Getty Images
After the assassination on George Floyd’s Memorial Day, enough people in and around the NFL said just enough about the potential return of quarterback Colin Kaepernick to the NFL to give the impression that Kaepernick would indeed be back. With Labor Day in the fray, that has not happened.
What happened last is that Commissioner Roger Goodell submitted for an interview with Emmanuel Acho, for his Uncomfortable conversations with a black man digital series. Acho asked Goodell, among other things, what he would say to Kaepernick, the catalyst for the national anthem, as a public expression of apology or remorse.
“The first thing I would say is I wish we had listened earlier, Kaep, to what you knelt down and what you were trying to bring to attention,” Goodell said.
The apology at that moment revolved around an attempt to subtly accuse Kaepernick of not doing more to let the league know where he was on his knees and what he was trying to bring to attention.
“We had invited him several times to have the conversation, to have the dialogue,” Goodell added. ‘I wish we had the benefit of it. We never did it. And, you know, we would have benefited from that. Absolutely. “
But what more did the league need to hear about where Kaepernick knelt and went thin to bring attention, beyond the statement he made publicly at the time he began to protest?
“There is police brutality,” Kaepernick said on August 28, 2016, two days after Kaepernick’s decision not to stand by the national anthem was first noted. “People of color are targeted by the police. So that’s a big part of it. And they are government officials. They are deployed by the government, which is something that this country needs to change. There are things we can do to make them more responsible, raising those standards.
‘You have people who practice law and our lawyers and go to school for eight years, but you can become a cop in six months and not have to have the same amount of training as a cosmetologist. That’s crazy. Someone who holds a curling iron has more education and more training than people who have a gun and go out on the street to protect us. ”
No conversation was needed, no dialogue needed to understand what he was kneeling about and what he was trying to bring to attention. Most if not all teams of the league, collectively and individually, simply accepted the narrative that the passive failure to stand amounts to an active attempt to respect military, flag and country – no questions asked and no explanations heard.
Kaepernick’s controversy did not come and went in a short, fleeting moment. It spanned two full seasons, from 2016 (when it started) to 2017 (when Kaepernick could not find a job with another team, when the president focused on players protesting during the national anthem, and then mobilized the league to try to find a way for them to stop doing so). The problem subsided in 2018 and 2019, becoming a slow sugar instead of a whole seed.
Only after the Floyd assassination, when the cacophony of voices acknowledging that Kaepernick was equal, became too great to ignore, did the league begin to embrace concepts previously held poor or longer held.
“It’s not about the flag,” Goodell told Acho in a video posted Sunday night. “The message here, what our players are doing, is being mischaracterized. These are not people who are unpatriotic. They are not disloyal. They are not against our military. In fact, many of those boys were in the Army, and they are military family. What they were trying to do was exercise their right to draw attention to something that needed to be fixed, and that the wrong view of who they were and what they were doing was the thing that really gnawed at me. ‘
It nodded to him quietly, for during the four-year existence of the dispute he had never before placed it in those terms, at least not publicly. Indeed, the video Goodell has prepared in response to the montage of players demanding action from the league was the first time he or the league had done anything to acknowledge that the league was wrong for not listening to the NFL players earlier.
The protests that began in August 2016 were loudly rejected by those who flatly argue that kneeling equals injustice, and the league has never taken significant steps to challenge this conclusion as unfair, unfair and / or unfair until June of 2020. it has caused Kaepernick, the man who started the movement and who made other players aware of their collective bargaining right to participate in it, to continue to remain an unpopular figure, in league circles and elsewhere. (Submitting the league for reunion to keep him out and calculate a scheme in the range of $ 5 million to $ 10 million did not help.) It has kept Kaepernick out of place on an NFL roster, and so it remains.
That’s the reason nothing Goodell or anything else from the NFL says at this point about Kaepernick’s affairs. The only way to show true remorse would be to find a way to get him back in the league.
Whether in March 2017 when Kaepernick became a free agent or at any point between then and now, if Goodell ever wanted Kaepernick back in the league, Goodell has always had the power to make it, or at least try. Whatever the reason, it has not happened yet, and probably never will. Until that happens, any apology or expression of remorse from Goodell or anyone else associated with the NFL remains hollow and incomplete.
