This may come as a surprise to many Americans but protest is not meant to make you feel warm and fuzzy inside. The very nature of protest is incendiary. It’s meant to target entrenched institutions and highlight the issues within said institutions. In 1968 at the Olympics in Mexico City, when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists and bowed their heads on the podium, it was not to make Americans feel good. It was to raise awareness and to protest the very nature of the racial divide in this nation.
When Colin Kaepernick made the decision to sit - and later kneel - during the “Star Spangled Banner” 48 years after those Mexico City Olympics, he did so to protest a nation that has taken the five decades since the Civil Rights movement to grow further apart.