Last Sunday, four members of the Miami Dolphins team kneeled during the anthem, joining Colin Kaepernick's protest. One player who didn't, and who never will, is receiver/returner Jakeem Grant.
A major factor for Grant is the fact that he has family members in the military, and he just doesn't feel right taking a knee. But he also provided some thoughts regarding an element of Kaepernick's message behind the protest.
“I’m not against them," Grant said about the NFL protesters, via the Palm Beach Post. "They do it in their own way, but in my way, kneeling is not gonna change anything. If we start going into the high-poverty areas and tell them it’s not right for us to kill each other… and now we’re putting the blame on cops for killing us and we’re blowing it up. But when we kill each other, it’s not blown up like that. We can’t sit there and just get extremely mad at them for doing that when we do it every single day.”
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Kaepernick has been very vocal about the police shootings of black men, and has repeatedly mentioned the killings as reasons for his protest. Following the death of Alton Sterling, who was killed by police, Kaepernick wrote on Instagram, "Another murder in the streets because the color of a man's skin, at the hands of the people who they say will protect us. When will they be held accountable?"
The 49ers quarterback also drew a lot of attention for wearing socks that depicted police officers as pigs, a derogatory term for cops.
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According to Grant, there should be more anger directed toward black-on-black crime than police shootings.
“It needs to be that equally across the board instead of it being wrong that white cop killed this black guy for no reason," Grant said. "Yes, that’s definitely wrong, but it’s not blown up when a black person kills a black person. Us, as black people, need to realize that we kill each other every day and you never see it skyrocket on the news, but when a white police officer kills a black guy it’s blown up. We need to start there first.”
