Tim Kawakami: What Colin Kaepernick has accomplished, and is accomplishing, is American history
This is only getting larger. It won’t get smaller. It can’t get smaller.
None of us knows how this will go, how America will change, how it might not at all. But this will be what Kaepernick is remembered for, decades from now, long after his playing career, and maybe it’s what this time in American sports will partially be remembered for – and we’re all right in the middle of it, watching it happen.
This is history, in day-by-day, reaction-by-reaction increments, starting with Kaepernick deciding that he had to do this, and then everything that happened after that.
Two weeks ago, I wrote that this conversation and situation was not developing at all the way Kaepernick’s critics thought it would – and that this all probably was unfolding very closely to the most significant possible way.
Again, that was a long, long two weeks ago – before the start of the 49ers’ regular season, before several WNBA players followed his lead and knelt for the national anthem and high school players and band members across the nation did, too.
And before the death of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and now maybe another questionable shooting death of a black man in Charlotte, North Carolina.
These things are happening rapidly, there is no sure answer to any of it, but Kaepernick – as so many other athletes have acknowledged – was the start of the dialog, at the top of the American sports landscape, and beyond.
Two weeks ago, I wrote that Kaepernick was winning – that his actions started the deep, thoughtful, troubling conversation he wanted to start – and that his critics, who just wanted to shout him down, were losing.
And now the TIME cover, and there will be more. This will not get smaller.
Also, yes, the criticism will probably only get uglier and angrier. Part of this I understand, because not everybody agrees on anything and I can understand that many Americans hold the anthem and the flag to be sacrosanct at all times, even when the anthem is played thousands of times every weekend.
That’s understandable. But the conversation is the point – and you cannot logically or morally say that Kaepernick is wrong to protest the shooting of unarmed black people by police.
Yes, you can say it, you can drape yourself in the flag while you do it, you can tell everybody to “stick to sports,” but you can’t do it logically or morally.
You can’t shout it away. If you say you only want to deal with sports – no, that’s not going to happen, not any more.