Can White Players Kneel During the Black National Anthem at NFL Games?

By Joe Pietaro
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Updated: July 2, 2020

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Imagine if one white NFL player had the balls to take a knee during the playing of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” the Black National Anthem that will be played before the real National Anthem at every season opening game in 2020. This hypothetical player can say that he is protesting the violence purported upon the police by black people, which includes numerous executions of uniformed officers.

Why not? Colin Kaepernick started the trend in 2016 to bring awareness to what he claimed was violence against black people by the police, one that has become a rallying cry around the world.

The NFL has gone out of its way to placate and pander to Black Lives Matter, a self-proclaimed Marxist-trained organization that is the modern day version of the Black Panther Party, a domestic terrorist organization that executed cops in the 1970s.

RELATED: OUR CHALLENGE TO NFL PLAYERS PROTESTING

If we wanted to list each and every detail of that, this article would be as long as “War and Peace.” No need to be redundant and tell you things you already know. But in case any of you conveniently forgot about the police who were shot and killed by blacks, here are a few recaps:

*DECEMBER 20, 2014 – Police officers Wenjian Lui and Rafael Ramos were seated in a parked marked NYPD patrol car in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn when Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley approached them and fired into the passenger side window, hitting them both and killing them instantly. He then fled into a subway station being pursued by responding officers and committed suicide. Brinsley was said to have done the shooting as “revenge” due to the acquittal of the defendants in the Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin cases, posting on Instagram earlier that same day “I’m putting Wings on Pigs Today … They Take 1 of Ours … Let’s Take 2 of Theirs,” and “I’m putting pigs in a blanket.” This was also during a period of numerous anti-police BLM demonstrations, which raised the temperature of the racial climate in the city.

Ironically, an August 29, 2015 chant by BLM during one of their demonstrations was “Pigs in a blanket; fry ’em like bacon.”

*JULY 7, 2016 – An armed perpetrator named Micah Xavier Johnson ambushed a group of Dallas Police Department officers, killing five and injuring nine others. The slain officers were DPD Senior Cpl. Lorne Ahrens, DPD Officer Michael Krol, DPD Sgt. Michael Smith, DART Officer Brent Thompson and DPD Officer Patricio “Patrick” Zamarripa. Johnson was killed by the use of a remote control bomb disposal robot after a standoff, during which he informed negotiators that he did the shooting because “he was upset about Black Lives Matter.”

*JULY 17, 2016 – In the wake of the Alton Sterling incident, Gavin Eugene Long shot six police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, killing three and injuring the others. Responding SWAT officers shot and killed Long. In a series of his YouTube videos, Long speaks about the death of Sterling, oppression against black, anti-police protests and that the Dallas shooting “and act of justice.” The slain officers were Deputy Brad Garafola, Officer Matthew Gerald and Corporal Montrell Jackson.

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The recent call for defunding and/or abolishing the police and the violent rioting during the protests since the death of George Floyd has resulted in numerous officers being injured in the line of duty, including Las Vegas Officer Shay Mikalonis, who was shot in the head during a protest and is paralyzed from the neck down with the need to be on a ventilator to breathe.

Needless to say, the anti-police, pro-black climate is front and center. And it’s become a choice of what side one is on – the law and order side or the criminal side. It’s as clear as black and white.