In 2016, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick did not stand for the National Anthem before any game of the season. Instead, he kneeled.

“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way.” Kaepernick said to NFL Media in 2016.

When the season ended, he was cut by the 49ers. Kaepernick who had been the starting quarterback in San Francisco for most of the 2016 season, has not been signed by another NFL team. It took years before any significant interest came from the NFL. While there is no explicit evidence that he was blackballed from the league, it is hard to see how no team even wanted to interview him. Without naming names let it be known that there were some terrible starting quarterbacks in the NFL in 2017.

While this controversy certainly brought racial injustice to the forefront of the NFL conversation, the press was by no means all good. In fact, much of the focus was on how he was “disrespecting the troops.”

Without recapping the entire story, it is important to know that Kaepernick was widely disrespected by the league and fans.

Jump forward to 2023 and the NFL has “It Takes All of Us” and “End Racism” in the endzones. Players all over the league have stickers on the back of their helmets with social justice slogans such as “Black Lives Matter” or the aforementioned “End Racism”.

While the helmet phrases still come from a pre-approved list provided by the league, they are progress compared to when something like that would have gotten a player fined. Still, nobody kneels for the anthem anymore. The NFL has come a long way in the six years since Kaepernick was cut, but this idea of approved and non-approved protest is counter to the very concept of protest.

The NBA had its own anthem scandal with Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf in 1996. Abdul-Rauf did not stand during the song due to what he called America’s long history of tyranny. While the NBA is often touted as the most progressive league, this was too much for them. Abdul-Rauf was suspended for every game he did not stand and was fined $31,707 per missed game. With his career and livelihood threatened, Abdul-Rauf took only two days to agree to a compromise in which he would still stand, but would be allowed to lower his head and close his eyes in Islamic prayer during the anthem.

This compromise was not enough to save him from the scorn of the American public, and Abdul-Rauf was quickly seeing a decrease in minutes and sporadic usage. He retired in 2001 at 31, an early retirement for someone who had a skill set that could easily have transitioned into a later career as a spot-up shooter.

Just as Kaepernick was likely blackballed from the NFL, it seems as though two decades earlier Abdul-Rauf did the same thing and was punished in much the same way. They had their careers ended for choosing to protest not in an approved way that the advertisers liked, but instead in a way that spoke the truth and made those in power angry.

The NBA has also created predetermined and approved “protests” for players to do. In the 2020 NBA bubble, many players wore jerseys with phrases on the back like “Black Lives Matter”, “How Many More?”,  and a number of equivalent phrases in foreign players’ home languages. Of course, as with the NFL, all phrases were designated by the league to be worn. Once the bubble ended, all of this vanished. Ultimately, the NBA has done less than the NFL, and neither league allows for significant unapproved protests.

Resistance is inherently not to be desired by those in power. When an entity like the NBA or NFL decides to designate a specific type of protest as the right way, what they are saying is that they have decided it will not lose them money. When Kaepernick knelt, bigots threatened boycotts, and so he was punished. When they put a logo in the endzone, nobody seemed to care, and so the logo remains.

Kaepernick has never received an official apology. Neither has Abdul-Rauf. Nobody defended them when it was not profitable to do so. While it is great to see anti-racism be pushed into visibility by sports leagues, the prior failures cannot be ignored. As they allow the protest they see as financially attractive it is important that the real protests, the stuff they did not like, are kept in the conversation. We cannot forget their names and their stories, as they did what nobody else was willing to do.