In America, there is a significant public perseverance that “freedom” is fundamentally connected with wealth.
Most of the country considers America through the desirable and transforming lens, color and without utopia, in which wealth conveys equality and acts as a panacea for social and racial diseases. As soon as a person achieves great financial success, or, as in the message, he or it “overcomes” the disaster of economic and racial inequality, it will turn out to be “free”.
Working in parallel with this reverence for this color version of the American Dream is a belief that economic privilege requires patriotic gratitude. In different sectors and disciplines, Americans say that they uncritically love their nation, be grateful for the fact that they are exceptional enough to live in a country that gives citizens the opportunity to achieve astronomical heights of economic prosperity.
For black citizens of the country, there is often an additional racial presumption hiding under the surface of these concepts: the opinion that black success and wealth require public silence on systemic issues of inequality and oppression.
These are strong and fragile ideologies that support the concept of the American dream – durable, because they are encoded in the fabric of American culture (most Americans, including African Americans, easily took these ideologies as alleged facts); Nevertheless, fragile, because it is too easy to see that the economic privilege is a lousy barrier of both individual and systemic discrimination and oppression.
Consequently, the blacks were also one of the most vocal applicants for these ideologies, as we have recently seen with the demonstrations of Colin Capernik and NFL #Takeaknee. In the demonstration of the joint quota of a free agent, professional football players – the vast majority of which blacks – were on their knees during the state anthem as a means of protest against racial injustice and cruelty to the police.
Watch: NFL players are united in Defiance and Saltiarity
Over the past few weeks, the President of the United States has attracted attention to internal tension, which determines the ideology of the “American dream” from his repeated public criticism of these on the knees of NFL players.
“If a player wants to privilege to earn millions of dollars in the NFL or other leagues,” Trump recently wrote, he or she is not allowed to kneel. Designing the actions of protesters, “disrespectful” in the country, the flag and anthem, President Donald Trump called for the dismissal of players, encouraged the NFL boycott, insisted that the League would bear the rule that binds the players for the hymn and ridiculed the “bitch's sons” protesters as “sons”.
In a dramatic plan, more suitable from the scriptwriter of the reality show, the president gloated that he instructed Vice President Mike Pence to leave the game Colts Indianapolis at the moment when any player was on his knees. It was an organized show of power and indignation, intended to send a bright political message, given that Trump and Pence knew in advance that on this particular day the colts played the San Francisco 49ers – a team that currently has the most protesters. The NFL announcement this week that the League does not plan to punish protesting players is the last event that provokes the rage of the president; Taking into account social networks early in the morning, he again equated his knees with a “complete disrespect” for our country.
As many noted, the President’s moralizing indignation in relation to NFL players is selective and deeply spoiled – his obvious patriotic loyalty did not prevent the millionaire policy from criticizing the removal of the confederation statues or an attack on the family of golden stars, or mockery of the military service of Senator John McCain.
NFL players and their defenders Repeatedly stated that the protests are designed to emphasize racial inequality and oppression. They also explained that their decision on their knees arose from the desire to peacefully and respectfully protest after a stable conversation with Military veteransField
Trump decided to ignore these rational and structural problems of inequalities that motivate protests and instead put forward a narrative associated exclusively with the obvious manifestations of American patriotism and the “privilege” of NFL players. As one of the presidential advisers explained, aggressively focusing on NFL players, Trump believes that he “wins the cultural war”, making black “millionaires of athletes to his new [Hillary Clinton].
Read more: as “Sport of America”, NFL cannot avoid politics
This is a cynical statement that reveals the president’s perception of his jingeism of his supports of supporters, who represent him as a crusader for American values and symbols.
Taking black protesters as an antithesis of all this, Trump noted the players as nonpatriotic elites and enemies of the nation. For the president, who constantly made his way through domestic and foreign policy since he was elected, the cultural war between the “hardworking” and “virtuous” working class and white Americans of the middle class and rich, ungrateful black football players are welcoming public diversion.
Trump's attacks on the protesting NFL are rooted in those competing tensions inherent in the American dream: that wealth is equal to freedom; This economic privilege requires patriotic gratitude; And most importantly, the individual economic prosperity of blacks deprives them of fear about systemic injustice and requires their silence in racial oppression.
Among the bulletin of protesters, this became a common line of attack, a means of humiliation of the activity of black NFL players, indicating their obvious wealth. The fact that systemic racism is clearly real and that individual prosperity is not eliminating immunity to racial discrimination, which is visible, is lost in critics of protesters.
This is a complaint, which suggests that black athletes should be grateful for living in this country; This racism cannot exist in America, since black professional athletes allow you to play and sign contracts for significant amounts of money; These black players owe the people their silence since America “gave” them the opportunity and access; that black athletes do not have moral authority on race and inequality from their individual success; And this success of black athletes has never been to earn them, but instead they gave them, and you can take it so easily.
This cultural war filed over black athletes, not new. Black athletes, and artists, stopping their peculiar place in American society as individuals loved by their sports and artistic talents, but also insulted when they use their public platform in relation to systemic race inequality. Parallels between #takeaknee protests and protests Muhammad Ali Or John Carlos and Tommy Smith Easy obvious; There is also an important similarity with the case Paul RobsonField
A frank civil law activist, student and professional football player, lawyer, opera singer and actor, Robson canceled his passport in 1950 from his political activity and speech – practically destroyed his career. The star athlete and artist, “who demonstrated the American mobility of rising mobility,” quickly “became a public enemy number one,” as the institutions canceled his concerts, the audience called for his death and burned him to anti-Besion crowds.
During the hearing in Congress in 1956, the chairman of the Committee of the House of Representatives for Non American events was won by a familiar refrain with Robson, challenging the artist’s accusations of American racism and racial oppression. He did not see any signs of prejudices, he claimed, since Robson was privileged, went to elite universities and playing university and professional football.
Read more: Poll: Americans divided into NFL protests
Black athletes, even quiet, largely understand that their economic privilege does not isolate them from the realities of racial discrimination. They also understand that their wealth and success are unreliable and often depend not only on their sporting results, but also on the fact that they are silent on issues of racial injustice, especially those that, in the visible, are questioning the “American Dream” or involve the American public in association.
It should not be a surprise that Colin Capernic, whose protests turned him into national paria, despite his talents on the field, filed a complaint against the NFL, accusing the League and her team of the black one because of his political beliefs. “Principal and peaceful political protests,” Kapernik lawyers said in his statement: “They should not be punished, and athletes should not refuse to work on the basis of partisan political provocation by the executive branch of our government.” It is not known whether an accelerated kapernican will win his complaint is unknown, but, of course, he says that he and his lawyers established his claims in the disputed definitions of freedom and the unreliable economic privilege of the NPL outright players.
In particular, for the most loud and vocal critics of black protesters, frankness is equivalent to treason, the grounds for the most severe punishments. Perhaps they will benefit from the close reading of James Baldwin, who once asserted: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and for this reason I insist on the right to constantly criticize it.”
