Tuesday on ESPN2’s “First Take,” co-host Stephen A. Smith weighed in on the continuous protests in the NFL over racial injustice, as well as the recent police shooting of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, OK.
Smith said the protests, started by San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, are only going to “intensify” as a response the Crutcher shooting.
He went on to add later that if someone has an issue with Kaepernick’s protest after he said it was not against the United States military, then it just speaks about the individual because African-Americans feel they may not even be second class citizens in this country.
“What cannot happen, and what cannot be tolerated, is us as a community and us as a nation turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to what exactly is transpiring,” Smith stated. “Every time we want to sit up there and quell the noise about what’s transpiring, some other event comes forward to remind us that we may not even be second class citizens in this nation, that our lives really, really don’t matter, and something needs to be said about it, and something needs to be done about it.”
“So whether we are agree or disagree with Colin Kaepernick, the moment he said social and racial injustice, the moment he brought that cause up, and he specifically articulated that in no way was he speaking against our military, from the moment he did that, I had no problem with it. And the fact that other people do says something to me about them, not about Colin Kaepernick,” he concluded.
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