A few weeks later a committed group of players was present at the annual NFL owners’ meeting in New York City. I was proud of what we were able to win: economic support from the league for some of our programs, in particular. But I don’t want us to fold so quickly just because the franchise owners chose to go with the carrot instead of the stick. In the meantime I’m going to keep sitting and using the space during the anthem to protest, because there are two parts of how things have gone down that feel wrong to me. The first is when Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said that players “disrespecting the flag.… won’t play. Period.” That’s crazy to me: saying we’ll celebrate freedom by forcing people to stand. Then he explained that he was “helping” us because we “need consequences” in order to stand up to peer pressure. I’m a thirty-two-year-old man, father of three, and that’s the most patronizing shit I’ve ever heard in my life. If you think about what Jones said, it’s treating players like they’re not human beings. It reminded me of the Dred Scott case: you’re property, so you don’t have the ability to be a person first. It sends a terrible message to young people: that your employer doesn’t see you as a human being; they see you as a piece of property. We have every right, according to our union and according to the freedoms we are supposed to be honoring, to use that space to do what we like. This game has given us so much, but it also takes so much away: our health, our time with our families. It seems like Jerry Jones is on the hunt for our dignity and our humanity, too.
The second part that sits wrong with me is that I believe central to any conversation about standing for the anthem is making sure Colin Kaepernick has an opportunity to play in the NFL. Before we negotiate anything about whether we sit or whether we stand, we need those doors for Colin to open up, to stop the collusion against him. It felt so wrong for us to have the opportunity to be able to speak honestly with our employers but for the guy who started everything not to have a voice or a seat at that table.
Going forward, we know that the owners are driven more by the financial bottom line, while we have more of a social justice view, so trying to align those is going to be hard. I will say that the best way they can show that they are truly with us is—as of this writing—to sign Kaepernick. He deserves more than just a place on a team—he needs to be on the front lines of what we are doing. Any effort to erase him from this moment needs to be fought.
Some members of the media have been frothing like junkyard dogs throughout this whole experience, and fans—outside Seattle—yell things at us now that wouldn’t be out of place in the Alabama of the 1950s. But, truly, I’ve felt surprisingly chill through the whole thing. I’ve been studying Martin Luther King Jr. a lot, reading biographies and his speeches, and one of the bits of wisdom I’ve gained is that hate comes at you when you make any stand. It’s the price of trying to be heard. If that’s the case, and we accept it, then it’s a waste of emotion to react to the negativity. The hate, the rage that people throw at you only has power if you let it affect you. I know that’s easier said than done, but I want to enjoy every single day and feel great about the power of this struggle that we’re building. Dr. King tried to love life, make time for his family, and keep his humanity intact. Reading his lectures and spiritual teachings is pushing me toward a clearer understanding of what you have to do to find balance.
Reacting to every slight—whether from someone online or even the president—doesn’t put you in the right mind to make smart, calculated moves. The week after all this happened, I was doing my regular work with youth at a jail detention center, talking to the kids about what makes a person strong. I asked them, “If I’m sitting in front of a white man and he calls me a ‘nigger,’ am I a man if I punch him in the face? Or am I a man if I think about my kids, and think about the consequences of what could happen if I did punch him?” For me, that was a reflective moment, to acknowledge that I’m a man if I think about my family first, not if I think about myself first. It’s not about the short-term satisfaction of responding to every impulse.
This approach allowed me in the aftermath to experience true grace—in a lot of situations that I don’t think the president expected to create. I felt that grace the week after the big Sunday showdown, when I rolled up to practice in my car and saw people protesting outside our practice facility, with signs indicating they were vets and waving American flags. I pulled over outside the security gate and got out of my car to talk to them. I’ll admit it was a little scary, because I didn’t know if they had guns. But I saw them protesting, and I was just like, “Fuck it. Let’s talk.” At first they were shocked. I don’t think they expected to be talking with players when they showed up to the facility with their flags and signs, but it was cool. We just shared our experiences. We talked back and forth about where we disagree, yet how we want the same things, and what the
