In America, there is a large kind of general insistence that “freedom” is a fundamental link to the individual’s wealth.
Most of the country looks at America through an ambitious and transforming lens, which is a colored and biased utopia, where wealth is transferred equality and works as a relationship of social and ethnic ills. Once the individual achieves tremendous financial success, or so the message goes, he will “exceed” the scourge of economic and ethnic inequality, and it becomes really “free”.
Working in parallel with this reverence for this colorful version of the “American dream” is the belief that the economic concession imposes national gratitude. Through industries and majors, Americans are asked to love their nation without bone, to be grateful because they are exceptional enough to live in a country that gives citizens the opportunity to reach astronomical heights of economic prosperity.
For black citizens in the country, there is often an additional racist assumption that lies under the surface of these concepts: the idea that black success and wealth requires general silence on regular issues of inequality and repression.
These are solid and fragile ideologies that support the concept of the American dream – durable because they are encrypted in the fabric of American culture itself (most Americans, including African Americans, easily adopt these ideologies as assumed facts); However, it is extremely easy to see that one’s economic concession is a poor obstacle against individual, device and repression.
Thus, blacks were also among the most vocal competitors in these ideologies, as we recently seen with Colin Kapernick and NFL #Takeaknee demonstrations. In the Solidary show with the free agent Qurtubbere, professional football players – the vast majority of them were black – kneeling during the national anthem as a way to protest against racist injustice and police brutality.
Watch: The American Football Association players cooperate in challenge and solidarity
Over the past few weeks, the President of the United States has attracted renewed attention to the underlying tensions that define the ideologies of the “American dream” through his repeated general criticism of these American Football Association players.
“If the player wants to have the honor to get millions of dollars in the US Football Association, or other tournaments,” Tweet Trump recently, he should not be allowed to kneel. President Donald Trump insisted on the actions of the “unresolved” demonstrators for the country, the hymn, and the constant, until the players are expelled and the US Football Association boycott, provided that he passes the league with a base that imposes that the player is
In a more suitable dramatic trick for a realistic, written television program, the president was brought up that he had instructed Vice President Mike Pines to get out of Indianapolis Colts the moment of any player kneeling. This was a vibrant offer of power and anger, designed to send a flaming political message given that Trump and Bens knew in advance that on that particular day, the dowries were playing with San Francisco 49 – the team that currently has most of the demonstrators. The US Football Association announces this week that the league has no plans to punish the protesters is the latest event to raise the anger of the president; When moving to social media during the early morning, he was equal to kneeling with “complete lack of respect” of our country.
As many pointed out, the moral anger of the president towards the American Football Association players is selective and deep – his apparent national loyalty did not prevent the billionaire politician from criticizing the removal of Confederation statues, attacking the family of the golden star, or mocking the military services of Senator John McCain.
The American Football Association players and defenders I mentioned over and over again The protests aim to shed light on racist inequality and repression. They also made it clear that their decision to kneel came out of the desire to protest in peace and respect after a continuous conversation with Old military warriors.
Trump chose to ignore this logic and structural issues of inequality that stimulates protests. Instead, it provides an exclusive narrative of public offers of American patriotism and the “Football Association” franchise. Also, one of the president’s advisers, by targeting the American Football Association players, Trump believes that he “wins in the cultural war”, after he made the “Millionaire Sports for the Athletic” new athletes. [Hillary Clinton]”
Read more: As “American Sports”, the American Football Association cannot escape politics
It is a satirical statement, revealing the president’s perception of his base from supporters who perceive him as a Crusader of American values and symbols.
In black demonstrators as opposing all this, Trump distinguished the players as non -patriotic elites and enemies. For the president who has been constantly floundering in domestic and external politics since his election, a cultural war between “hard work” and the “virtuous” Americans of the emotional class, the middle class and the wealthy black players is publicly welcome.
Trump’s attacks on the American Football Association demonstrators are rooted in those competing tensions inherent to the American dream: that wealth is equal to freedom; This economic privilege requires national gratitude; More importantly, the individual economic prosperity of the black people invalidates their concerns about the systematic injustice and requires their silence on racial persecution.
Among the critics of the demonstrators, this has become a common line of attack, a way to extract the activity of the American Black Football Association players by referring to their clear wealth. The fact that the methodological racism is clearly real and that individual prosperity does not make one of the immunized against racial discrimination seems to be lost to the critics of the demonstrators.
Their doubts indicate that black athletes must be grateful to live in this country; Racism cannot be found in America, where black professionals are allowed to play and sign contracts for large sums of money; The black players owe the nation their silence because America “gave them” the opportunity and arrival; Black athletes do not have moral authority in race issues and inequality because of their individual success; And that the success of black athletes was never to win, but instead, I was given to them and could easily make them easier.
This cultural war on black athletes is not new. Black athletes-and artists have long been their strange place in American society as individuals loved by their sporting and artistic talents, however, they raised the moment when they used their general platform to protest against systematic racist inequality. The similarities between #Takeaknee protests and protests Muhammad Ali Or John Carlos and Tommy Smith Easily clear. Also, there are important similarities with a case Paul Robson.
An explicit civil rights activist, a collective and professional football player, a lawyer, singer and opera representative, canceled his passport in 1950 because of his political activity and speech – actions that destroyed his career. The star and the artist, who had embodied the American upward, “became a” single general enemy “as the institutions canceled his concerts, and called on the audience to death and immersed by the anti -Rubson mobs.
During a hearing in the Congress in 1956, the Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee defeated non -American activities to abstain with Robson, challenging the accusations of artists of American racism and racist repression. He said he had not seen any sign of bias, because Robson was distinguished, after he went to the elite universities and played team and professional football.
Read more: Poll: Americans are divided into the protests of the American Football Association
Black athletes, even silently, realize that their economic privilege does not isolate them from the facts of racial discrimination. They also understand that their wealth and success are unstable and often depend not only on their athletic performance, but also on their silent survival on racist injustice issues, especially those that seem to question the “American dream” or the American public’s involvement by the association.
It should not be a surprise, then, that Colin Kberrenick, whose protests turned him into a national pariah despite his talents in the field, filed a complaint against the American Football Association, accusing the league and his black soccer team because of his political beliefs. “The initial and peaceful political lawyers should not be punished, and the athletes should not be punished for employment based on the party political provocation by the executive branch of our government,” Kaiernick’s lawyers said in a statement. Whether the packed Kapernick will win his grievances unknown, but he definitely tells him that he and his lawyer have rooted their demands in the definitions of disputed freedom and the risky economic privilege of the American Football Association.
For the highest and most vocal critics of black demonstrators, in particular, frankness is a betrayal, and the causes of the harshest penalties. Perhaps they will benefit from a documentary reading of James Baldwin, who once argued: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and that is for this reason, I insisted on the right to criticize it permanently.”