Whereas most sportswriters focused on Kaepernick and the celebrity professional athletes that followed his lead, in The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World,Dave Zirin instead mostly features the high school and college athletes and coaches that drew inspiration from Kaepernick.
The through line for a collision between national anthem, sports, and protest that has persisted from 1968’s black-gloved fists in the air to #TakeAKnee is not as straight as you might believe.
In some ways, the current wave of African-American football players kneeling during the national anthem replicates the Bebop revolution that changed the public persona of the black male jazz musician. Now it is black players demanding that audiences recognize that their attitude is not the same as their white peers.