The Kaepernick Effect

"Me and Kaepernick, we both wake up Black. We probably experience shit down the road a little differently from each other, but we're still Black. We still look Black. We are still of Black descent. He walks out of his house and he's Black, every single day. People try to discredit anybody who tries to buck the normalcy of our country, and the normalcy is white supremacy."
Those are the words of Bruce Maxwell, a baseball pro who, like Colin Kaepernick, was blackballed after taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem. He's quoted in Dave Zirin's The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World. Recall that in 2016 after a run of high profile police shootings of unarmed Blacks Kaepernick chose a quiet dignified way to protest an ongoing evil. Remember The way out of proportion reactions people had to his assertion of not only outrage over acts of evil and so many people's acceptance and active defense of them but of his fully sentient humanity.
Zirin shows that Kaepernick served as an inspiration to not only the elite adult athletes we usually associate this activism with but for high school and college student athletes. Most of the book consists of his portraits of these people who had had to deal with Kaepernick's adult realizations during some of the most sensitive developmental periods of their lives. They come from all over the country, many from majority white communities and schools with an aversion to racism's inconvenient truths. Many were learning how to come out of an encounter with police alive at the same age as white peers were learning that Mr. Policeman is your friend. They were in middle or high school when unarmed Trayvon Martin was killed by a fully armed grown ass vigilante. Many had seen ugly incidents go down not only in the news but in their own neighborhoods. They faced threatened consequences that had the potential to derail their lives. They had to deal with IRL and cyber bullying. What they did took a lot of conviction and courage.
You don't have to be a sports fan to fully appreciate The Kaepernick Effect. If you are bothered by the racism so many people encounter in so many parts of their lives you'll get a lot out of it.
On a purrrsonal note, I've been thinking of the campus protests against Israel's war of aggression against Palestine. On a few campuses you see fully armed police breaking up student encampments. On most (including mine) nothing much. This probably has to do with the bandwidth finals, moving out of dorms, and, for some graduation are taking up. I bet a lot of admin are plenty happy about that. I've been assessing how far I'll go if it gets more serious at UMaine next semester. TBH I'm not really impressed with myself. I'd go to protests, speak out, and raise money. But the day Joan F-M (UMaine's President) is on the phone asking Orono Police to bust up a protest on the Mall I am so not there. After working so hard, especially after the stroke, to get a degree and a job working with undergrads I am not going anything to alienate the admin on the one campus I can get a job on within commuting distance.
A great big shout out goes to the students who are willing to risk more than I am.
Jules Hathaway