As league executives, team owners and a host of sports and media experts scrambled to make sense of the steep decline, one definitive poll from Seton Hall found that 56% of NFL fans believe the protests being held during the “Star-Spangled Banner” are to blame. That’s higher than any other reason given — including the presidential elections, oversaturation of sports and the fallout from fan awareness of CTE and traumatic brain injuries. Cord-cutting and expanded streaming options are also likely contributing to the ratings declines.
I believe the poll.
It’s why Donald Trump is actually echoing the results of the poll on the campaign trail and publicly singling out Colin Kaepernick as the singular reason for the decline in the NFL ratings. Trump and his team of white supremacists and bigots know that such a mention would actually resonate with their base. Think about it. One study stated that 83% of NFL fans are white and also said that registered Republicans were 21% more likely to be NFL fans than Democrats. In other words, a significant chunk of NFL fans are Donald Trump supporters. The only real demographic he is winning is white men without college degrees.
So, of course ratings are down and of course the league wide protests are playing a role. Anybody saying otherwise is willfully denying the role of race and racism in America.
Conservative white NFL fans love their teams and even feign loving the players on those teams as long as they keep their mouths closed about the civil and human rights of African-Americans. Sixty-nine percent of players in the league are black. A few more percentage points are from other ethnicities of color. Those numbers are likely to increase in the years ahead.
What we have right now is the stark reality that uneducated conservative white men hate few things more in the world than a fully free black man — particularly a decidedly wealthy, physically fit, fully free black man who unashamedly and unabashedly raises his black fist in the air during the “Star-Spangled Banner.” That’s exactly what we have the NFL right now.
If Donald Trump has done anything, he has deepened the racial divide in this country and emboldened tens of millions of white Americans to embrace their whiteness in ways I’ve never seen in my lifetime. So, when Donald Trump attempted this weekend to use Colin Kaepernick as a political football, he did it because doing so is a popular thing to do with his base. They hate Colin. According to new polls, Colin is far and away the most hated player in the league right now. He’s not hated by black fans, but by conservative white fans who see him as the human personification of so much of what they hate in a black man.
I believe the poll.
It’s why Donald Trump is actually echoing the results of the poll on the campaign trail and publicly singling out Colin Kaepernick as the singular reason for the decline in the NFL ratings. Trump and his team of white supremacists and bigots know that such a mention would actually resonate with their base. Think about it. One study stated that 83% of NFL fans are white and also said that registered Republicans were 21% more likely to be NFL fans than Democrats. In other words, a significant chunk of NFL fans are Donald Trump supporters. The only real demographic he is winning is white men without college degrees.
So, of course ratings are down and of course the league wide protests are playing a role. Anybody saying otherwise is willfully denying the role of race and racism in America.
Conservative white NFL fans love their teams and even feign loving the players on those teams as long as they keep their mouths closed about the civil and human rights of African-Americans. Sixty-nine percent of players in the league are black. A few more percentage points are from other ethnicities of color. Those numbers are likely to increase in the years ahead.
What we have right now is the stark reality that uneducated conservative white men hate few things more in the world than a fully free black man — particularly a decidedly wealthy, physically fit, fully free black man who unashamedly and unabashedly raises his black fist in the air during the “Star-Spangled Banner.” That’s exactly what we have the NFL right now.
If Donald Trump has done anything, he has deepened the racial divide in this country and emboldened tens of millions of white Americans to embrace their whiteness in ways I’ve never seen in my lifetime. So, when Donald Trump attempted this weekend to use Colin Kaepernick as a political football, he did it because doing so is a popular thing to do with his base. They hate Colin. According to new polls, Colin is far and away the most hated player in the league right now. He’s not hated by black fans, but by conservative white fans who see him as the human personification of so much of what they hate in a black man.
