ANALYSISApril 13, 2026
Is kneeling during the national anthem appropriate protest?
The debate over kneeling during the national anthem as a form of protest against systemic racism and police brutality, which began in the NFL in 2016, remains active in 2025-2026. The most recent flashpoint involves Howard University, which updated its athletics protocol after its women's basketball team knelt during a December 29, 2025 game against the United States Military Academy, now requiring student-athletes to either stand during the anthem or remain in the locker room. Howard's women's basketball team has since chosen to remain in the locker room rather than stand.
When a Black athlete drops to one knee during the anthem, is he dishonoring the flag or forcing the country to confront what the flag is supposed to stand for — and who gets to decide which reading is more patriotic?
Not familiar with this story? Get context →
Protest effectiveness versus symbolic gesture
C
The debate after 2016 became almost entirely about the flag and military propriety — not about Laquan McDonald or Philando Castile. When a tactic consistently swallows its own message, that's not courageous speech; it's a strategic failure dressed up as moral conviction. Nine years later, no major federal police reform has passed, and kneeling has largely faded from professional sports.
L
You're measuring effectiveness by legislative output, but Kaepernick's stated goal was to make it impossible to look away — and by that measure, we're still here in 2025, a military-college basketball game forcing a university to rewrite its protocols because of a choice made in 2016. The protest hasn't faded; it's still generating the exact discomfort it was designed to produce.
C
Sustained discomfort is not the same as sustained progress. If the legacy of the protest is an HBCU banning kneeling and a decade of argument about flag etiquette, the discomfort landed in the wrong place.
L
The wrong place to land discomfort, according to whom? If the people most invested in racial justice at Howard are still fighting about this protocol in 2025, the protest found exactly the pressure point it was looking for.
Career consequences prove or indict protest
C
The Poskanzer study found the first 50 NFL players to kneel suffered fewer contracts, smaller deals, and roster cuts. When your tactic costs your messengers their livelihoods, you've imposed a real price on real people for a form of expression that didn't move the policy needle.
L
You're using the suppression of the protest as evidence the protest was wrong — that's circular. The protest said Black athletes in America are not free to speak; the NFL's response was to make them less free to speak. Those career consequences don't indict kneeling; they confirm the diagnosis.
C
That framing only works if we already accept that the career consequences were politically motivated rather than performance-based — which the confidential Kaepernick settlement explicitly left unresolved. You're treating an open question as a closed one to win the argument.
L
Fair point on the settlement, but a cartel-adjacent employer market doesn't require explicit coordination to produce blacklist conditions — teams acting rationally on shared reputational risk get you to the same outcome without a smoking-gun memo.
Neutrality of standing versus kneeling
C
Howard University's request to keep the anthem space apolitical is a reasonable institutional boundary, not censorship. Shared national symbols only function if they remain above partisan contestation — that's not a power move, it's an appeal to a commons that benefits everyone.
L
The 'keep it neutral' position requires you to believe that standing makes no political statement while kneeling does. It doesn't work that way. For a Black woman athlete in 2025 standing before a game against the U.S. Military Academy, standing is also a loaded choice — neutrality is never actually neutral.
C
By that logic, every possible posture is political, which means the concept of a shared civic moment becomes incoherent. Some conventions have to be treated as background conditions or public life collapses into pure contestation.
L
Conventions become background conditions through consensus, not decree — and the people this debate is about never consented to the terms. Calling it a convention doesn't make the burden of maintaining it equally distributed.
Howard's authority as ideologically aligned institution
C
Howard University — founded in 1867, the capstone of HBCU culture, with every reason to be sympathetic to racial justice advocacy — did not make this call casually. When the institution most aligned with the protesters' cause judges this expression contextually inappropriate, that is principled judgment, not oppression.
L
An institution built to educate people whom American law once classified as property telling those same students they may not kneel to protest the conditions that still kill people who look like them — the irony alone is an argument. Alignment with a cause doesn't give an institution authority to police how that cause is expressed.
