Kentucky players knelt. Stivers wept - and showed how little he understands their point.
It’s understandable that Senate President Robert Stivers is emotional over his son’s choice to join the military, a patriotic and selfless act that we all appreciate. He is clearly sad about our youth’s apparent inability to understand how important symbols like the flag and the national anthem remain to older people.
It’s also quite clear that Stivers has made no effort to understand why a group of young, Black athletes would choose to kneel while the American anthem was played at a basketball game, even though it’s been four years since football player Colin Kaepernick first did so.
If Stivers had made that effort, he would have seen whole forests of written material on this topic, ranging from the purpose of patriotic and peaceful protest to the 400-year history of police brutality, racism, white supremacy and inequality, along with the endless, myriad ways that Black people have and continue to suffer in this country. The sight of white people streaming into the U.S. Capitol last week, unmolested as they went on a blood hunt for legislators when Black Lives Matter protesters were routinely tear-gassed, beaten and arrested last summer, was apparently the last straw for players on the UK men’s basketball team. They were not disrespecting the young Stivers’ service. If anything, they were respecting it by asking America to do better.
That Stivers cried over their choice to use their celebrity for something far greater than a basketball game makes this situation uniquely Kentuckian. As I’ve said before, the obsession with UK basketball has many strange intersections of race and white privilege, as though being a fan of UK basketball gives you some kind of ownership over the players’ views and conduct. As in the Knox County Fiscal Court now wants our entire flagship university to be defunded. A third of Knox County lives in poverty and the per capita income is $17,000 a year, so sure, take a vote against kneeling.
It is absurd that one of our elected leaders would choose to remain so willfully ignorant over the concerns of people of color in these days of tumult. It is pitiful that Stivers merely issued a statement over the storming of the U.S. Capitol last week but took to the Senate floor to cry over a patriotic protest by the basketball team.
Stivers cried as a parent whose son faces danger and over the tattered symbols of an America we are only just now beginning to understand. Where are his tears for the parents of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd or Breonna Taylor? Where are his tears for the nearly 3,000 Kentuckians who have died of COVID-19? For the police officer killed at the Capitol? Where are his tears for the residents of Clay County, who may love the cheap political shots scored in his speech, but remain sunken in the depths of poverty?
On Monday morning, this paper asked Kentucky Republicans to act more like grown-ups by focusing on real and thorny problems instead of trying to impeach the governor, entertain militias and shut down non-existent abortion clinics. On Monday evening, Robert Stivers said hold my beer as I cry salty tears into it.
This country is finally coming to grips with its original sins. We are starting to comprehend that neither the flag, nor the anthem, nor the police nor the military, necessarily represented all of us. Sure, middle-aged white men like Robert Stivers or the members of the Knox County Fiscal Court are having a hard time grasping the history that has uprooted much of what they once believed. That doesn’t make it less true or less important that they make the effort as they lead our counties and our state.
This story was originally published January 12, 2021 at 11:26 AM.
