Students Kennedy Kline and Ua Hayes recently wrote an essay for the Oberlin Review which drips with the sort of leftism we’ve come to expect from this school.
Anthem Supports False Narrative of FreedomWhen our field hockey team stood for the national anthem Saturday, it didn’t feel right. We didn’t feel proud to be standing for America because we didn’t feel that America offers anything worth being proud of. We’d felt this before: feelings of discomfort, confusion, and anger over being pressured to stand tall and strong in a display of unrelenting patriotism. At a certain point, we just couldn’t ignore the feeling anymore.In August and September 2016, Colin Kaepernick, quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, received an enormous amount of media attention after kneeling during the anthem before one of the 49ers’ football games. Immediately after, people demanded to know: Why did he kneel?Since that moment, which captured so much of the nation’s attention, countless athletes across the country — at the professional, collegiate, and even high school level — have followed Kaepernick’s example and knelt during the anthem. Last fall, our field hockey team joined those ranks. This weekend, some of us chose to kneel once again.Simply put, we kneel for justice. When the national anthem first reached American ears, Black people were still enslaved. It is not a song written for us, about us, or in support of us. This “land of the free” was a land of slavery and oppression, and what the American flag symbolizes is no different.
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