Really, NFL, this is a protest? Stop killing the players with kindness

The National Football League may be backing down from requiring players to stand for the national anthem. But I'm glad the league seems to be on the verge of pressing the point.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that the protesting players are out of line or deserve to be punished. The problem with the kneeling-and-sitting has been that they are not, let us say, advancing the ball.

The players insist that they are trying to make a point. Their defenders insist that they have the right to do so. But when the issue becomes your right to dissent rather than what you're trying to say, your protest isn't working.

Colin Kaepernick began kneeling a year ago to make a statement about police brutality. Other players have said that they are protesting racial inequality more generally. Nonviolent action isn't the same as self-expression. Protest at its best should have a clear, articulable purpose. It should also be designed to create a disruptive tension that can be resolved only by bringing the movement nearer to its goal.

By this standard, the NFL protests have not been working very well. Sportswriters have been particularly complicit in this. By lecturing angry fans or grudging owners about how the players should not be criticized for peacefully protesting, they are in effect urging that nothing about the game on the field should change.

The players should protest, and everyone should behave as though they aren't protesting, and the game should go on. In other words, the sportswriters seem to think that fans or owners or politicians who disapprove are being disruptive.

But this turns the traditional theory of protest on its head. The point of protest is disruption.

It is the players who should be trying to provoke a larger response than a few booing fans. Instead, the NFL protest has become reminiscent of the Albany Movement of 1961-62, regarded by many historians as a defeat for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Here, the history is instructive. When the SCLC came to Albany, Ga., the chief of police — a man named Laurie Pritchett — decided to avoid the traps that had ensnared his counterparts elsewhere in Dixie. Pritchett was a segregationist, but a clever one. Albany would unleash no police dogs, riot batons or fire hoses. Instead, Pritchett would meet nonviolence with nonviolence. His officers were carefully trained to make arrests with minimum force. He contacted nearby towns to borrow their jails so that local cells were never overflowing with protesters. The arrests police made were for disturbing the peace, not for violating segregation laws. When King himself was jailed, drawing the nation's attention to Albany, Pritchett arranged for King's bail to be paid promptly.

The result of all this maneuvering was a protest that generated very little news — and a segregated town that changed very little. Pritchett, went the saying at the time, had killed the movement with kindness.

Kindness was a problem. The SCLC had never understood nonviolent protest as simply the exercise of the right to dissent — the goal was to force change. To reach that goal, the demonstrations had to create sufficient tension that the authorities would ultimately react with harshness, and perhaps violence. If no reaction was forthcoming, there were no chilling photographs, no blaring headlines — and no change.

That's what happened in Albany, after Pritchett flipped the script. The protests, wrote King biographer David Levering Lewis, "pained but did not seriously cripple the merchants."

On top of that, the goals were amorphous. The tactics were inconsistent. Although there were many arrests, the protesters never managed to provoke the harsh response that they had hoped for. As a result, what had been planned as an intolerable disruption of business as usual became little more than a tolerable exercise of self-expression.

So far, the NFL has been relying upon the Pritchett playbook. No anthem protesters have been punished. Yes, lots of fans have been booing, and calls on social media for a boycott of television broadcasts have drawn some adherents, though adherents disagree over how many. But none of this has affected the game as played on the field.

With the full complicity of sportswriters and the league, the kneeling and sitting became a part of the background — not intolerable, not a disruption, but simply a handful of acts of self-expression. Under this approach, the game would go on, everybody would get paid and the protests would change nothing because nothing would be at stake.

Had President Donald Trump not weighed in, the league might have continued indefinitely to kill the protests with kindness. Instead, the owners are pondering what measures to take. I have no idea whether Trump has his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist in a way that the players and their defenders (including me) do not. Polls are all over the place. But the president's unfair and unrelenting criticism has smoked out the fact that many team owners are also unhappy. So maybe there will finally be a response of some sort after all.

Strange though it may sound, that would be a step forward.

It's not that I want the players to be punished. I don't. I may feel differently about the anthem, but I understand and support what they're trying to achieve. The trouble is, they have been unable to move the ball forward. The protest isn't any nearer its goal. We need a serious national conversation about race, but the players aren't sparking one. Instead, we're arguing about tactics.

Let's wait and see what happens. If a couple of highly paid stars eventually have to sit out a game or two, maybe we'll get the serious debate that we need.

Stephen L. Carter is professor of law at Yale University and was a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. His novels include "The Emperor of Ocean Park" and "Back Channel," and his nonfiction works include "Civility" and "Integrity."