While I love the Seahawks, and often find their politics to be amongst the best and most interesting in the NFL, I agree with Jezebel's Kara Brown's criticism of the Seahawks quasi-protest during the National Anthem on Sunday.

The demonstration, along with the way it came about, suggests to me that none of these people really know what they’re trying to say, nor do they really understand what Colin Kaepernick is protesting. Conflating a refusal to stand for the national anthem with being anti-military is the most painfully obtuse conclusion that could possibly be drawn from these actions. 


Baldwin and his team’s display reads as even less impactful when you learn they surrendered to teammates who disagreed with their plan for reasons not rooted in facts. You don’t have to concede to wrongness. You don’t have to give in to people who don’t have the courage to stand up for you and your safety in the spirit of unity.

The Seahawks didn't really protest anything on Sunday. They stood together unified as a football team, which, yeah, sure, I guess unity is good, but they hardly challenged the status quo. The Seahawks are a team of football players whose commonalities outweigh the (admittedly significant) differences between the players. And while it's a nice enough gesture, within the context of more specific forms of protest against police brutality and systemic racism that have been percolating through the league, the Seahawks' gesture disappoints in that it does not intend to affect any specific change.

The desire to find consensus doomed the Seahawks political effort from the start. Apparently the team wanted to make a gesture as a collective, led by wide receiver Doug Baldwin, but while the majority of the squad wanted to take a knee together during the anthem, some were uncomfortable with the gesture. The need to find common ground stripped a potentially significant moment of its teeth.

In Inventing The Future, co-authors Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams spill a lot of ink on the left's failure to combat the increasingly nefarious forces of neoliberalism. The writers hold up the Occupy movement as an essential example of the left's failure. Occupy was a movement focused on temporary occupation of the spaces of power, a movement defined by the need for consensus more than its attempts to accomplish specific goals. The group's attempts to make real changes to the status quo were thwarted by the capacity for those in power to wait out the inherently temporary occupations, and for the inevitable divisiveness to set in to an organization that held up consensus as a primary goal.

Contrast these failures with the national and specific impact of Black Lives Matters, which despite having a less defined organizational structure, elucidates very specific goals even at the risk of being divisive. Black Lives Matters continues to impact the current political climate, while Occupy has failed to keep its criticism of neoliberal corporatism at the fore of the national debate.

The good news about the Seahawks gesture is that a bunch of individuals on the team including Baldwin are opening a dialogue with city officials about issues surrounding the city's police. While it may be unpleasant, and run counter to the those of professional football, it is through these individual actions that the Seahawks can do good, not by standing together in a time of genuine strife.