One common response to the national anthem protests originated by Colin Kaepernick is to disparage them as polarizing. Joe Scarborough, host of Morning Joe, summed up this particular critique in a tweet last weekend:
This may be unpopular but it is a political reality:
Every NFL player refusing to stand for the national anthem helps Trump politically.
The idea here is that kneeling NFL players are committing an act of such blatant disrespect that they hand Trump an easy image with which to demagogue. Often attendant to the idea that protesting players are shooting themselves in the foot is the notion that in some other era, black protest proved to be a unifying force that altered the psychology of some critical mass of open-minded whites.
[For more of this story, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, go to https://www.theatlantic.com/po...n-kaepernick/541845/]
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