Four years ago, in the last week of my 20-year military career, a fellow officer pointed at the flat-screen television mounted on the wall of a classified Pentagon conference room and asked, “What do you think about that?”
I glanced up to see a cable news segment about Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers at the time, kneeling during the national anthem, the closed-captioning sputtering out blocks of text with his rationale. The summer of 2016 had been filled with more than a hundred Black Lives Matter protests in several dozen cities following the police killings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in Minnesota. Kaepernick explained that his protest was designed to call attention to racial injustice, including the brutal policing of black people.
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