The Chris Moeller Archives

Kaepernicks on campus

Slowly but confidently, Colin Kaepernick's NFL colleagues are joining him in his protest of the National Anthem over the national indifference to racism and institutional violence, but sadly, we haven't witnessed the same electrifying visual images we've seen on NFL sidelines performed by pigskin participants at the collegiate level. Yes, there've been a few, but they've been far between and mostly away from the campuses of the high-profile, Division I institutions.

It illustrates how little power these athletes perceive themselves as having upon the "plantation" that is higher-education athletics in the United States. I don't think they're wrong in their bleak assessment of the situation. Individually, they have almost no power. Without the major financial investments that many NFL players have behind them, they are as expendable as their physical bodies so routinely reveal them to be. Even college basketball players, also exploited, are probably better able to exert power, the great ones in particular, simply due to the fact that their sport allows one or two players to dominate a contest.

The funny truth of it is, though, that, as a group, the athletes have magnificent social and economic power. We saw this at the University of Missouri last fall when members of the Southeast Conference football team, en mass, refused to suit up until the university president had stepped down because of his insensitivity and inaction in the face of racial intolerance on campus. They were successful in their protest within a week, the president was history, and a highly-lucrative contest between the school and Brigham Young University, which had been threatened, went on as originally scheduled on a brisk November Saturday.

The sad irony of all of it is that the college environment is exactly the right one for protest, for independent thought, and for self-expression. It just doesn't work out that way. In an ongoing absurdity incapable of inviting immediate comparison, University of Iowa head football coach Kirk Ferentz bans the young adults on his team from using Twitter. Preventing college students from expressing themselves in public is a little like keeping elementary school students from participating in extracurricular activities like sports, music, and dance. It's a big reason they're supposed to be there.

As we saw in Columbia, Missouri a year ago, though, there's a danger posed to the traditional economic structure of an educational institution, and perhaps even to a state, if the students learn to express themselves beyond the simple ability to parrot a humble gratitude for the "rare opportunity" they've supposedly been gifted. To adapt a Kurt Vonnegut idea about education to the collegiate sporting field: If they were no longer using their diplomas as tickets to establishments of the ruling class, they would no longer be obligated to pretend that America is something that it obviously isn't.

posted by CM @ 7:16 PM