Colin Kaepernick editing, publishing collection of police abolition essays

[WhiskeyGrinder]

https://sports.yahoo.com/nfl-colin-kaepernick-announces-release-of-police-abolition-essay-collection-edited-by-him-185810754.html

Colin Kaepernick is continuing to keep busy despite still not having a job in the NFL. On Tuesday he announced that his publishing shingle, Kaepernick Publishing, will be releasing an anthology of essays on police and prison abolition in October. "Abolition for the People: The Movement For a Future Without Policing & Prisons" will contain 30 essays, and Kaepernick himself served as editor.

The topic of police and prison abolition is something Kaepernick has been passionate about for years. When he first knelt during the national anthem before a preseason game in 2016, he told NFL.com that he was doing it to protest institutional racism and law enforcement's treatment of Black people.

Link to tweet

[comradebillyboy]

1. Come on Colin, help Dems lose more swing districts

with that "abolish the police" nonsense.

[stillcool]

11. What Colin wants to publish..

affects swing districts and Democrats? Damn, that guy can't do anything can he? I don't think those swing districts will read one page, but wouldn't it be great if they did?

"Abolition for the People: The Movement For a Future Without Policing & Prisons" will contain 30 essays, and Kaepernick himself served as editor.

The topic of police and prison abolition is something Kaepernick has been passionate about for years. When he first knelt during the national anthem before a preseason game in 2016, he told NFL.com that he was doing it to protest institutional racism and law enforcement's treatment of Black people

[StarfishSaver]

18. You really think that anyone who would be so upset that Colin Kaepernick wrote this book

that they would refuse to vote for Democrats would be voting for Democrats in the first place?

Please.

[comradebillyboy]

21. Pukes will hang Kapernick's foolishness on the Democrats

regardless. Especially since a number of Dem House members espouse the same views.

[StarfishSaver]

28. So what?

They'll hang something, anything on Democrats no matter what anyone says or does. That's not reason for every Black person in America to shut up about things they care about.

[comradebillyboy]

33. When did Colin Kapernick become the voice of all

Black Americans?

[StarfishSaver]

35. Probably around the same time you think he became the voice of Democrats

even though he has absolutely no connection to the party at all.

[OneBro]

2. Fodder for the right-wing sound bite machine.

Few people would have the courage to put their careers on the line as Kaepernick did, and I assume that by "abolish" they mean "reform" from top to bottom, but such nuances are water off the backs of the MAGA Duck Dynasty crowd which prefers to bottom feed off the likes of Faux Gnus, Sinclair Broadcasting, Newsmax, MAGA mega churches and every Rush Limbaugh wannabe on a.m. radio and YouTube.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

3. Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html

Enough. We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police.

There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo.

So when you see a police officer pressing his knee into a black man’s neck until he dies, that’s the logical result of policing in America. When a police officer brutalizes a black person, he is doing what he sees as his job.

(snip)

I’ve been advocating the abolition of the police for years. Regardless of your view on police power — whether you want to get rid of the police or simply to make them less violent — here’s an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people. The idea is gaining traction in Minneapolis, Dallas, Los Angeles and other cities.

[TwilightZone]

4. And replace it with what?

Let us know when you're going to volunteer to apprehend some whacko hopped up on meth who just shot and killed his wife and kids. And then tell us what you're going to do with him.

Abolish the police is political suicide. It's also ludicrously short-sighted.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

7. Systems that support the guy before he gets on meth and shoots his wife and kids, so he doesn't

feel the need to.

Abolishing the police is not a great electoral issue, but it's an excellent activist issue.

[TwilightZone]

10. You think you can eliminate violence entirely?

And every other crime that police are currently tasked with?

That's the most ridiculous assertion I've ever heard.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

14. We actually know a lot of the reasons why people become violent, and a great many of them are

easily preventable. Investing in those systems without replicating the white supremacy of the police would fill the void.

