{"id":879684,"date":"2019-09-04T09:00:49","date_gmt":"2019-09-04T13:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=879684"},"modified":"2019-09-04T16:23:01","modified_gmt":"2019-09-04T20:23:01","slug":"colin-kaepernick-shawn-carter-nfl-police-brutality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/politics\/political-commentary\/colin-kaepernick-shawn-carter-nfl-police-brutality-879684\/","title":{"rendered":"They Didn’t Kneel For This"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\t\t\t\t

\u201cInspire Change\u201d could be something you say if you are trying to make people aware of a particular problem. But with regards to the National Football League and racial injustice, that job is already done. Colin Kaepernick, along with his fellow football players and other athletes from other sports, handled that job starting three years ago this past August, when they began kneeling in protest as the national anthem rang out before their games.<\/span><\/p>\n

So when the NFL tells us, starting this week, that it is trying to \u201cInspire Change,\u201d it is clear that two things, primarily, interest NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and the billionaire owners of the league\u2019s 32 teams \u2014\u00a0along with Shawn Carter, the artist known as Jay-Z, soon to be a majority team owner himself. Under the guise of philanthropic activism, they are taking credit for Kaepernick\u2019s message \u2014 even as they paid him a monetary settlement for continuing to deny him employment because he chose to express it. Even worse, they are flaunting it, showing how unserious they are about embracing his cause.<\/span><\/p>\n

Last Friday, <\/span>the league<\/span><\/a> revealed the first fruits <\/span>of its partnership<\/span><\/a> with Carter and Roc Nation, the rapper\u2019s entertainment company. <\/span>As anyone with common sense could have expected<\/span><\/a>, those fruits are rancid with commercialism and commodification. When the NFL opens its 100th season, and third straight without Kaepernick, on Thursday night with its annual concert event, the performers won\u2019t just be headliners. Meek Mill, Rapsody, and Meghan Trainor are now <\/span>\u201cInspire Change Advocates.\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

That isn\u2019t all. While \u201cSongs of the Season\u201d sounds like a Christmas compilation album that you buy off a toll-free line, it\u2019s actually the name that the league chose for a supposedly serious part of its \u201csocial enterprise model,\u201d perhaps labeled so because corporations consider words like \u201cracial justice\u201d to be radioactive.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

No, instead, they dispatch musicians to create music that the NFL will integrate into promotions, all branded with the feel-good \u201csocial justice\u201d message. They\u2019ll also sell \u201cInspire Change\u201d apparel later this season. (Though the league didn\u2019t say as much last Friday, past experience tells us that these products will end up as mandated sideline gear for players and coaches before too long. What better billboards do you get than the NFL star who scores a touchdown and slaps on an \u201cInspire Change\u201d cap?)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Proceeds will go to organizations \u201ccommitted to the key priorities of Inspire Change,\u201d those being \u201ceducation and economic empowerment, police and community relations, and criminal justice reform.\u201d But the real profit comes from placating white feelings at the expense of black speech and protest.<\/span><\/p>\n

Music singles, concerts, and clothing. People can engage in all the willful ignorance they like and pretend that they don\u2019t know what Kaepernick\u2019s protest was all about, but I think the average bear could discern that neither he nor his fellow players tried to sell anything while demonstrating.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

(That came later, when Kaepernick became <\/span>a prominent Nike pitchman<\/span><\/a> and the brand once accused of sweatshop abuses put a swoosh next to his face and all of a sudden became conscious.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

People have intellectually honest criticisms of Kaepernick. Even I do, specifically concerning <\/span>his selfish, wrongheaded declaration<\/span><\/a> in 2016 that he wouldn\u2019t vote. But the fact is that the NFL has not only silenced his antiracist message on the sidelines while denying him employment, but the league has now converted it into something that it can sell. Even better for its owners, they have managed not to suffer many meaningful repercussions from its teams shutting Kaepernick out, often for inferior personnel. In several cases this season alone, <\/span>teams chose to have poorer quarterback situations<\/span><\/a> by keeping Kaepernick out. Perhaps they either view it too risky a public-relations move to even give him a shot in training camp, or it\u2019s because they don\u2019t want to associate themselves with his ideals. Either way, though the league could still have made him a part of its philanthropic efforts while he was not on a roster, it chose not to do so.<\/span><\/p>\n

Instead, the NFL presented Carter as validation, as the apotheosis of its wokeness. The league \u2014 for which I worked as a Films producer for six years \u2014 is most interested in \u201cprotecting the shield,\u201d a metaphor for both its logo and its reputation. And it offered up one of the most famous and celebrated black entertainers as a buffer. For a few weeks, it worked. Carter was a cookie for the disbelieving black public to entertain, for a short while, the possibility that it actually gave a damn about racial injustice. The league won either way, whether those black skeptics bought it and muted their criticism of the NFL, or they didn\u2019t and soon focused <\/span>their ire on Carter<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

The swindling of Kaepernick\u2019s protest is all but complete. Since the league once used <\/span>pink accents on its uniforms<\/span><\/a> to spotlight breast cancer research, the only thing that may be missing from this <\/span>Susan G. Komen-ing<\/span><\/a> of the fight for racial justice are the black ribbons on its uniforms.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite his past activism, Carter\u2019s involvement shouldn\u2019t shock anyone. Back in January, he pinned some of the epidemic of police violence of single-family homes instilling an <\/span>\u201cadverse feeling toward authority\u201d<\/span><\/a> in the black people who grow up in them. And aside from his politics, Carter is one of these masters of the NFL universe now, and it is a club that he sought to join despite what has been done to Kaepernick. He is an extraordinarily wealthy man, like the team owners, and odds are that he\u2019ll side with them when the chips come down.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was foolish for any of us to expect otherwise. While corporations are awful at pressing for positive systemic change, they tend to be great at public relations. And the best way they saw to end the Kaepernick mess was to pay up. In 2017, the league committed $89 million over six years to various social-justice causes. Signifying virtue while not angering the <\/span>overwhelmingly white fan base<\/span><\/a> that buys tickets at stadiums on Sundays was probably at the forefront of their minds, not ending systemic racism with the kind of cultural and financial cachet that the league possesses. The priority is always making money while maintaining a profile clean enough to make that business sustainable.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That is why Carter and the NFL didn\u2019t feel that they could make a partnership official without putting a hasty civil-rights paint job on it. But like so many of us, Kaepernick himself saw what was lying beneath. In <\/span>a tweet<\/span><\/a> sent Friday afternoon, not long after the \u201cInspire Change\u201d news broke, the quarterback and activist cited a passage from Robert L. Allen\u2019s 1969 Black Power text, <\/span>Black Awakening in Capitalist America<\/span><\/i>. It critiqued how people in Carter\u2019s position in the past welded \u201cblack communities more firmly into the structure of American corporate capitalism.\u201d The passage charges with malfeasance both the system and the black messengers who, as Kaepernick would argue, make things worse in the end for our people.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Reading always gives me clarity.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat [they] seek is not an end to oppression, but the transfer of the oppressive apparatus into their own hands. \u201c<\/p>\n

Robert L. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America (1969) pic.twitter.com\/Yztn8pAnUi<\/a><\/p>\n

— Colin Kaepernick (@Kaepernick7) August 30, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n