Facebook friends ask me why I am focused on the kneeling, since they can’t understand why a good white girl like me doesn’t see this as unpatriotic and move on. Or at least support the flag and the anthem and the military.
Years ago it was illegal for blacks to enter the front door of restaurants and to eat in the same dining rooms. In protest, black people began sitting at lunch counters. They broke the law.
Years ago black people had to sit in the back of the bus. Rosa Parks sat down in front and other blacks began to do so too. They broke the law.
Still today blacks are prevented from voting in many places, by new voter id laws and district voting changes, by law.
Our country is a nation founded on the rule of law. This is one of the things our military protects — equality under the law.
Years ago the sit- ins and bus boycotts were considered un-American because the protesters should simply change the law. But their voices were not heard, by white citizens, by the lawmakers. The protesters were fired, called all kind of names, told to go back where they came from if they didn’t like America, and even killed.
Whenever white people’s power and position is threatened, we trot out the flag and the military to tell blacks to sit down and shut up or leave. And ultimately job loss, jail, and police action follows.
Here we are again. Blacks protested police brutality in marches, die- ins, lobbying their representatives from the mayor’s office to the Congress, and nothing happened.
Not nothing. More men and women were killed and the offending police officers were acquitted and nothing changed.
One day a black man prepared for work and realized he would hear the song and see the flag that still didn’t mean equality under the law. So he quietly knelt down.
When asked he explained. A few others joined him. He lost his job. He gave away a million dollars. People started noticing and a few others took a knee.
And then just like years ago, a white person provided misdirection and identified these citizens with a foul name and wrapped it all in the very flag that gives them the right to ask for equal treatment under the law.
For those who have ignored this reality that is what the kneeling is about: equal treatment under the law —
In a land that incarcerates over half of the black population while treating whites differently for the same crimes,
In a land where a black kid walking down the street can be shot and killed and his murderer go free but the white kid who kills 9 black people at a church receives donations to help with his trial,
In a land where a traffic stop of a black woman ends in her death overnight in jail,
In a land where Nazis wave confederate flags and kill people are called, “fine people” but black football players calling attention to the lack of equal justice are labelled “sons of bitches” who should be fired.
For those white friends who ask me why I care so passionately about the people kneeling, I ask you, why don’t you care more?
Here, now, in the land of the free, why aren’t you brave enough to see what racism does to our nation and support the movement toward equality under the law?
After all that’s the Republic for which it stands. And that is the Republic for which they kneel.
bevfriedlander 