Portside

Colin Kaepernick, the former quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, is being blackballed — itself a revealing phrase — from the National Football League with the collusion of the all-white owners. He is ostracized because a year ago he exercised his First Amendment right to free speech by taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem, as a symbol of protest against police shootings of unarmed African-American men.

As long as white children are constructed as innocent, we must continue to demand that children of color are as well. The idea of childhood innocence carries so much political force, we can’t allow it to be a whites-only club. We argue that black and brown children are as innocent as white children, we assume that childhood innocence is purely positive. The idea of childhood innocence itself is not innocent: It’s part of a 200-year-old history of white supremacy.

In the summer of 1967, the streets of Newark exploded in violence. Here is a first-hand account of the tragic events that changed the city, and the country forever. Newark’s population is still exceedingly low income. Crime, gang warfare, drugs, joblessness and failing schools are still facts of life in some Newark neighborhoods. But the cultures of many ethnic groups continue to lift the spirit of its many peoples. Increasingly, Newark is a good place to call home.

The truth is ugly as sin. The NFL is denying Colin Kaepernick employment not because he isn’t “good enough” but because he is being shut out for the crime of using his platform to protest the killing of black kids by police. NFL owners don’t make pariahs out of players who beat women or face accusations of murder. Kaepernick’s pariah status is about sending a shot across the bow at every political athlete—particularly black athletes—that they better toe the line.

A Mississippi legislator called for lynchings on the same day that a black student was stabbed on campus. We are facing a crisis of racism.

Much commentary on the late Chuck Berry will focus on how his songs expressed fun and teenage angst. This is the right thing to do. Yet there’s more. For example, Berry’s obsession with the comparative qualities of fast cars — most brilliantly displayed in his song “Maybellene” — did not just reflect the rise of post-WW II consumerist culture....He preferred V-8 Fords over Cadillacs because he spent several years in the late 1940s and early 1950s helping make Ford cars.