UPDATE – 12:53 pm MST: Dolphins owner Stephen Ross now says he won’t make players stand for the anthem.

Ross’ comments Tuesday in a statement released by the Dolphins came after the New York Daily News reported that he said all of the team’s players will stand for the anthem in 2018. Ross was in New York on Monday to be honored by the Jackie Robinson Foundation and receive its ROBIE Lifetime Achievement Award.

”I have no intention of forcing our players to stand during the anthem, and I regret that my comments have been misconstrued,” Ross said in his statement.

If you’re confused, join the club. In the audio, available on the Daily News site, Ross clearly says “all our players will be standing.”

It’s hard to know what to make of it all. It’s odd that “I won’t make players stand” would get “misconstrued” to “I will make players stand,” especially since it’s on tape. The way he shapes that sentence, though – he doesn’t regret that he said what he said. He regrets that what he said was misconstrued. By other people. To mean, well, what he said.

Regardless, the irony is thick enough to choke a moose. On a couple of accounts. First, as noted above, he was being presented an award by the Jackie Robinson Foundation. And second, a rich white guy being afforded the chance to “clarify” what he meant, in a story about how institutional racism deprives black people of the right to mean what they mean … you can’t make this stuff up.

Read on.

I don’t want to deprive people of their right to express themselves fairly, so hopefully we’ll have resolution at some point. If Ross is innocent, I’ll happily retract the vitriol I aim at him below.

_____

Because massa said so, that’s why.

Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross says all players on his team will stand for the national anthem starting next season.

“All of our players will be standing,” Ross told the New York Daily News on Monday.

…

“Initially, I totally supported the players in what they were doing,” Ross said. “It’s America, and people should be able to really speak about their choices.”

But Ross told the newspaper he came to the standing decision because he felt the message being sent by kneeling players was unpatriotic and anti-military, an interpretation that was taken by President Donald Trump.

Fuck Colin Kaepernick and all the rest of them uppity negroes. The protests were about DISRESPECTING THE MILITARY BECAUSE TRUMP SAID SO.

Here’s your free speech and expression in America, bitches: If you do something, you aren’t the one who gets to decide why you did it and what it means. It doesn’t matter what the darkies think they mean, what matters is how massa “interprets” it.

BLACK PERSON: I think Plilando Castille’s killing was a crime.
WHITE RULING CLASS: How dare you disrespect the military!

It’s sort of unreconstructed Colonialism and runaway Postmodernism all at once, init? (Sorry, the book learnin’ got the best of me for a second there…)

[deep breath]

This moment of rampaging privilege is why everything you hear about institutional racism is not only true, but it’s worse than you realize. Here’s why.

When a white cop murders a black kid in cold blood and never so much as faces charges, that’s racism.

When Congress actively targets programs that primarily benefit black citizens, that’s racism.

When state legislatures gerrymander districts and enact other measures aimed at keeping blacks from voting, that’s racism.

And on and on.

But when a black person says, explicitly, “I’m protesting X,” and that’s dismissed roundly by white elites decreeing “no, you’re protesting Y,” that is the foundational core of racism. It strips those citizens of their right to intend, to mean. They no longer own their words. They are not competent to understand the knowledge in their own minds.

It’s the archetypal pinnacle of patronization. When you deprive someone of the right to mean what they say they mean, no freedom of any sort is possible.

The dehumanization is compounded, of course, when we take the extra step of wagging our fingers at protests that are “inappropriate.” Because, as history has demonstrated, societies are especially responsive when minorities protest the “right” way.

Now, you may be saying “wait – I served in the military” or “members of my family died fighting for our freedom,” etc. This would be a fine argument if in fact the protest had anything at all to do with the military.

See above.

How would you feel if you hated, say, Adolf Hitler, and I was on TV telling everybody how much you loved him. Next thing you know, the whole world is in your face for being a Nazi sympathizer, even though nothing of the sort is vaguely true.

That’s what this is.

A final note to whites (of the non-wealthy elite variety) who also disapprove of NFL player protests. If you’re like 100% of the white folks I’ve talked to about this, your reasons are note-for-note identical to the talking points being passed around by the Trumps and Rosses of the world. You may say, verbatim, that you “think it’s wrong to disrespect the flag” or “it’s wrong to disrespect the service of our military and veterans.”

In doing so, you have accepted a fabricated, patently deceptive PR propaganda ploy crafted by people who do not want you thinking too hard about why the police unlawfully shoot blacks and get away with it, and worse, what that might mean down the road when … other segments of society get out of hand.

In other words, you’re being played. Perhaps for a reason.

In the US we had plantations. A long time before that, though, Europe had the Feudal system, which you may have heard about in school. Those serfs weren’t black, though. They were more or less like you. In fact, some of them may have been your ancestors.

Their massas were feudal lords – the medieval equivalent of, say, a hyper-rich NFL owner.

This whole protest thing looks like it’s about race right now, and it certainly is. But you need to understand, and I mean today, that ultimately it’s not about black vs white. It’s about rich elite vs everybody else.

And when it comes to “disrespecting the anthem” or “disrespecting the flag” or “disrespecting the military,” your freedoms only count insomuch as they support the massas.