[StarfishSaver]

19. "Good morning" is fodder for the right-wing sound bite machine

[uponit7771]

22. If this is louder than GQP worshiping a guy who killed 500,000 Americans than we're screwed anyway

[PBC_Democrat]

5. "Awesome" says the RNC Marketing Dept

I'm guess the Democrats will celebrate and endorse this report, while anyone in a 'less than bright blue' district will cringe and have to draft a response to the report.

That's not to say that I don't expect there will be a lot of excellent ideas and proposals ... I worry that the concepts will get lost in the presentation.

Rep. Karen Bass, the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, described calls to “defund the police” as a terrible rallying cry.

Democratic Whip James Clyburn: 'Defund the police' cost Democrats seats, hurt Black Lives Matter movement.

I say we listen to the people who actually stand in elections and try to govern and not the people who play to the headlines.

[TwilightZone]

6. Most Dems won't celebrate or endorse it.

There is zero support among mainstream Democratic politicians for abolishing the police.

[JI7]

8. He also doesn't vote

[StarfishSaver]

29. Apparently every Black person in America is supposed to just STFU

[Treefrog]

37. And once said Hillary and the former guy were just the same.

Ugh.

[uponit7771]

23. Right, cause they wouldn't just make up some shit like Biden Hates Meat? tia

[PBC_Democrat]

25. They Most Certainly Would ... And Probably Still Will

But a publication like this just makes their job easier and puts moderates in the position of having to defend something tangible.

If we can't side with the Democratic leaders of the HoR and CBC ...
People who have actually been elected to office ...

I really, really don't want a former NFL quarterback making policy statements.

[uponit7771]

26. Isn't their job easy whether these publications exist or not? I mean at some point we got to ...

... realize we're not dealing with reality based people and beat them at their messaging game.

[StarfishSaver]

42. So what?

White athletes speak their minds all the time and no one's wringing their hands saying, "Oh, no! Tim Tebow said something outrageous! That's going to lose the Republicans a lot of votes!"

You know why? Because people don't assume every time a white person says something, he's speaking for all other white people.

Kaepernick isn't even a Democrat and he's never been associated connected to or aligned with the Democratic party. But now people are scared that anything he says will be blamed on us. If Republicans try it, it will only be because he's Black and some people will be quick to assume that he speaks for all Black people, that all Black people are Democrats, and therefore, he speaks for all Democrats.

That's BS and if anyone tries it, we should just call it BS and move on. But whining about how this Black man should STFU because something he says might be held against us is ridiculous and insulting - and this kind of reaction usually ONLY happens when it comes to Black and Brown people speaking their minds. Otherwise, we look at what white people say as representing only their views and that's the end of it.

[Polybius]

9. He's not a Democrat

He's a political extremist. We don't need people like him in our Party.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

13. Enough people here express support for Kaepernick I thought some might be interested.

[Polybius]

15. Yes they do

I wasn't blaming you at all. In fact, I'm glad you posted it. It was just a dig on Kap.

[StarfishSaver]

20. They CLAIM to support Kaepernick

and they probably do - as long as he just shuts up.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

34. Yep.

Black protest is subject to just as much criticism from white Democrats as white Republicans.

[StarfishSaver]

36. Indeed

"Shhh. You're talking too loud and people can see you. We're trying to elect people we think will help you improve your situation one day when they get around to it and you're getting in our way with all that talk about what you think your situation is."

[WhiskeyGrinder]

39. "Couldn't you at least wait until after the next election? You won't get ANYTHING if we lose the

next election. Help us win the next election, which is the most important election we've ever had, ever, and THEN we can focus on what you think needs to happen."

(next election goes by)

"No wait we mean the NEXT election."

[StarfishSaver]

40. Every effing time

That is LITERALLY what some people on this board have been saying.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

41. The obsession with electoral politics makes it impossible for people to imagine any other change

agent. If everything must fit inside the framework of The Next Election, then of course a book of essays about revolutionary ideas will seem like a threat, as ridiculous as that sounds. There are a lot of people who like to pretend protest doesn't work -- and they need to interrogate that.

