The excuse being used right now is that he wore a t-shirt with Castro on it and stupidly defended Castro in an interview.
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From the first quoted (video) tweet, by Sean Clancy@sclancy79
Since when did the American Flag and the National Anthem become offensive?
Is this irony?
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And who protested police brutality and racism in a humble, respectful way.
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Ain’t Phil Knight a lib(ertarian)? And he’s donated almost a mil to republicans in Oregon over the last year, including 500k to Nut Buehler (perennial failure at winning statewide elections.)
Bite the hand that feeds you, I guess…
Quickly? It’s been several years now. Plus, Kaepernick has been sponsored by Nike since 2011.
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But he is no longer the CEO of Nike…not for 3 years now.
He does not make any decisions nor does he determine the path the company takes any longer.
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Phil Knight is already donating a lot of his fortune to cancer research and climate change. Most of Nike’s corporate giving is focused on sport and kids; they’re big contributors to Special Olympics and programs that support urban at-risk youth.
I work there. It’s not perfect, but for most of us progressive values aren’t just a slogan.
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To these types, every police murder of a POC is a separate event, always justified; the POC would have been okay but then they did something wrong - they didn’t obey orders, they stupidly had something in their hand, the cop saw the toy gun and a 12-year-old black boy looks like an adult - each case is separate and the cop in question was always right to shoot to kill. It’s absolutely impossible for the racist to see/admit that there is a pattern.
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Go to Twitter and look up user @playazball and find the thread wherein he decides to burn his Nikes in protest.
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Here’s the reverse protest from a few years ago. Apparently the president of New Balance is a Trump supporter:
Full disclosure though- I wear New Balance shoes as their 993 line is the only shoe I’ve found that is compatible with the type of orthotics and shoe modifications I need. That is, it’s New Balance or crippling back pain.
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It’s the next stage of planned obsolescence. Every now and then you manipulate the dumber portion of your customers to destroy their own stuff, so they have to buy it again a few months later when they’ve forgotten why they were mad.
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As someone who’s just generally in favor of more people protesting and putting their grievances right out in the open, I’m all about this. The alternative is respectability politics and po-faced PC nonsense that achieves nothing.
Peter Finch said it best (and Faye Dunaway’s smile is a sledgehammer edit)
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It is a complete disconnect in the meaning of his protest. I am sure he is completely sincere that to him it is about injustice. But to a large number of people, the method of his protest is a gross disrespect to both the country and to those who have died for it.
So those who support his protest methods see the people opposed to it as rejecting the injustice he is protesting, which would make them racists. But that is not it at all.
His wording for his explanation of his protest was also poorly chosen. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that…” was a poor choice of words. There was more to the statement, but everyone stopped listening right there.
I was at a big car show this weekend. I guess at 0800, they raised the flag. There may have been a ceremony, but I was a few hundred feet away, and just saw the flag go up. But the point is that every single person, when they noticed what was happening, stopped what they were doing, and at a minimum, stood silently while it went up. Almost everyone remembered to take their hat off, and lots of people put their hand over their heart. I did the same. For military people, it is like a reflex.
But we were not doing that because we support racism or police violence. It is a basic show of respect for people who have died for the country.
This is what they are thinking of when that flag is raised:
That is also what they think of when you talk about people “sacrificing everything”
Connecting that slogan to his protest just reinforces the idea that he is all about basic contempt for their sacrifices.
It does not matter what his cause is, or how legitimate it is. The backlash has nothing to do with his cause. He wants to make the flag and the anthem about police violence, but that is not going to happen for most people. And calling everyone who disagrees with his method of protest a racist does not help anything.
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But, black on black crime!!!
This is literally the argument somebody in my FB feed brought up in a friend’s post about this. Along with some sort of weird, reverse white privilege.
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He clearly didn’t cut the socks he’s actually wearing, though. Look how even the tops are. I’d even bet that he cut one pair for the photo and ignored the rest of his socks.
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Everybody knows that you don’t cut them while you’re wearing them. I’m thinking as he cycles through his socks (prior to laundry day) is there going to be a day where he’s forced to wear the half-Nikes?
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Especially deplorable, racists’ shoes.
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