This week brought a lot of 10th anniversary Colin Kaepernick protest retrospectives in sports media, which then inspired arguments over who he was/is and what he meant/means. My interest is less about the man himself who, whatever you think of him, appears to have done what he did absent cynical expectation of fame and Nike endorsement. I’m more focused how so few people still care about his movement, one that grew into a massive, even international, cultural obsession. It makes me wonder: Did so many of my friends, colleagues and peers ever care? Do people care about the core of anything these days?
DeRay Mckesson (remember him?) helped launch the Mapping Police Violence project in 2015, and the project still publishes annual reports. In 2020, nearly every major institution and celebrity made a big show about fighting racialized police violence. According to the MPV data, following all the 2020 protests and riots, police killings have trended upwards. It’s harder to track demography in these matters, but Black people as a share of those killings appears not to have gone down. This somehow feels like the quietest historical footnote to the arguably loudest social movement of my lifetime. How?