Television companies and more including buckeye broadband. Buckeye broadband along with these Television Companies reports cspan2 as a public service. Tonight i am really thrilled to welcome dave zirin the author of the new book the kaepernick effect taking a knee, changing the world and his book conversation partner akhalil greene, a jen z historian in essence with a halfmillion social media followers. They have much to share and im here to introduce them but i want to say a word about the book. So many of us remember the quiet and at the same time exclusive action colin i kaepernick took five years ago. Weve witnessed the Mass Movement thats taken shape since then and thought about the courage that standing up as an athlete takes and the states at play. This book reflects on all of isthat, its about the politics of sport and impact of sports on politics and its about the players across generations and levels who aspire by using this platform of their field or Court Despite to fight Police Brutality and injustice. The program is part of a t series of discussions connected to the center for brooklyns history initiate, brooklyn resist. Which is deeply into the history of black led protests. You can learn more about brooklyn resist and all ofits many facets by going to the link in the chat. I suspect listening to dave and khalil will prompt manyof you to want to explore facebook further. So we will also put a link in the chat to the website as a local brooklyn bookstore, the Community Bookstore so you can click learn more about the kaepernick effect. A few final notes, and then i happily will have it off. As an author of a History Program you have the optionto engage close captioning tonight. You can simply like that at the bottom of your screen and finally, youre all invited to share your questions. For dave, khalil and typethem through the program into the q a box also at the bottom of your screen. Now let me briefly introduce dave and khalil and invite them, they have stepped up from behind that digital curtainand handed off to them. Briefly because i could go on but im not , dave is the Sports Editor of the nation, a columnist for the progressive and the host of the edge of sports podcast. His many books include a peoples history of sports in the United States states, game over , bad sports and as you know the kaepernick effect most recently dave has been a regular guest on msnbc, cnn and espn and was also named one of the readers. He was elected the first black student body president and enyells 318 year history and is currently finishing his buddies of social movements in history. He has approximately half 1 million followers across his ticktock, instagram and linkedin platforms where he comments about history and our society. He has worked for the espn sports and pop culture website the undefeated and authored up as about Racial Equity in the new york times, Washington Post among others so welcome to you fellas, thank you so much for being here and im going to handed over to you. Thank you so much for that introduction, dave, how are you . Im great. I have such warm feelings for brooklyn, for society, for eli so this is everything for me and im grateful to youfor taking the time to do this. Same shop to brooklyn, im from maryland but my mom is from bedford size so its a recurring where shes from. I think if we want to get mastarted we can jump into the questions if that sounds good to you. It does. Im inmaryland now, where did you grow up . Memory county. Thats where im from. I was born in maryland. Im sitting here in takoma park maryland. There you go. Thats amazing. Not to like take away from new york, you know we love new york. But shout out to maryland two. How about we jump into its, i think the first question on the audience is mine and i guess my before i started th reading the book so it centered early on but i love to hear in your ownwords what is the kaepernick that . It is a Chain Reaction that took place after Colin Kaepernick sat during the anthem and took a knee in august and september 2016 but i think the best way to describe the effect is to Say Something about how i even came up with this idea that i wanted to spend a big chunk of my life working onthis book and talking to people and interviewing them and whatnot. It started when i was talking to 1968 olympia john carlos who so famously raised his fist on the metal stand in mexico city and john a couple of years ago looked at me and just said dave, after i raised my fist in mexico city a ton of young people started doing it at meets. And i was like what, i was always considered myself a bit of an amateur historian so i said where are these people, who are they, how did it affect their lives, how did it affecttheir coaches. I was curious to know the effect of john carlos fist and i realized that was going to be an Impossible Task so i started to then think about all the oneoff stories that i read and some of which ive written about young people who took any after Colin Kaepernick so there would be a story about young one young woman kicked off the team, one young man who was disciplined by his coach, a team in detroit that had garbage thrown at them. These stories that i had written or that ive read. I started to think this is significant, its im right about the intersection of sports and politics and hundreds if not thousands of Young Athletes in this country any after Colin Kaepernick we need to tell that story so i started the process of at the start of the pandemic of calling a lot of folks who work roughly around your age and this was one of the pluses of being at the start of the pandemic is i know you know