Afros, Anthems and Colin Kaepernick
Dear Colin Kaepernick,
I hear you. And so do millions across the country. As a professional athlete, you actually have more sway than pastors. Welcome to a culture driven by the worship of sports.
This is why your political statements carry such tremendous weight.
Let me take you back for a moment…
“If you don’t say the Pledge of Allegiance, you’re going to get a detention!” threatened my 12th grade Government Studies teacher. She was angry that I refused to say words I felt were untrue.
I was the only one in the class who staged this brief protest. How could I recite words that I knew were a lie—“one nation under God”—we weren’t, and I wasn’t going to pretend it was true. She kept threatening me, but I refused to say it for weeks, not fearing the consequences.
I get you Colin Kaepernick. I understand that frustration with knowing something is wrong and trying to express it in some way.
We have similar backgrounds. You’re “biracial”. I’m “biracial”. (I put “biracial” in quotes because we’re all just one human race.) Both of us had black biological “fathers” who weren’t in the picture at all. (Actually, that’s an understatement for me as my biological mother was raped yet chose life despite her horrific circumstances). Your biological mother faced different but dire circumstances, too. Each of our courageous birthmoms chose adoption for us, allowing us to be loved like crazy.
Like you, I was able to grow up in a loving Christian home. I had white parents and a multiracial family (with 12 siblings). Adopted as babies, transracial adoption made our lives and our experiences possible. Adoption undeniably unleashed purpose in each of us. I love how you predicted, way back in junior high, that you would become a 49ers quarterback…and God made it happen!
Each of us, as biracial adoptees, were able to navigate through some of the natural confusion and questions because we had parents who loved us through it all. For me, growing up in a diverse home served as a reminder that color (as beautiful as it is) is not what binds us—love is.
You once said in an interview with CBS that adoption “was the biggest blessing in my life”. Me, too.
Sadly, millions don’t ever get the opportunity that we did—to be given life and a nurturing family. Many are killed because they were “unplanned” and supposedly “unwanted.” Adoption shatters the myth of the “unwanted” child. Our lives prove this. Abortion reinforces the lie. It is the ultimate injustice, killing unarmed human beings over 3,000 times a day. Their bodies aren’t “in the street”…just flushed down drains or shoved into bio-waste bags. And they far outnumber the 259 black individuals or 497 white individuals killed by police in one year (79% of whom, according to the Washington Post, were armed). More unarmed black lives are killed in one day by Planned Parenthood (an estimated 266) than police kill (with or without justification) in an entire year. But somehow the injustice of the slaughter of those who will never get to be adopted, loved and dream like you doesn’t move you to protest. There are people getting paid and getting away with murder. They’re called abortionists, many of whom become millionaires (like Kermit Gosnell) by killing the most defenseless among us.
You’ve been seduced into a false narrative that exploits racism for political 
and financial gains when your experience and your mixed hue should call you to be what President Obama has never chosen to be—a unifier. Rockin’ an afro doesn’t make you blacker or righter, by the way. It doesn’t change who I am either. Truth changes who we are…for the better. The external appearance of self is meaningless if valuing truth is a superficial exercise. What is the content that flows from your heart to your mouth, or to your Twitter account (which sadly is currently a hot mess of racist accusations, racial division, and expletives)? These aren’t worth standing up for but should cause a pause to take a knee and reconsider the long-lasting effect of reckless words.
Misinformation is poison.
The fundamentally dishonest, Marxist #BlackLivesMatter movement is toxic. (Part of their platform is decrying “income inequality”, by the way, but you didn’t choose to sit down over that. You made 9,899 times the money, in one game, than someone working security in your home stadium.) Surely, there’s a better way to illuminate actual injustice and address needless, tragic losses of life without spewing the venom of a movement rooted in regurgitated black nationalism.
Martin Luther King powerfully declared: “Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout, ‘White Power!’ when nobody will shout, ‘Black Power!’ but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power.”
.
Frederick Douglass, famed abolitionist and unapologetic supporter of an America gradually achieving the promises of Liberty, also served as a powerful force of racial reconciliation. “I go further, and declare that no man’s devotion to the cause of justice, liberty, and humanity, is to be weighed, measured and determined by his color or race,” he said in one of his last speeches. “We should never forget that the ablest and most eloquent voices ever raised in behalf of the black man’s cause, were the voices of white men. Not for the race; not for color, but for man and manhood alone, they labored, fought and died.”
No one can force you to stand during the National Anthem. That has to be your choice. But you can choose to stand for truth. Be a factivist. Be a reconciler.
We all have a choice. Out of emotion, we can embrace a lie or we can choose to be proactive and seek out the truth. Education is a painful but liberating process. Douglass eloquently said: “Education means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light only by which men can be free.”
Today, I will recite the Pledge of Allegiance with my children in hopes that this nation will not deny, but embrace, its Judeo-Christian roots. I will stand for a flawed National Anthem that extols a flawed but great nation where justice repeatedly triumphs. And I will continue to illuminate, as an American who happens to be “biracial”, that no matter the injustice, we tackle it as one human race.
