Open Letter to Taya Kyle About the NFL;
Ms. Kyle,
I read your letter to the NFL this morning and felt compelled to respond because while I see that your intent is ultimately for all of us to be more unified, I think your message misses some pretty important considerations.
As white people, it is really easy for us to diminish the all-encompassing pressure that African American men, in particular, face in this country. It’s hard for us to relate to the way race plays into virtually every aspect of daily life for them. Consider for a moment that this ethnic group in the US was literally bred to be large, strong, resilient so that they made better slaves. These men in the NFL represent a modern iteration of that ugly truth, and more importantly, they represent a small fraction of success when we compare them to other African American males in this country. It’s not an accident that young black men have almost no shot at decent education, that they are trapped in the revolving door of the for-profit prison system. I learned a lot from Ava Duvernay’s 13th; it’s a brilliant distillation of racial injustice. Give it a watch.
As the wife of a serviceman, I imagine it’s easy to see taking the knee as a disrespect to the flag and the military, let’s look at it from another angle; the rights afforded us by the Constitution have never been extended to African Americans, not even today in 2017. Nonetheless, they have fought and died in disproportionate numbers in every war. Eric Reid stated clearly that the reason he decided to do it was watching story after story unfold of unarmed young black men dying at the hands of the police, and no accountability for this horrifying misconduct that tears families apart. It’s a concrete failure of due process because all humans in this country are innocent until proven guilty.
So I want to call your attention to the tone you use when you say things like “that’s how healing works” or “if you want to build some bridges, let me know.” Not only is it condescending, it echoes the same kinds of abusive demands our people have put on their people for centuries. And it’s a blatant disregard of the fact that these men do commit money and time to their communities.
I want to suggest to you instead that we finally acknowledge how deep down their suffering goes, and that taking a knee and linking arms on the world stage is a dignified response to a very undignified cultural reality. How can we simultaneously say that nazis (hate groups inciting a race war and an ethno-state) have the right to protest, but these guys don’t?
I’m not saying I’ve got all this figured out as a white person, but I do know that my relatives and ancestors have spent a ton of time telling people of color what to do and that their words don’t matter. So the least, the very least I can do as a beneficiary of that history, is listen.
If you want to help, Ms. Kyle, you can put yourself in the albeit uncomfortable position of listening and hopefully empathizing, rather than doling out advice about how these grown, professional men should protest injustice. From where I sit, they were exercising their First Amendment Rights, leveraging their status as athletes and public figures to make a powerful statement. Taking the knee is patriotic because implicit in the act was the belief that we can do better. And we can.
Sincerely,
Miranda Culp
Writer, Mom
