TWO THOUGHTS ON THIS:
1) I think talking about if Kaepernick is oppressed or not oppressed in a binary fashion is probably unhelpful, and maybe makes us talk past each other a bit.
For instance, I think we can all agree that from the age of 4 on Kaepernick has been raised with and lived with a lot of class privilege. He doesn't personally know what it's like to worry about where your next meal is going to come from. In our country it is disproportionately black children who know what that worry feels like, but that doesn't mean he knows it, and it doesn't mean that for white children who know and feel that worry it hurts any less than for the black children who feel it in higher proportion.
At the same time, I think we can all understand how growing up as the only black member of an all white family and in a pretty rural all white community could be alienating, lonely, umcomfortable, challenging, and sprinkled with experiences in which you're made to feel that you don't belong, or reminded that maybe you truly don't entirely belong. Living with an all white family and not having anyone to process those experiences with or to talk you through those experiences also presents its own challenges. That's the opposite of privilege, which is what people mean by oppression.
2) Regarding comparing the NFL combine to a slave auction, this is an old comparison, and I think in some ways it's deeply unserious and in other ways it makes a lot of sense. The distinction I think, is if you understand the making of that comparison as being one about the player or one about the owner.
If making a comparison about the player-as-slave, comparing NFL players to chattel slavery in the U.S. is simply stupid. For a comparison to work both sides of the comparison have to have some equivalence and that's pretty laughable in this case. For instance, would you rather be a multimillionaire, or not only be forced to spend the rest of your life working for free, but to also have your children and your children's children be forced to work for free by the same owner because they had originally purchased you? I mean, c'mon.
At the same time though, if you're making the comparison about owners, the similarities between a slave auction and the combine can be a little bit uncomfortable: they're both ultimately events in which owners and their representatives poke and prod people's bodies to help them decide who to buy and to help them try to figure out who they can make the most money off of.
So while I've personally always found this comparison to not be that helpful, I also think we can all understand how having a bunch of (overwhelmingly white) representatives of team owners poke you and prod you on a stage while deciding how much money you are worth is a very different experience for black potential NFL players than it is for white potential NFL players. For black players I can totally understand how this very weird experience hits way too close to home despite not being at all the same thing. How close it hits to home (while obviously not being at all the same thing) is, I think, why people have been making the observation for so long.
SMALLER THOUGHTS:
a) Funny to see folks on a Hawks board still claiming to hate Kaepernick because of his hair and clothes. :lol: Ten years ago it was his shoe collection, whereas now I guess it's his afro.
Personally, having grown up in the East Bay in the 90s around graying Black Panthers and their kids I find Kaepernick's New York Fashion Week version of appropriating the Black Panther Party aesthetic to be pretty corny and eye rolling, but also harmless. Jay Caspian Kang recently wrote about how watching younger people reappropriating the parts that didn't matter from 60s radicalism for the cool pictures and the clout is very backwards looking and depressing, which I agree with, but in the grand scheme of things I also don't think it matters.
b) That said I reject the idea that activists are impure if they make money. I think people involved in these movements regularly and very seriously have conversations about selling out and self interest and giving to the movement rather than taking from it, but the people who proudly announce Kap having made money as a criticism never seem to actually be involved in these movements, or to care beyond using the criticism as a way to score a point. So, I take that criticism as unseriously as the people who make it are, meaning I think it can absolutely be valid but isn't being made seriously.
c) As for the Netflix show, I don't think I'm going to watch it? I was a fan of Kapernick as a player and remain a fan of his and the work he continues to do, but the trailer felt like a racism after school special plus infographics, and I'm not really sure who the audience is supposed to be. People who like Vox explainer videos? Middle schoolers? Me?
Admittedly, another part for me is that while Kap is clearly very book smart he's never been a particularly interesting person to listen to. I kind of think oh him like a very scaled down version of Tank Man (the guy who stood in front of tanks and blocked them in Tiananmen Square) or the monk who set himself on fire in '63 to protest Diem's oppression of Buddhists. Kaepernick, like these guys, is important for what he did. I don't need to learn about their high school experiences, or for them to explain why they did what they did, to understand why they're important.
For people who get something out of this I think that's great and for that reason I'm glad it exists, but I just don't think I'm probably the audience for that at this point in my life, or at least right now in my life.
