QUESTION ASKED: Did Colin Kaepernick do more harm than good for the Black community?

I see a man whose entire cause… was built on a false premise.

I’m bracing for impact as I write that, because I know what the blowback for such a sentence looks like. Kaepernick is a sacred cow in the eyes of activists and much of the media, and criticism of him does not go unnoticed.

But the reality is this: Unarmed Black people were not being killed by cops en masse while Kaepernick was kneeling. They were more likely to be struck by lightning than die at the hands of a police officer. And well-intentioned as Colin may have been in his protest, the anti-police movement he helped inspire likely made things worse for the most vulnerable members of the Black community. Because when cops can’t properly do their jobs — people die.

There was a poll from 2019 that asked Americans how many unarmed Black people they thought were killed per year. They were given five choices. 1) About 10, 2) About 100, 3) About 1000, 4) About 10,000, 5) More than 10,000.

Here are the results for people who identified themselves as “very liberal,” which I think describes most of the activists who rallied behind this issue. About 10 — 15.7 percent. About 100 — 30.7 percent. About 1,000 — 31.4 percent. About 10,000 — 14.3 percent. More than 10,000 — 7.8 percent.

The actual number of unarmed Black people killed by cops that year, per the Washington Post? Twelve.

My guess is that survey would have yielded similar results if conducted in 2016, when Kaepernick first began his crusade. I say this because I was one of the people who thought the number was in the triple, if not quadruple digits. There was Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, etc. And those deaths — whether it be in mainstream media or social media — were seldom framed as one-offs but rather representative of a system crisis.

I, like millions of other Americans, bought into Kaepernick’s narrative. But then I actually looked into it.

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