USWNT and race

Don't expect @hocbz to cop to it.

 

He's too busy out there dominating the streets

 

I was, but I should have been thinking. No board has 602 members. I was thinking you were announcing a vote count. My bad...

 

That reminds me of the nice old lady who was traveling west out of Chicago on HW 80 on her way to Cedar Rapids.The speed limit was 65 and she was going about 80 when stopped. The officer told her how fast she was going and she replied that she just passed a sign that said "80" on it. The officer later said that he was glad he stopped her before she turned north on HW 380. And no, she was not from Pasadena.

 

Hey, I hadn't seen Rapinoe in the last months: the hairdressers' lockdown hit hard on her!!!

 

Oh my God, I didn't watch the full two hours of the YouTube video-show, just some minutes, but it looks funny!

 

This is being announced on a Friday night so he claim to do something while knowing he can't do anything. Gaetz is such an example of walking fertilizer.

 

I guess now we know who the one was/is.

 

I guess his only ever interest in women's football was jinxing USWNT at WWC 2019, so he would have had a way to retort to Rapinoe on Twitter, but he didn't succeed.

And even then, I doubt he did much more than asking some dude to keep him updated about the tournament.

 

Patriotism should not be legislated because common sense should prevail when you put on a national team jersey. Domestic competitions are one thing, but no one is forced to be on a national team. Moral courage is refusing a call-up because you disagree with the values of the cause, people, or nation that you would be representing, much like a conscientious objector. When you find American symbols offensive and oppressive, the nation unjust, and the national federation unfair, and you still decide to represent all those things on the field, you become self-serving and hypocritical. Are you playing for your country or yourself? If someone is truly sincere and isn’t protesting for publicity, your beliefs and conscience should be more important than a paycheck and trophies. Otherwise you’re no better than a mercenary.

 

Contrary to what seems to be a lot of the prevalent opinion it is possible to be a proud US citizen and still strongly disagree with part of the policies that the US implements.

The overall way people of color have been treated in the US is disgraceful and players and other people that have a strong feeling about that can, and should, use whatever platform they have to help bring that disgraceful conduct to an end. Kneeling for the National Anthem does not indicate hate of the US but rather it shows support for change. Using a platform, like being on the National team for any sport, to help the cause of equality is a duty for many people and refusing to play because of political disagreements is just a way of dodging ones responsibility as a US citizen.

Personally I feel strongly that the players that choose to kneel are correct and those that choose to stand and be silent are correct and those that stand and cheerfully sing along are correct. The national team for any sport is an honor but it is also a responsibility. Those the use that platform to express support for a cause are simply being the best they can be and, unless it is disruptive, they should be allowed and encouraged to express their beliefs publicly even to the extent of kneeling for the Anthem. I even think that undershirts, wristbands, headbands or the like with political statements should be allowed unless they foster hate or greatly distract from the uniform.

 

If the opinion is that there are systemic injustices and inequalities in the U.S., then no it isn’t possible to be a proud U.S. citizen. How could you be proud of any representation of a system that supports inequality within social, political, and financial institutions through laws and public policy? Whether you want to acknowledge it or not, this is what the national discussion is about. The fundamental divide now revolves around whether America itself is inherently good or evil. If the system of governance is offensive and oppressive, so are the values and symbols of the country. The toppling of statues of Founding Fathers should be the first clue that this has gone beyond protesting racism. These are not solutions. Defunding and abolishing police or releasing prisoners are subversion tactics for a revolution that seeks to abolish the Constitution.

If the opinion is that there are isolated incidences of racism and inequality within the U.S., then I'm in agreement, but do players have to kneel or perform some type of personal protest to make others aware of this? Don't we know this already? Every country has to deal with this. Have you ever read I, Rigoberta Menchu? Guatemala also doesn't have the stability, freedoms, and affluence that Americans enjoy, so the U.S. is actually in a much better place to address inequality. But in the age of social media, the perception that the country is becoming more racist will continue to grow. That's because in a country of 330M, the hundreds of thousands of positive interracial interactions are ignored or never posted, while the one negative daily interaction somewhere in the U.S. goes viral.

 

Opinion?

 

That the anthem kneeling protest is and should be a constitutionally protected right I do not dispute. That it is in most cases is well-intentioned and can be chosen by people who on balance do value and take pride in this country I have no doubt. But that it is truly effective or helpful, particularly in this specific context, I am extremely skeptical, and I believe that there's a good chance that it actually may hurt the very cause that motivates it.

