By: Burke De Boer
Sports Editor

The NFL preseason ended and games are now serious. The trial-and-error month is forgotten. Except for one moment.

Colin Kaepernick remained seated during the national anthem. I didn’t think much of it at the time, figuring he needed as much sitting practice as he could get. The San Francisco 49ers are a mediocre-to-bad team with Blaine Gabbert their mediocre-to-bad quarterback. This left Colin to fight practice team wanderer, Christian Ponder, for the backup’s seat on the bench.
Ponder had a good preseason too.

I figured Kaepernick wouldn’t throw a pass this year and I haven’t changed my mind. However, his protest will be intrinsic to the sports annals of 2016.

We’ve had a hot summer, folks. Philando Castile was killed by police while trying to show his license and registration. Alton Sterling was pinned to the ground and shot for selling CDs. Terence Crutcher was shot while holding his hands in the air.

Protests spread, often turning violent. Five police officers were killed in Dallas.

And the Democratic Party nominated a member of the old guard, whose 1990s party ramped up the War on Drugs. This escalation disproportionately affected blacks who, today, make up 40 percent of the American prison population despite being 13 percent of the general population, according to the U.S. census.

Kaepernick has brought all this summer heat into the football stadium, using his platform to bring attention to a people he feels this country has left behind. For largely the same reasons that Johnny Cash wore black, Colin Kaepernick now sits. Other players have followed suit, raising fists and kneeling.

But football is a conservative institution. Sports generally teach conservative principles from a child’s first youth league. Across the country, kids are brought up from peewee sports to blue collar work or military service.

It is in this spirit that the military has been evoked to condemn players sitting. The flag is very personal to a lot of people who have known or served alongside men and women who died protecting what the American flag represents.

It represents a country founded on the ideals of freedom. Which especially includes the freedom to critique. It is only through free democratic discussion that a country can grow. As anyone who’s played a sport knows, it is only through critique that you improve.

Whether or not you agree with his method, and whether or not you think America is already the greatest country in the world, the fact is America can still be better. The gulf between government and black communities it’s supposed to represent is one more problem that’s going mainstream.

In the hot summer of 2016, it seemed unlikely that Colin Kaepernick as a quarterback would ever be discussed by any sports panel. And then the hot summer went pro. Would Ray Lewis and Shannon Sharpe have discussed life in African-American communities on Fox Sports 1 without Kaepernick’s controversy? Certainly not. But now that discussion has come to America’s conservative institution.

Contact the author at journalsports@wou.edu

Link to attach to “according to the U.S. census” in online publication: http://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/rates.html