Over the past few years there have been heightened amounts
of tension fermenting here in the United States regarding African-American
people, law enforcement, the judiciary system, racial profiling, and racial
bias in general. The realization that there was a problem with racial profiling
began after the Trayvon Martin incident back in 2012 when a neighborhood watch
member shot and killed the 17-year-old simply because he seemed suspicious and
was acquitted of all charges. This one incident was an eye-opener but there
have been several more incidents where the United States' laws and legal
systems have been less than righteous towards African-Americans and the deaths
of unarmed African American men have led to no indictments for their killers.
Just to name a few cases: Micheal Brown in Ferguson, Dontre Hamilton in
Milwaukee, Eric Garner in Staten Island, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Walter Scott
in South Carolina, and most recently Alton Sterling in New Orleans and Philando
Castile in Minnesota. This was just a little background knowledge to inform you
on the breaking Twitter news updates.
Due to the unfortunate, unrighteous
treatment of African American people here in the United Stateds 49'ers
quarterback Colin Kaepernick has elected not to stand during the national
anthem before games now. The entire country has been in an uproar choosing
sides and asserting their opinions on what is just and what is unjust. Colin
Kaepernick's reasoning for not standing during the national anthem is "I
am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses
black people and people of color,”, “To me, this is bigger than football and it
would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the
street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder." The
Twitter story I have been following is on South Park’s Kaepernick spoof. When I
was choosing what story I wanted to follow for this brief I searched through
the list of trending topics and saw Southpark, I figured it was something about
the show ending but when I logged on I saw that they had started airing their 20th
season Wednesday night on Comedy Central.
Apparently, Southpark had taken on
the Kaepernick controversy and spoofed it for their first episode of season 20.
I followed the thread for an entire night and was very entertained by the
comments. This was a great way to lighten up the mood on such a controversial topic and for a little while Americans of all races were able to unite and commend
Southpark on being “satirical geniuses”.
Below are screengrabs of some of the tweets from the topic page.
Works Cited
