Colin Kaepernick will forever be known more for what he did on a football field during the national anthem than what he did on the field after the anthem played.
And that’s saying something, considering Kaepernick led the San Francisco 49ers to a Super Bowl appearance.
But four years after Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem, generating wide-ranging reaction from every locale from the White House to your neighbor’s house, the controversy over kneeling has become mainstream.
The conversation – especially in the days and weeks since George Floyd’s death under the knee of a former Minneapolis police officer – that Kaepernick always claimed he was trying to start about equality and how Blacks are treated by police is everywhere.
So, as sports returned last week, the question that loomed was whether kneeling would be not just present, but potentially prevalent. After all, the NFL – which distanced itself from the conversation as well as Kaepernick – has pledged a quarter of a billion dollars to social justice causes. NBA and the NFL are allowing players to alter uniforms for Black Lives Matters causes, which makes them anything but uniform.