this, sometimes its tough to get photon the phone and actually have a conversation with them. They want to text, they want to snap jack, its if people still snap jack, i dont know what because of the pandemic people were at home, they were a little bit bored and were happy to talk to me. So i started having these n long conversations with young people who taken a knee, learning how it affected their lives and thats where my head was. Just im going to see this history from being forgotten but then summer of 2020happens, the Police Murder of george floyd. You have the largest protest in the history of the United States in the summer of 2020 and i went back and called the dozens of people ive interviewed up to that point and it was amazing to me that all of them were either in the streets or organizing hepeople to get in the streets and that really made me realize that while many roads may have led up to the summer of 2020, one of them runs straight through the athletic fields of the United States and that story is worth telling i. Thats so powerful and i think reading this book you get a sense of that because it is a collection of stories. And of the , like stories of the impact that Colin Kaepernick had on these individuals and the impact they had on their own communities. Whats very all sorts of reactions i think you see through the utbook and one question i have the kind of followup is in the book, it pretty much separates into three main parts looking at high school protests, College Protests and professional protests that followed Colin Kaepernick and why did you choose to segment it in that regard generationally as opposed to maybe the south were bad reactions to good reactions, what was that process like . Thats a great process and it was a lot of thought went into my going to organize all of these worries that im getting in sort of catchall is because once word got out i was doing this book people started reaching out to me saying my cousin took a knee , can you talk to them and so there was all this wilike swirling around how should i properly organize this and izone of the things i saw early on like himy first thought was exactly what you said, should i do this by region, should i go blue state red state, rural urban and then i realizedlike so many of the stories , it actually transcended that. Or you could say maybe transcended isnt the right word but the connective tissue between the stories to me was so sstrong that it belied whether you are in a red state or blue state or st anything like that and frankly i think some of those differentiations are Mainstream Media nonsense because everyone knows each of these red states blue states can be diverse. After george floyd was murder there were protests in all 50 states in the United States and similarly like some of the reactions in cities thought of as liberal and whatnot like seattle could be more vicious toward people taking a knee and say someone doing it in a Rural Community in georgia. Depended on so many factors in terms of the backlash young people wouldreceive. I went to high school, college and pro because i started thinking there are very distinct and specific challenges at High School Student would face, a College Athlete on a scholarship would face and then a professional athlete. Like read different very distinct realms because in high school we all know itwhat it is, we remember what it was like to be in high school, youre setting up and making your self or r. Theres a lot of courage that goes along with the one with rare exceptions want to stand out in high school or stand against the grain and i wanted to honor that specific kind of courage eofor people who have been born after 9 11 and not really have known anything in this country other than a permanent kind of state of war and of course the pandemic and environmental catastrophe. I have a 17yearold daughter so people who been raised under this pacific set of circumstances i want to honor that. At the collegiate level youre dealing with scholarships, a coach who could cut you off the team. Scholarships in a lot of skills are renewed on an annual basis. A lot of pressure can be applied to your financial aid, to alternative factors relative to playing sports so i had to honor that kind of very specific set of challenges and then at ther professional level where talking paychecks. Were talking collusion against you if you odare speak out. And another is a specific set of challenges, challenges that it Colin Kaepernick in the afface after he took his knee. So i wanted to specifically honor andextrapolate off those very different sets of generational circumstances. Im that makes a lot of sense and even as im reading the book there are other ways of categorizing and thinking about separating the things you readthroughout the High School College and pro categorization really well. One of those others i think was standing out as i read was the fact that not everyone who protested was playing the same sport. Colin kaepernick is a football rplayer and a lot of those examples off the bat are Football Players that love to hand in other black males but as you go through the book you see black women in college at ivy leagues who are cheerleaders also taking the stand for Colin Kaepernick and people doing different forms of resistance whether its a knee or sitting down or putting a fist up. Im curious usabout the sports and gender aspect. What are some of the trends you saw dependent on whether or not someone was a Football Player or a cheerleader or the questions will get to later, wnba. Another great question khalil and folks should know i dont know what these questions