back to Ghana, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, and saw my existence was more than just being a slave. It was as an African man. We had our own civilizations, and I want you to know how high the ceiling is for our people. I want you to know that our existence now is not normal. It’s oppressive. For me, identifying with Africa gave me a higher sense of who I was, knowing that we have a proud history and are all in this together.”

Kaepernick traveled to Ghana this summer. On July 4 on Instagram, accompanying a video montage of the trip, he said that he made the pilgrimage to get in touch with his “African ancestral roots.”

He sat in prison cells at “slave castles,” the fortresses that detained people just before they were shipped across the ocean as slaves. He also visited the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, schools and hospitals. Along with Nessa Diab, he also went to Egypt and Morocco.

“A part of the motivation was, if you have an awakening, then you start to want to have answers,” Loggins, who was part of the travel group, said on a podcast with Zirin. “You start to become inquisitive at a level that can sometime be seen to others as obsessive.”

On a day off last December, Kaepernick took the GRE, the standardized graduate-school entrance exam. “Just exploring all opportunities,” he said.

It was about then that Kaepernick was introduced to Christopher Petrella, who teaches American Cultural Studies at Bates College in Maine. Petrella has since helped devise the curriculum and taught at the Know Your Rights camps and become part of Kaepernick’s inner circle.

Their first conversation, Petrella said in an email interview, “unexpectedly morphed into a back-and-forth on Bacon’s Rebellion, a late 17th-century political uprising in colonial Virginia that began to codify race and class hierarchies in the U.S. I was immediately struck by Colin’s raw curiosity, historical fluency, and the sophistication with which he spoke of persistent forms of racial injustice and racialized forms of police brutality today.”

He, too, has heard Kaepernick’s name mentioned alongside other athletes who became civil rights icons. Petrella said the comparisons were apt, but Kaepernick’s approach reminded him more of Ella Baker, a civil rights pioneer known for her work with the N.A.A.C.P., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

“Just as Colin tends to eschew the spotlight, Baker operated under the principle that ‘Strong people don’t need strong leaders,’” Petrella wrote. “Baker once said that ‘People must fight for their own freedom and not rely on leaders to do it for them.’ This approach seems consistent with Colin’s principle of believing in the capacity of ordinary people to grow into leaders, to self-advocate and to lift as we climb.”

What may be settled in the coming days and weeks is whether Kaepernick will once again experience the spotlight of the N.F.L. — whether a team will sign him, or whether it matters to the movement he has sparked.

“I’m so proud of him,” said Marshall, his Nevada teammate and fraternity brother. “If people look at the real issue, and look at what he’s doing in the community — the money he’s donating, the time he’s donating, the camps he’s putting on — they’d be like: ‘You know what? This dude’s really a stand-up guy.’”