US football stars inspire new fight against racism

WASHINGTON: Colin Kaepernick, a biracial star of American football, started it; President Barack Obama endorsed it; and now one of the top teams of the game’s premier

WASHINGTON: Colin Kaepernick, a biracial star of American football, started it; President Barack Obama endorsed it; and now one of the top teams of the game’s premier championship is threatening to join what is rapidly turning into the country’s most visible protest against racial discrimination and injustice.

HT Image

Seahawks of Seattle, Washington, a team that won the championship in 2014 and finished second in 2015, will join Kaepernick’s protest, US media reported citing unidentified sources. Their is their first game of the season when they play Miami Dolphins of Miami, Florida, on Sunday, which is expected to be one of the most watched TV events in recent times.

Member of the Seahawks team, led by African American Russell Wilson, will stage a silent but unspecified form of protest as a team, and not individuals, information leaked by members of the team said, during the singing of the national anthem, a standard practice at all major public events in the US, from sports to politics.

They will probably not stand during the anthem, as Kaepernick.

These protests mark a new high in racial tensions triggered by unwarranted violence against African Americans by white police officers, resulting in multiple fatalities, such as that of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in recent years and others.

There have also been retaliatory killings of white offers, as in Dallas, Texas in July.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump may have contributed to these tension in part by not repudiating support from white supremacists and dog-whistling support for those opposing Black Lives Matter, a modern day incarnation of the civil rights movement of the 1960s — its opponents say, “All lives matter”. And Trump supports them.

Kaepernick first refused to stand for the national anthem late August in a pre-championship game against another top-notch team, the Green Bay packers of Wisconsin. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of colour,” he said in an interview to the league’s in-house magazine, adding, “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way.”