How dare you call these black football players sons of bitches, Mr President? Piers Morgan to Trump

Sons of bitches? No Mr President, these proud, successful black Americans deserve respect not abuse.

It was just over a year ago when NFL star Colin Kaepernick first refused to stand for the US national anthem when it was played during a San Francisco 49ers preseason game.

Instead, he sat it out, explaining afterwards he did it in response to a summer of contentious police shootings involving fellow African-Americans: ‘I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people,’ he said. ‘To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.’

My gut reaction at the time to the images of Kaepernick slouching on his seat as the anthem played was not dissimilar to Donald Trump’s.

I thought it was massively disrespectful to those who have fought in the US military for the freedoms the flag and anthem symbolise, and I said so in a strident column which ended with this entreaty to the quarter-back: ‘Get off your backside, stand to attention, put your hand on your heart and thank God you spend your life chasing footballs not dodging bullets. Then we’ll believe you when you say you’re not anti-American, and we may listen harder to the message you want to convey.’Barack Obama, who was President at the time, concurred: ‘When it comes to the flag and the national anthem, and the meaning it holds for men and women in uniform, that is a tough thing for them to get past to then hear what his deeper concerns are.’

Obama, though, endorsed Kaepernick’s constitutional right to act as he did, and made this very good point: ‘I want Mr Kaepernick and others who are on a knee to listen to the pain that may cause somebody who, for example, had a spouse or a child who was killed in combat and why it hurts them to see somebody not standing. But I also want people to think about the pain he may be expressing about somebody who’s lost a loved one that they think was unfairly shot.’

In other words, there were two sides to this debate, both worthy of respectful hearing.

Kaepernick’s sitting protests sparked a storm of fury across America.

But a transformative moment arrived a few weeks into the furore in the shape of an open letter to Kaepernick from Nate Boyer, a former Green Beret who played briefly for the Seattle Seahawks in 2015.

Boyer politely told Kaepernick why it was so hurtful as a veteran to see him sitting through the anthem, but he also vowed to listen to him ‘with an open mind’.
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Culled From Daily Mail UK.