Yes, Kareem.. Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr, expecting athletes to stand for the National Anthem is just like the songs slaves were forced to sing while working in the fields. You got us, you got Trump dead to rights :sarcasm:
Leftists, like Ferdinand, cannot contain their hate for this country and our President. They justify their hate by claiming everything they don’t like is rooted in racism.
It’s beyond insulting for people who have had so much success to do what they want thanks to the sacrifices of men and women who have defended this country that is symbolized by our Flag and National Anthem. Is it so much to ask people to stand up and pay respect to the very blanket of freedom they are privileged to live under? People die everyday trying to get into this country for a fraction of the like elites like Ferdinand live.
All the athletes making millions to play ball are employees of their team and league. If you don’t like the rules of your employer quit! Here’s the deal, and from the words of Chris Cuomo, “if you don’t like what America is YOU LEAVE!”
Shame on anyone who agrees with Ferdinand and all the dolts in the NFL and any other sports league. This kid gets it You don’t.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on the NFL, ‘BlacKkKlansman’ and the Summer Movie as Protest Song
by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar | Hollywood Reporter
Amid Trump’s national anthem rhetoric, Spike Lee’s latest film and Boots Riley’s ‘Sorry to Bother You’ reinforce satire as the preferred genre of the oppressed, writes the NBA Hall-of-Famer and Hollywood Reporter cultural columnist.
“Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work,” observed ex-slave-turned-abolitionist Frederick Douglass. To the slave owners, singing slaves would drown out their own cruelty and oppression, clothe them in a coerced choir of decency. But it wasn’t enough that the slaves had to sing, they had to sing their oppressor’s feel-good songs that are summed up in the Porgy and Bess refrain of “I’ve got plenty of nothin’,” and nothin’s plenty for me.”
Yay, nothin’.
Currently, the song being demanded is the national anthem during football games. But during a warm-up game on Aug. 10, despite President Trump’s previous condemnation, several Eagles players kneeled during the anthem or raised their fists — their way of singing their own song. For them, lyrics like “land of the free” don’t accurately represent the daily reality for people of color. They love their country but want that country to recognize the suffering that occurs when it isn’t living up to its constitutional promises.
Trump reacted by tweeting, “Numerous players, from different teams, wanted to show their ‘outrage’ at something that most of them are unable to define.” Who would know better how to define their outrage: the privileged darling of white supremacists, the 94 percent-white team owners, the 75 percent-white head coaches or the 70 percent-black players who actually take the field each week?
The daily challenge for African-Americans is getting white Americans to listen to their song, especially when it isn’t a grinning, grateful or pandering patriotic song…more