The productive discussions that the protest hopes to prompt, to find solutions for the problems that the protest vaguely attempts to highlight will require as many people as possible to join the table. But I argue that the ironies associated with this particular protest in this particular context are more likely to turn otherwise sympathetic people away. One of those ironies is that, whether intentionally or only incidentally, the protest overtly disrespects the same flag of which the players are at the exact same time voluntarily wearing a direct permutation, as members of the U.S. national team. And I think it's fair game to point that out regardless of how much the participants or supporters insist it has nothing to do with the flag. Because it's such a simple, minimal-effort, basic courtesy to remain standing for those two minutes that doing otherwise comes across to a lot of people as a supreme insult, which leads to my next point: the double standard implied by the juxtaposition of the anthems.

The participants in this protest, as representatives of the United States on the world stage, are likely willing to extend to any opponent country without exception the courtesy of standing for its anthem before each game. These opponents include nations like Thailand, China, and even North Korea, in which massive human rights abuses continue to this day as a matter of policy with little or no systematic effort to discontinue them. And conversely, that the representatives of those infinitely more flawed countries will extend a courtesy to the anthem of the United States that a multitude the U.S.'s own representatives may be unwilling to show. Perhaps I'm trying to dissect the logic too much but there are just too many non-sequiturs.

The bottom line is that regardless of how you frame the anthem kneeling, it is easy to reasonably interpret this protest of something specific about the nation as a protest of the nation itself. That may be hard for a lot of fans to square with the decision to play for the same nation for the 90 minutes that follow the two-minute tribute chosen as the venue for the protest. I imagine that back-to-back World Cup Champions would have a sizable platform of their own without feeling the need to expand it with such tactics, and targeted approaches using a clear, direct, and universally understood language and demonstrations would work far better, whether written, posted, spoken, shouted, worn, carried on signs, or what have you.

 

We're talking about the USWNT. They can easily win WWCs without any one player because the US is hugely populated and wealthy and there is a ready-made developmental system (college woso) in place that no other nation can even dream about. If Rapinoe sits out, no protest occurs and they win anyway. everybody's happy except the victims of race-related discrimination, lol.

That feel-good nonsense is what protests are supposed to disrupt.

Protests are intended to make the issue known and the conservative viewers uncomfortable enough to give it some thought, or at least to make them uncomfy if they're not going to change their mind.

No Black person in this country is free from racism, ever. It takes only one a-hole to ruin an otherwise decent and happy life. With the bolded, you're grossly underestimating the effect of institutionalized racism in this country by focusing on the people who are simply doing what they're supposed to do.

 

This is only an opinion. There are those who have the opinion that failing to do something, such as kneeling, disrespects the flag and what it stands for. There are many ways to be patriotic; and some consider it unpatriotic to insist that "You must engage in this particular symbolic act, that I consider patriotic, or you are not qualified to represent our nation."

Some things are far more important than the sensitivities of sports fans.

 

Be that as it may, the opposite viewpoint is no less an opinion. And as much as it has grown in popularity in recent years, it could be a harder one to argue in these circumstances. The protesters will likely afford the anthem of every other country on the planet the same basic courtesy they deny to their own, as if it is the only way the point of this country's failings can be made, and that the failings of other countries, in many cases on a much larger scale, don't matter [relatively speaking]. Do these points invalidate the opinion supporting the protest? Probably not. But they also should not be dismissed out of hand.

My point was not the mere tragedy of sports fans' sensitivities being offended. It was that I see no connection whatsoever between participating in the protest in this context and the bringing improvement to the far more important things that motivate it. Making people uncomfortable or getting a lot of attention, good or bad, does not in itself necessarily make a protest effective. I think it should be persuasive to the average person, and to the extent possible to make clear exactly what is wrong and how it should be made right. Like the sit-ins and boycotts of the civil rights era, they should leave little ambiguity as to the purpose of this protest. Explaining the motivations and specific endgame of staging this particular protest in this particular setting on the other hand, with all of its associated ironies, may require so much time that half the audience may have tuned the players out by the time they finish. And making the protest without providing any context whatsoever is obviously also ineffective.

All I see this protest doing is adding one more division to a country that has already been greatly fragmented. As you said though that's just my opinion. I suppose we will see when they return whether or not it's only minority opinion.