[StarfishSaver]

43. True

But can you imagine what our electoral politics would look like if, instead of chasing around after that, as one poster in a other thread called them "sliver of voters," we went all out to unapologetically fight for, protect and attract Black, Brown and other marginalized voters? If we made THOSE voters the priority and treated that sliver as a "nice to do" (the way we too often treat minority voters now). It would be transformational.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

44. Absolutely -- and I don't want to play down electoral politics at all, or the ways the Democratic

party gets it wrong when it comes to being truly inclusive, or the gains it could make if it would just get over itself.

[StarfishSaver]

45. To many people here

being "inclusive" means doing everything we can to attract reluctant white voters while treating minority voters as a given, worrying that doing too much outreach to those minority voters might offend those white voters, and not caring whether the slavish outreach to those white voters threatens the support of minority voters because "where else are they going to go?"

[WhiskeyGrinder]

46. EXACTLY.

[StarfishSaver]

47. Remember the over-the-top defenses of Carville's attack on "wokeness"?

Those folks didn't seem the least bit concerned that jumping to the defense of a white man who claimed that being sensitive to racism and systemic discrimination is a problem for Democrats because it offends some white people might insult minority voters. Nah ...he was just "speaking uncomfortable truth" and should be commended and defended, even if that "truth" isn't true at all.

But let a Black person speak truth that makes some white people uncomfortable, and all hell breaks loose and they tell him to shut up.

And they insist that he should shut up because his words could possibly be used against the Democrats, even when that black person has no direct connection to the Democratic Party. On the other hand Carville is connected at the hip to the party, But they have no worry at all that his words could cause any damage or drive away voters - they don't care about those voters because they they're invisible and largely irrelevant (or at least not important enough to warrant any priority over the elusive but oh-so-precious white voter).

[WhiskeyGrinder]

48. It says so much that so many still listen to him as a leader anymore. So much.

He's the symbol of so much of the party's weaknesses that were solidified in the Clinton era, the biggest of course being that "The common people of the party dislike anything that I, James Carville, The Common Man of the Party, dislike!"

And so everyone else decides they have to dislike those things too, which, funnily enough, have to do A LOT with race and class.

[betsuni]

24. It surprises me how many people assume he's a Democrat when he was quite public about

not voting because he believed both parties are the same, saying Hillary and Trump were proven liars, racists, and voting for the lesser of two evils was still voting for evil so he wasn't going to do it. Fell for the propaganda. A lot of people confuse activism with politics.

[StarfishSaver]

30. "He's not a Democrat ... We don't need people like him in our Party"

Is he trying to join our party? If not, what's your point? Is he just supposed to STFU?

[BGBD]

12. If he's as good at this as he was playing QB...

Then the police are safe.

[Brother Buzz]

27. To be fair, he showed a lot of promise with his rocket arm and skill set early on

That is, until the opponents figured him out and shut down his game. His mistake was letting them live in his head rent free; he became a headcase and started regressing horribly.

There are times I think he should have done a Timmy Tebow and perused baseball after he walked away from the 49ers. With his rocket arm, he could have been a killer closer for any MLB club. Not many people know the Chicago Cubs drafted Kaepernick as a pitcher

?t=18

[BGBD]

32. He'd have done better in MLB

It took about a season worth of games for the NFL to adjust to him and when they did it went bad quickly.

But even before that, his terrible accuracy and no touch cost the 49ers the Super Bowl.

I wonder how high he could have worked that velocity up. I doubt he had the placement to be nasty like a Kimbrel, but if he could have got that fastball up to the upper 90s and worked in a slider he could have closed. He'd have been a good center fielder if he could hit.

Tebow made the mistake of thinking he was way better than he was. He should have took the Matt Jones route and switched to TE right out of college. He was athletic enough to play TE or LB, but didn't have anywhere near the talent to pull off QB. His baseball career was a sideshow too. Now he's in the right position, but he's too old to make it work.

[Ferrets are Cool]

16. Damn, to read some of the posts in this thread, one would think they don't believe in the

1st amendment.

[MichMan]

17. Doesn't the same 1st Amendment also give people the right to criticize speech?

[StarfishSaver]

31. These threads always reveal true colors

Sometimes the call is coming from inside the house.

[Ferrets are Cool]

38. +1