are so im responding off the top of the dome to a serious set of inquiries so let me try to take that on in terms of the different sports and whatnot. Im using the word on her a lot because i have so much respect for the people i interviewed and i feel like a sense of real connection with them atthis point. After having called them, we e call them during the protests of 2020. Theres a set of really just a tightness there that ive enriched my life tremendously. Its made me far more optimistic than i was when i started this book about the , just talking to these folks and one of the things i wanted to do was honor the breath of the experience that exists because i made a book about Football Players, that would be in effect a historical line because i would be saying heres the effect, it involves young men and involves olfootball. And its not just a football story, its spread to so many different sports. I had to make a point to honor the contribution of women because women often particularly black women get written out of the history books and this is a case where like the black lives Matter Movement in many cases black women are the backbone of this kaepernick effect, of pushing it forward and we can talk about the wnba proceeding them taking that need so just to get another layer to the role that women have playedin the struggle. And one of the things that i found though to get to your question is i found that there are stereotypes are very helpful is what i found. People might think well, i that high school womens Softball Team would be more supportive than an mens Football Team cause there would be more of a culture of unity in womens sports and mens sports. I found doing this book that when were talking about racial inequity aand violence and people dont want to hear that that figurative knives come out. If people dont want to hear what you have to say in this country the response canbe very brutal. One of the Common Threads in the book is really this specter of violence as a response to what is a nonviolent act of civil disobedience. And to me thats a stunning window into this country and larger. It doesnt matter if youre a softball player in one part of the country or a youth Football Player in beaumont texas. If you are challenging the status quo, if youre your challenging the way White Supremacy works in this country then people arent going to just agree to disagree or people are going to say youre making a good point,maybe i should listen to you and hear you out. In some cases people say that and there are stories of people who are changed through these protests but in other cases the rresponse is not only do i notwant to hear what you have to say but im going to respond violently to that. And i feel like what all these Young Athletes went through from 2016 to 2020 was kind of like the canary in the coal mine. The warning of everything were seeing right now with regards to socalled Critical Race Theory and the idea of teaching about Structural Racism in schools. We got such a sneak preview around these kneeling protests of how a certain segment of this population will respond if you dare raise up theseflags against Structural Racism. I think it reminds me of im a student as you know, im a history major studying the history of social change. One of the most basic stories and profound and wellknown stories about nonviolent protest and a lot of what youll find is that they use nonviolence knowing specifically that it would cause a violent reaction from the white southerners and that violent attack on nonviolent people and it was spectacle enough to get other people on their side. In a lot of ways its almost like making yourself a martyr in a small way and a lot of these cases in their own community. To make a larger statement es about the fact that all im doing is kneeling or raising a fist yet its causing this reaction so what else you need to look at and as easy overtime the nonviolent protest especially after Something Like your floyd where a lot of communities its the straw that broke the camels back and the canary song is a warning after so many years. If it still doesnt work, you see what we have like what we had last summer with the racial uprising. I think its a very interesting opinion, making a cycle of nonviolence to increasing frustration and communities of color against whats happening. Im curious. Before you ask that question you sense of interestingstuff. Ive got three bullet points in my brain based on what you said but the first is i came back from minneapolis today and you go to George Floyd Square and one of the murals that there is this huge mural of Colin Kaepernick taking a knee its chilling and very moving because implicit in presenting that over where George Floyds body lay is this idea of okay, we tried expressing this in the most peaceful possible terms that theres a problem with the lease violence in this country and racism and that was ignored or it was responded to with hostility and violence. You have to listen to people wawhen theyre stepping forward with their concerns in our society or youre going to read the whirlwind at some point. You also mentioned the Civil Rights Movement. Two quick things about that, two quick parallels to this kaepernick effect weve seen over the past few years. Anybody whos watched eyes on the prize knows the part about all the Civil Rights Act of this who speak about the fact that emmitt till in mississippi was something that changed their lives and it was like a scar that could not be erased. It informed that they needed to be part of the struggle Going Forward no matter what. I found in talking to these young people that