Colin Kaepernick is woke. He wears pig socks to protest cops, whom he reckons are modern day slave catchers, and even cosplays as Angela Davis. He has deemed America’s first standard, sewn by the hand of Betsy Ross, an icon of slavery—that Ross was a Quaker, therefore an abolitionist, matters not. And he does all of this under the auspices of his thoroughly white paymasters at Nike.
All nine of Nike’s executives are as white as the driven snow, and Kaepernick is only too happy to do the woke shuffle for them.
Kaepernick’s liberation from “AmeriKKKA” has led him merely into a more complete bondage, with the corporate sector dominated by white liberals as his master. Kaepernick, in other words, has gone up from the fields and entered the cool halls of the “Big House.”
The main plantation house—sometimes called the “Big House,” or “Great House Farm”—was the building or compound occupied by antebellum slave owners. Slaves, not knowing any other kind of life, considered it an honor and a privilege to find themselves in the luxurious presence of their white masters, out of the sun and further from the lash. “The slave who was selected to sleep in the ‘big house,’” Booker T. Washington recalled, “. . . was considered to have the place of honour.”
“Few privileges were esteemed higher, by the slaves of the out-farms, than that of being selected to do errands at the Great House Farm,” Frederick Douglass similarly observed. “It was associated in their minds with greatness. A representative could not be prouder of his election to a seat in the American Congress, than a slave on one of the out-farms would be of his election to do errands at the Great House Farm.”
Of course, bondage did not end at the big house, it simply became more intimate (in some cases quite intimate), and therefore more total; just as it has with Kaepernick, whose level of “wokeness” has merely tightened the fetters of oppression over his mind.
The has-been football player has so thoroughly soaked his persona in the salty tears of victimhood that without slavery and without the white people he so despises (even as they cut his exorbitant paychecks) Kaepernick would be precisely what he is beneath his afro and raised fist: a professional failure.
Nike figures that the prospect of a majority nonwhite—excuse me, “diverse”—United States to come means that becoming the un-American brand is good for business in the long-term.
I wish that I could say that Nike is wrong. But given that the Republican Party has failed to stop and even facilitated the mass immigration of foreigners who care about as much for the Betsy Ross flag as Kaerpnick does, Nike is probably not far off the mark. America already is and will likely only continue to become more unpatriotic as it becomes more “diverse.”
Whereas some Americans see dark clouds of crisis looming on the horizon, Nike’s executives, good capitalists that they are, see an emerging market in anti-Americanism; and they have, accordingly, updated old formulas and modes of enslavement.
Frederick Douglass was a penetrative observer and saw through the designs of America’s original slavemasters. It was customary in his time for owners to grant a reprieve from hard labor to their slaves between the days of Christmas and New Year’s Day—but there came a twist with this quasi “liberation.”
Slaves were actively discouraged from spending their holiday liberty doing anything industrious or edifying for themselves. They were pushed instead by their owners toward “sports and merriments as playing ball, wrestling, running foot-races, fiddling, dancing, and drinking whisky.”
On the surface, wrote Douglass, it was “a custom established by the benevolence of the slaveholders.” But Douglass realized that it was, in fact, “the result of selfishness, and one of the grossest frauds committed upon the down-trodden slave”; the object of which was “to disgust their slaves with freedom, by plunging them into the lowest depths of dissipation.”
The scheme was simple enough. Fill a slave’s cup with as much liquor as they could take—and then give them more, thus searing into his or her mind a connection between freedom and vice. “Thus, when the slave asks for virtuous freedom, the cunning slaveholder, knowing his ignorance,” wrote Douglass, “cheats him with a dose of vicious dissipation, artfully labelled with the name of liberty.”
Kaepernick has drunk the poison of the diversity doctrine that insists America is vile, just as slaves were led to believe about freedom; and, certainly, there are some who genuinely believe as much.
But Nike, like so many other corporations, simply does not care about the truth involved in historical grievances. Moralistic stances in the marketplace are merely the mask that modern capitalism wears to veil its only true concern: profit. White liberal CEOs fan the flames of woke culture, pouring more poison into the cups of the Kaepernicks of this world, and place them behind the shop window with a sign around their neck that reads: “Black Lives Matter.”
This is indeed an old formula. Booker T. Washington, like Douglass, took notice; in his case, of how Yankee industrialists used freed blacks against Southern whites. “In many cases it seemed to me that the ignorance of my race was being used as a tool with which to help white men into office,” wrote Washington, “and that there was an element in the North which wanted to punish the Southern white men by forcing the Negro into positions over the heads of the Southern whites.”
“I felt that the Negro would be the one to suffer for this in the end. Besides, the general political agitation drew the attention of our people away from the more fundamental matters of perfecting themselves in the industries at their doors and in securing property.” In other words, cynical white political types, instead of encouraging black citizens to become better and more informed citizens, helped to inflame their passions so they would choose the most irresponsible and ineffective among them to serve in Congress and elected office, as a way to get revenge on their political enemies in the south. Washington’s words, like Douglass’, ring true today as well. Colin Kaepernick has been a political football for cynical white liberals playing high stakes identity politics for going on two years.
The fusion of woke culture with modern capitalism has become like a cotton gin separating the fibers of our society from the hearts and minds of the people, because doing so is more profitable than not. And like the original cotton gin, this machine in service of woke culture, is sure to guarantee our servitude and suppress our liberty. Kaepernick might think that he’s got it made, that he has achieved liberation, but he has merely moved his bags into the big house, where his white paymasters are only too happy to watch him dance.
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