Black & White

We stumbled upon the Colin Kaepernick Netflix series that had six episodes.

The series tells the story of his young life, and I was interested in seeing it because I never could truly figure out what his end game was when he was kneeling.

He never said anything!

He had people’s attention and he was quiet.

He speaks out in the series and like a whole bunch of race relations movies and documentaries I was uncomfortable watching it because there was a whole bunch of confusing information provided to us as I grew up.

The thing about Kap is that he is such a polarizing figure. Maybe if he had spoken out when the controversy was at its highest point he wouldn’t be so hated.

“The people who might learn something from this won’t watch it,” Kathy said.

And that right there is the problem.

At the start of the 2020 baseball season the Yankees played the Nationals to open things up.

The players stepped out of the dugout and a handful of guys on each team knelt down.

They all stood up for the national anthem. I didn’t notice any of it, but I made a Facebook post about being ready for the start of the season.

A long-time work friend jumped all over me saying that I shouldn’t be watching ‘those traitors.’

He was ‘done!’ with baseball!!!

He felt I should be as well.

I explained that it was America and there was room for all sorts of expression.

That ‘friend’ didn’t speak to me for a year!

Called me all kind of names.

So, it’s all so confusing and has been since Kaepernick took a knee.

It certainly brought division, mostly because a great divider misrepresented what was being said.

It wasn’t about the flag.

It was about so much more and the Netflix series shed a little more light on it.

But just not enough.

And it was uncomfortable for my generation because ‘we’ didn’t handle race relations very well.