There is no denying that many Americans feel strongly about national anthem protests, particularly during the National Football League's 2017 season. And while the protests have made for good water cooler fodder, they have also elicited strong and unprecedented reactions, including President Donald Trump calling on NFL owners to fire protesting players.
Anthem protests date back well past Colin Kaepernick's August 2016 kneeling display. Many readers will recall the infamous photograph of 200-meter medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos standing on the medalists' podium at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City with their black-gloved raised fists and bowed heads. What Kaepernick, Smith, Carlos and other professional athletes who protest during the anthem have in common is their call to raise attention to issues related to racial injustice in American society and especially the criminal justice system.
Philadelphia Eagle Malcolm Jenkins and Seattle Seahawk Doug Baldwin (the son of a police officer) go further in their aim to draw attention to the issues they are advancing. Independent of their on-the-field actions, both of these players have been active in meetings with community groups, talked with members of Congress and engaged police officials and officers in constructive dialogue.
The freedom for American citizens to engage in free speech and peacefully protest just about anything is one of the main pillars and great features of our democratic society. But are some protests off-limits? Are some so sacred that they are beyond protest? And do all Americans across the demographic spectrum speak with one voice on the matter?
These questions motivated us to survey young adults to examine how race influenced their own perceptions regarding different styles of anthem protesting, and how race related to perceptions of punishment of anthem protesting athletes. Depending on your own stance on this issue, what we found in our new study published online in the academic journal Deviant Behavior was noteworthy.
Of 299 college students polled, we found that black respondents were more likely than non-black respondents to agree with several different forms of anthem protesting, including kneeling, sitting, and fist-raising, while at the same time being less likely to support punishment of anthem protesting players by either the NFL or NFL team owners. Specifically, 90 percent of black respondents agreed or strongly agreed with protest kneeling, but only 38 percent of non-black respondents did.
Similar differences across race were observed for the other two types of anthem protests: fist-raising and sitting. Even more striking, we observed that every single black respondent either disagreed or strongly disagreed with both the NFL punishing anthem protesters and NFL team owners punishing anthem protestors. Only about a quarter of nonblack respondents felt the same way.
Aside from these racial splits on attitudes about anthem protests and potential punishment for such protests, we also found that politically conservative respondents, those individuals who reported being more patriotic and those who agreed with President Trump's tweet denouncing anthem protesters were more likely to disagree with anthem protests while being more supportive of punishment for said protests from either the NFL or team owners.
An original version of this opinion piece was published on November 13, 2017 in the Dallas Morning News.
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Alex R. Piquero is Ashbel Smith Professor of Criminology and Associate Dean for Graduate Programs in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences at The University of Texas at Dallas. Email: apiquero@utdallas.edu; Twitter: @DrAlexPiquero.
Nicole Leeper Piquero is Robert Holmes Professor of Criminology and Associate Provost at The University of Texas at Dallas and current President of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.
Jonathan Intravia is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Ball State University.