What started with Colin Kaepernick taking a seat during the national anthem 13 months ago has evolved into the largest protest the NFL has ever seen.

While the current NFL protests are certainly the largest-scale demonstration against racial injustice in the athletic world to date, it is not the first time marginalized athletes have used the national anthem as a platform.

At the 1968 Olympic Games, Tommie Smith and John Carlos famously raised their black-gloved fists in a black power salute. What Kaepernick and his peers are doing now follows in the spirit of what Smith and Carlos did so many years ago, speaking out for the systematically oppressed members of our society.

Kaepernick, and now hundreds of professional football players, are protesting what has become an increasingly visible depiction of racism and oppression in our country: police brutality. This is a topic that has divided people everywhere today and now it’s spreading into the place where people only want to cheer on their team’s athletes.

The NFL, a league that comprises nearly seventy percent black players is taking a knee against the oppression that has weighed on the backs of every person of color since the United States was founded. Yet, sports fans and non-sports fans alike are turning their backs on these men, all of the lives needlessly lost and the freedom to peacefully protest – for a national symbol.  

Sports have always been political, and to ask that members of an oppressed community leave their rights as Americans off the field – that’s an attack on freedom of speech that we, as a newspaper run by and for students, have to respond to. No one should be attacking the first amendment, especially not the president of the United States of America.

President Trump has been a catalyst to this phenomenon by condemning the actions of NFL players and owners – the players for kneeling and the owners for not firing the players as soon as it happens. Not only should these athletes keep their careers, but they should be respected for using their platform to speak out in protest against unjust actions taken by the very members of this society designated to protect marginalized communities.

What has happened this past week is not out of disrespect for those who have served in the military for this nation and all of its people. The protests that have occurred have been in protest of people of color dying for no reason other than the color of their skin, the police officers who acted when they should not have and the lack of consequence afforded to each abuser. Players are protesting the loss of their community and the complete absence of condemnation from our judicial system. That nothing is done to rectify incident after incident of abuse speaks to the systematic sickness of our government’s courts.

It is because we live in America that we are able to use whatever platform we may have, whether that means kneeling in front of thousands of fans or “dying-in” in Talley Student Union. When that is silenced, when people no longer can speak out or sit down to express what they believe or feel, that is when the flag, and our national anthem, loses its meaning. That is when democracy dies.

We respect the players who have chosen to kneel and those who have stood – because it is their platform, and they choose how to use it. We are only the land of the free if we protect the freedoms we all have, and after this stretch of football, we certainly are the home of the brave.

The unsigned editorial is the opinion of the majority of Technician’s editorial board, and is the responsibility of the editor-in-chief.