Just one day after news broke that the Seattle Seahawks had postponed former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s visit with the team over his commitment to the Movement for Black Lives, the team has reportedly signed quarterback Stephen Morris, according to Yahoo! Sports.
Morris, who played for the University of Miami, has bounced around the NFL since 2014 and has never played in an actual professional football game, but he has one thing going for him that Kaepernick doesn’t have: He won’t take a knee during the national anthem—and in truth, it’s looking as if that’s all you have to do to play quarterback before Kap does.
The NFL is trash for turning Kaepernick’s protest against the killings of unarmed black men, women and children by police into a protest against America. The current president of the United States has phone sex with the Russian president on a nightly basis, but the only folks being billed as un-American are players who take a knee to protest black death.
As it stands, Kaepernick’s former team is willing to keep Reuben Foster on its active roster even though the linebacker was formally charged Thursday with felony domestic violence.
“The official Santa Clara District Attorney’s Office statement on Foster’s case includes gruesome details of Foster dragging his former live-in girlfriend by her hair and punching her in the head repeatedly until her ear drum ruptured,” Bleacher Report notes.
The incident allegedly took place in February and was investigated by police before charges were filed.
The 49ers didn’t immediately drop Foster; instead they issued a statement explaining why he would stay with the team for now:
The 49ers organization is aware of today’s disturbing charges regarding Reuben Foster. We will continue to follow this serious matter. Reuben is aware that his place in our organization is under great scrutiny and will depend on what is learned through the legal process.
Thus proving a widely held and long-standing theory that the NFL is fine with domestic violence, illegal-drug use, being accused of murder and killing dogs, but protesting the killing of unarmed black men, women and police—that is where the league draws the line.
The Seahawks are guilty of harboring questionable players, too. Here’s how Yahoo! Sports explains the team’s history with troubled players:
The Seahawks needed a backup after cutting Trevone Boykin over a domestic violence incident. Before the domestic violence accusation, Boykin was with the Seahawks two seasons despite separate arrests on drug charges and resisting arrest after a bar fight that got him suspended from TCU’s bowl game. Kaepernick has no known arrests.
The Seahawks, who once drafted defensive end Frank Clark after he was arrested for a domestic violence accusation and kept Clark after he injured a teammate in a practice fight, needed a backup quarterback so they contacted Kaepernick about a workout. The workout was scrapped over Kaepernick’s refusal to promise he wouldn’t kneel for the national anthem, according to Yahoo Sports’ Charles Robinson and other reports. Robinson said a meeting could happen at a later date, but in the meantime the Seahawks needed someone other than Russell Wilson at quarterback. So Morris was brought in.
But we all saw this coming. The NFL, much like the rest of Trump’s America, doesn’t care about black people (old-Kanye voice). The hurtful part isn’t that teams keep passing on Kaepernick; it’s that teams really try to make sound arguments that the decision not to sign him—or, hell, to not even bring him in for tryouts—is purely football related.
Former pro-bowler Eric Reid, Kaepernick’s former teammate and the first player to kneel with him, has been on one visit since leaving the 49ers, and that was with the Cincinnati Bengals, who up until recently employed Adam “Pacman” Jones, a player who at one point was so reckless, he was suspended for an entire year for his off-the-field conduct.
While the NFL continues its moral stand against black protest, let’s hope that these developments are merely strengthening Kaepernick’s argument that the league colluded to keep him off the field, because we’ve all known this for some time now.