Kaepernick, Flag-burning, and the Anti-Patriotic Protest
As you know, I don’t usually get this symposium tied up in the media churn. But this particular bit of churn raises a couple interesting questions, so here goes.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock like me, you’ve probably heard the polarized hubbub over San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the pregame national anthem, an act he explained as refusing “to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” citing police violence in particular. The widespread backlash against his act is both totally unsurprising and unsurprisingly poorly articulated. As I read it, here are the underlying causes of people’s outrage against Kaepernick:
- A) He expressed a message with which they have strong political disagreement
- B) He politicized a normally non-political space
- C) His form of protest was anti-patriotic, indicting the entire nation rather than just a specific party
Of course (A) is pretty common and sort of uninteresting. But (B) and (C) both raise complex questions for me, viz.:
- What are the benefits of having spaces that we think of as non-political, such as the Olympics? What are the costs? What circumstances justify openly politicizing them?
- What, if anything, is the social harm of the kind of all-indicting anti-patriotic protest that Kaepernick or flag-burners perform? What values are being undermined, and should that undermining be discouraged (or encouraged)?
I’m still a little fuzzy on these, so feel free to take the thread in other directions!