The Sept. 6 edition of The Maine Campus included a degrading opinion piece rife with the perpetuation of crippling stereotypes that have had an enormous effect on the African-American community.
Editor Jacob Posik’s piece “Kaepernick saga telling of America’s racial divides” not only included gross generalizations of the African-American community but also displayed an alarming apathy towards police brutality and the lives and valid concerns of his fellow Americans. This piece dangerously spews racial rhetoric that is offensive and has no place for a liberal school campus.
Kaepernick utilizing his rights as an American to take a knee during the national anthem is not “selfish” nor are the issues of social justice in America unrelated to the Army. The Army is utilized as a force to give out social justice in countries overseas, continually toppling regimes that stifle the human rights of their people and then instilling democratic governments meant to protect their rights. It has become their job not only to protect America but also to enforce social justice worldwide.
Why then is it so hard to believe that social justice in America and the Army are related? How quick people are to forget that the American flag did not represent freedom for the minority men and women that fought in previous wars under it, nor did it represent freedom for the millions of slaves in America and a people that until the 1960s were not given their natural rights of enforced and ensured equality.
Posik uses a segregationist tone referring to the African-American community as “them” and “they” while making the foolish assumption that this community needs to be educated in how to run their family unit, regurgitating nonsensical information passed to on through biased news sites — a charge Posik accuses Kaepernick of doing with the liberal media.
I highly recommend that pieces such as these be carefully proofread and then, as this one should have been, completely erased or rewritten by an editor who will not perpetrate lies that are a false characterization of a minority community that may propagate unwarranted negativity towards that community.