Sincerely,
Ryan Bomberger
Adoptee and Adoptive Father
Well, you don’t hear that every day. (at least I don’t)
Well said, sir.
Exactly right! Facts over fiction! A divided nation is easier to control. A victim mentality will always clamor for a messiah (not the King of Kings) but a phony government mouthpiece.
Perhaps you are this ignorant because you don’t understand the National Anthem. Francis Scott Key penned this poem mainly because black slaves had joined the British in the War of 1812 for their freedom. Key was joyful that the black slaves were being killed, and thought them unpatriotic. He literally couldn’t believe slaves would rather fight and die than remain slaves. The third stanza to our National Anthem talks about this:
Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro’ the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watch’d, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof thro’ the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
On the shore dimly seen thro’ the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected, now shines on the stream:
‘Tis the star-spangled banner: O, long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash’d out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
O, thus be it ever when freemen shall stand,
Between their lov’d homes and the war’s desolation;
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land
Praise the Pow’r that hath made and preserv’d us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
Did you notice the third verse? “No refuse could save the hireling and slave from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.” Yeah, that’s an anthem that every black American would get behind, right?
Wow. Are you really that ignorant? I guess since the Bible talks of slavery, it should abolished, too, huh?
By the way, Francis Scott Key wrote those words from a British prison ship where he went to negotiate their release, both Black AND white, but I guess you already knew that, huh?
The answer the British commander gave him was that when the flag was lowered, they would release the prisoners. They bombed the fort through the night and the flag remained. By morning’s light, it was askew, and when they discovered that the base of the flag pole was littered with the bodies of men – Black AND white- who galiantly went out there to keep that flag flying high, and gave their life for their country.
Too bad you listen to racist bigots who rewrite history to fit their agenda. Too bad you cling to a verse that’s NOT sung in our modern anthem. Too bad you cry foul about things that happened 200 years ago, that don’t affect you directly.
Too bad you’ll always be another sad victim.
So you are one of the racist bigots huh JT?
Slavery was wrong in the Bible too, yet no one said abolish the national anthem. Black Americans “are” victims of American chattel slavery and Jim Crow’s racist segregation policies. My being able to go to law school and have a good job does not make me the victim you whine about, however. I know American history and you choose to ignore it, thinking an entire race of Americans not having their rights for 190 of the 240 years we’ve been a country was no big deal. Jim Crow’s “redlining still exists today, but you still don’t understand how this victimizes black Americans because you are not intellectually curious enough to want to know. I said the anthem’s original intent was to mock black slaves who choose freedom over being slaves. No black slaves would willingly fight the British for their fellow Americans to remain someone’s property. You do realize how stupid that sounds, right?
There’s nothing racist or bigoted about Kaepernick’s protest, but it sure does bring out the racist and the bigots in America, who can’t remember this man has a 1st Amendment right to protest his government. If you think that what happened during slavery doesn’t affect what goes on today, then explain to me how these Multi-Billion Dollar companies got their start since they all admit to making significant profits off of slavery: Aetna, Barclays Bank, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, New York Life Insurance, Wells Fargo Bank, N M Rothchild & Sons Bank, Norfolk Southern Railway, The USA Today, E. W Scripps. Bank of America, CSX Railway, Canadian Railway Company, Brown Brothers Harriman, Brown University, Brooks Brothers, AIG, Citizens Bank, Harvard University, Princeton University, Yale University, and Tiffany’s.
Without the sale of slaves 200 years ago, each and every one of these companies would not exist, and they certainly wouldn’t be making billions a year. So it’s okay to profit off of slavery, and pass down those profits to your children, but let’s not try to pay for the slave labor that started these companies, right? According to you, no reason to cry foul about something that happened 200 years ago. Yet it’s okay for these companies to start 200 years ago off of slavery. That sounds pathetic to me, sir.
Regrettably, he will never see your eloquent words. Nonetheless, well said!
Presidential denate #3:
Chris Wallace lied , misquoting #CrookedHillary on #Abortion. Wallace stated, #she said, “Unbor. Fetuses have no rights”. What the #ButcherofBengzani actually said was, “An unborn person or child have no constitutional rights”. #Hitlery’s statement, to me, is an admission that an unborn human being is, in fact, a person, a child as she called them and an acknowledgement by her that abortion is murder.
https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/3/hillary-clinton-unborn-person-has-no-constitutiona/
How can anyone vote for #CrookedHillary while #her mainstream news media, the DNC, and the #ButcherofBengzani herself continue exploiting millions of #women and their other voting blocks, #minorities?
Abortion has always been murder. Now with Planned Parenthood and generations of #Women’s rights groups drilling their misguided agenda into the fabric of minority life, it’s only a matter of another 20 yrs for them to dispose of the Black population.
http://www.blackgenocide.org