C
Institutions earn the right to make contextual calls precisely because they have skin in the game. Howard's administration isn't suppressing racial justice advocacy; they're making a judgment about one specific tactic in one specific setting — a game against the U.S. Military Academy.
L
The team's answer — staying in the locker room — shows they understood the context perfectly and found a response Howard couldn't script for them. That's the institution's judgment being met with the athletes' judgment, which is exactly how it should work.
53 percent opposition as strategic liability
C
A 53-percent majority says kneeling is never appropriate — that is not a rounding error. Democratic politics requires persuasion, and a tactic that alienates over half your audience before you've said a word has already lost the room it needed to enter.
L
You're right that majority opposition is a real strategic cost — I won't dismiss it cheaply. But Kaepernick wasn't running for office; he was forcing a confrontation. Smith and Carlos had majority opposition in 1968 and are now taught as moral clarity. Popularity at the moment of protest is a poor predictor of historical verdict.
C
Smith and Carlos made one gesture at one event and were immediately exiled from American athletics for years. The comparison actually supports the cost argument — and unlike kneeling, their protest didn't generate a sustained domestic backlash that required their own institutions to rewrite policy against them.
L
Their exile is your evidence it worked — the punishment confirmed the point loudly enough that history couldn't ignore it. The same logic applies here: Howard rewriting its protocol is not proof kneeling failed; it's proof kneeling still has force.
Symbolic confrontation versus coalition persuasion
C
Slower coalition-building is the harder, less dramatic work that actually moves policy. Symbolic confrontation may feel like resistance, but if it calcifies opposition rather than converts it, it is substituting the satisfaction of the gesture for the discipline of persuasion.
L
You're framing these as alternatives when they operate in sequence. The confrontation creates the crisis; the coalition work happens in the space the crisis opens. Civil rights history doesn't give us examples of polite persuasion alone moving entrenched power — it gives us disruption followed by negotiation.
C
That sequence argument assumes the disruption is legible as disruption rather than disrespect — and the polling evidence suggests kneeling was read as the latter by the majority it needed to reach. A crisis that reads as an insult doesn't open space; it closes it.
L
The majority's discomfort with the form doesn't tell you anything about whether the underlying problem is real or whether something needed to break open. Birmingham looked like chaos from the outside too.
Conservative's hardest question
The confidential settlement of Kaepernick's collusion grievance means there is no public exoneration of NFL owners — coordinated blacklisting by a cartel of powerful private actors would represent a form of speech suppression that cannot be excused simply by invoking private property rights, and I cannot fully rebut what was never publicly adjudicated.
Liberal's hardest question
The 53 percent polling opposition is genuinely difficult to dismiss on strategic grounds — if the goal of protest is to shift public opinion toward accountability for police violence, a tactic that more than half the country finds categorically inappropriate may be consolidating opposition rather than building coalitions. A liberal honest about movement strategy has to grapple with whether symbolic provocation substitutes for the slower, less dramatic work of persuasion.
Both sides agree: Both sides accept that Howard University, as a private institution, has the legal authority to set its own athletics protocols without triggering First Amendment violations, since no government actor is involved.
The real conflict: The sides disagree on a factual-interpretive question about causation: whether the career consequences suffered by kneeling NFL players constitute evidence that the protest failed strategically (conservative) or evidence that the protest correctly identified the very suppression it was protesting (liberal).
What nobody has answered: If Howard University — founded to educate people whom American law once classified as property, and with every institutional reason to be sympathetic to racial justice protest — concluded this particular tactic was incompatible with its mission, what would it mean for protest advocates if the historically Black institutions most aligned with their cause keep reaching the same judgment?
Sources
- Web search results provided: comprehensive summary of the kneeling during national anthem debate, including Howard University 2025-2026 developments, CSU volleyball 2024, NFL history, legal dimensions, polling data, and career consequence study