What Do The Anthem Kneelers Want?

By now you've probably heard about the fact that a bunch of prominent athletes are kneeling, sitting down, or otherwise refusing to stand with their hand over their heart for the national anthem.  I think the motivation for this is #BlackLivesMatter based on the statements of Colin Kaepernick and Adam Jones, though according to Megan Rapinoe, she's doing it because she feels it's right in her heart and she somehow thinks it honors the country.

Whatever the motivation, I don't necessarily have a problem with these displays of dissatisfaction.  My question is broader.

What do the "anthem kneelers" want?  What will satisfy them?

Do they have a specific thing they want to see change, something concrete, achievable?  Or is it just a vague, nebulous sense of "injustice," a feeling that something is not right and needs to change, without a clear "how?"

I suspect strongly that it is the latter, which makes their protest somewhat pointless.  Sit-ins at lunch counters, for instance, had a point: black people were literally being separated from society, forced into an underclass.  The Boston Tea Party didn't happen because a bunch of colonists thought the British were just being "unfair."  They had a concrete complaint: don't tax us without allowing us to represent ourselves in Parliament.  So they dumped a symbol of that taxation into the harbor.

#BlackLivesMatter, in its most straightforward form, has a point too.  They claim that police use excessive force against black people because they are black.  They want law enforcement to be equal in their enforcement.  If the facts are as #BlackLivesMatter claim – something which I choose not to debate here – this is a worthy goal.

I'm just not sure how refusing to stand for the national anthem relates to unequal enforcement of local laws by local police officers.  The federal government didn't kill Freddie Gray.  In fact, they investigated the police department who hired the officers that were with Mr. Gray when he died.

Maybe it's Kaepernick's frustrations with Donald Trump's stance on immigration and Islam that lead him to kneel.  If that's it, Colin, we agree that Trump's positions smack of racism, or at least that they can be easily twisted in that direction.  But Trump's views are not the country's views.  Far from it.

Even if Trump's views were that of the country, what would lead Kaepernick et al to stop kneeling?  What if we banished Trump from our country, and every one of the white supremacists who happen to support him?  What if we replaced every cop in Baltimore, in Ferguson, in Baton Rouge, in New York?  Would that be enough?  I suspect not.  "Deadly" unconscious racism would remain, because believing that people that are different than you are lesser than you is a human flaw as old as the human race.

Humanity's baked-in tendency to treat other people unequally for meritless reasons is the reason for the law.  Enforcement of the law will never be perfect, because people enforce the law, and people are far from perfect.  As the Father of the Constitution James Madison said in Federalist 51:

But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?  If men were angels, no government would be necessary. . . . In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

As imperfect beings, we can only do our best to improve the law, while knowing we will never reach absolute utopia.

So to the "anthem kneelers," feel free to express your dissatisfaction with whatever it is you're dissatisfied with.  You have that right in America, the land of the free.  I have the right to continue to be bewildered by your methods and motives.