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Violence Against Our Youth Who Protest Police Brutality?

The announcer of a high school football game said,

"If you don't want to stand for the National Anthem, you can line up over there by the fence and let our military personnel take a few shots at you...."

to any high school student-athlete who kneeled during the National Anthem in protest of police brutality against African-American citizens. It never ceases to amaze me that there are people (apparently a majority of people) who would rather continue on in their presumptuous and oppressive ways than to acknowledged the pain, fear and helplessness that many of us feel due to the injustices we have experience at the hands of police and a policy system that is built to empower the majority while suffocating the voice of the minority. Not only did this announcer say this aloud but many people in the audience (I am willing to bet that most of these applauders were White) apparently cheered, in a rambunctious roar, for the announcers audacity and bravery in the face of such a nonsensical protest (as they think it to be). Yet what is astounding to me is that many of the military personnel, that I personally know, do not feel the same way as these people IN THE SLIGHTEST. Yet it is the masses who parade around exclaiming that the protest of the National Anthem is indeed a protest against the military. Yet, evermore, it seems that most dissenters of the protest of the National Anthem are in a ruckus because of its resistance to a 'Patriotism' that cares more about visual appeal and traditional ideology than it does justice and righteousness. It is sickening to think that an announcer (Pastor Allen Joyner of the Sweet Home Baptist Church) can say to a group of children, who are being effected by police brutality all the same, that if they protest in this manner they deserve to be gunned down. Basically, "If you do not agree with our appeal to historical tradition that has promoted a historically oppressive environment for African-Americans, and other brown people, then you are not worthy of the life that God (an American construction of the God who appeared as a Jew) has given you and thus we should take it." To this man's comments I end by saying, "I then am not worthy of this American life I have been given since I could not, in good conscience, pledge my life to any ideology (and ultimately to a god) that intends to suffocate my protest against a nation who defines the worth of my life to be less valuable than my white contemporaries and to a god that is inherently pro-white."

"No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave."
-Transcript from the Original National Anthem written by Francis Scott Key


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