California truck owner hangs Colin Kaepernick doll by the neck
One California resident has shown their apparently ongoing disagreement with former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s decision to protest extrajudicial killings of black Americans by ...
Hanging Kaepernick in effigy off the back of their pickup truck.
Twitter user “jo” posted photos on Tuesday of a black Nissan she saw driving in San Jose, Calif. with a stuffed Kaepernick doll hanging from a chain, dangling from the underside of the vehicle.
Some comments under the post predictably tried to justify the hanging doll, saying it was just part of the Oakland Raiders-San Francisco 49ers rivalry.
Kaepernick hasn’t played for the 49ers since the 2016 regular-season finale.
***Reposting because wanted to include the license plate
Car with a lynched Colin Kaepernick Doll in San Jose, CA. And they swear Bay Area is free of hate pic.twitter.com/agIfxsHiBd— jo🥑 (@wootjoanna) April 24, 2019
Even if he still was playing for the Niners, and still taking a knee during the pre-game playing of the national anthem, this behavior is a disproportionate response, and seeks to reinforce Kaepernick’s decision to protest racial injustice.
Hangings in effigy are wrong, but for black Americans they are particularly upsetting.
After the abolition of slavery, lynching was used as a tool to try to control and scare black Americans (and some whites who helped blacks were also lynched).
Though exact numbers are not known, the Equal Justice Initiative estimates that over 4,000 black people were hanged between 1877 and 1950.
The lynchings happened often for mundane crimes or even accusations with no basis in truth; frequently, they were treated like parties, with residents and those from nearby towns coming to watch the hanging. Once they were killed, those lynched would be cut down and mutilated or burned. Despite hundreds or even thousands of witnesses, very few people, if any, were ever brought to justice for the killings, and it was standard for government officials to turn a blind eye.
On Wednesday, Texas executed John William King, a white supremacist who orchestrated the 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr. King and two other men chained Byrd to the back of a truck and dragged his body for three miles.
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