Whose National Anthem Is It? Giants Manager Gabe Kapler Says It’s His

by Valerie Morales

Gabriel Kapler isn’t the usual ballplayer turned manager. His father was a classical pianist, his mother an early childhood educator. The elder Kaplers met during the ideological anti-war protests of the sixties so political awareness is embedded in Kapler’s DNA.

Kapler as a boy had reasonable fears like a lot of young boys but with a twist. He was afraid to cross the street after he was hit by a car, a logical response to trauma. The empathy he was given as he struggled to manage his anxiety he now bestows, particularly upon those who are suddenly immersed in their own painful grief.

Like the parents of 19 schoolchildren slaughtered by a gunman and ignored by the local police. Like the two teachers whose children, nieces and nephews, and former students mourn their absence. And the husband who couldn’t bear the trauma; his heart broke and he is dead too.

After the massacre in Ulvade, Texas, San Francisco Giants manager Gabe Kapler made the decision not to stand for the national anthem for however long he feels his country has lost its soul.

It’s an ambitious stance in a sport that is social justice averse despite its Jackie Robinson roots. That Kapler is white and Jewish eases the margins somewhat for baseball which skews right of center in national politics. Baseball is no longer native ground for restorative justice or justice of any kind for that matter. Once baseball abandoned black cities for the Caribbean, they rewrote their own narrative of African American inequality. With such a small black labor force, Kapler’s protest won’t be ghettoized, nor will it be parameterized through the prism of the entitled black athlete who isn’t grateful for the millions of dollars white people have blessed him with.

Kapler can reject the national anthem and there isn’t much interpretation necessary. He doesn’t represent a vulnerable population but a privileged one. It allows Kapler to do whatever he pleases. In that vein, Kapler cannot bear one more minute of children being slaughtered.

Naturally, Kapler has detractors who disagree with how he is expressing his disgust but isn’t it interesting that when the ones not standing for the national anthem are white, the discourse is civil and polite. Everyone agrees that its okay to have multiple opinions based on lived experiences.

Any national anthem protest, regardless of the protester, centers a moral question: what is fair? Tangentially, national anthem protests levy a tax many find unconscionable, this layered conversation about rights in a free nation. There is a large group of thinkers who adhere to gratitude theology which pared down is ‘this is America, be grateful’. Pointing out that the armed forces has been seeped in generational racism and sexual assault gets words like traitor and terrorist thrown back at you.

I’ll go there. Black veterans came home from the WWII where they put their lives on the line and had to enter through back doors and couldn’t vote and discovered family members lynched and women raped and lacked the freedom to send their children to schools with above average resources. They still had to live in a Plessy v Ferguson world of separate but unequal.

The respect veterans reasoning as to why you shouldn’t protest the national anthem is tone-deaf because of who it excludes: everyone who is not white. Black veterans have always lived a separate but not equal existence of redlining, voter suppression, police brutality. The nation has been fine letting black veterans twist in the wind while expecting them to wax a bunch of poetry about freedom.

Lyrically, the national anthem is idealistic. One line references home of the free and yet when it was written slaves and their descendants were excluded as citizens and denied justice. Those who deify the song are praising flawed lyrics in a diverse nation that has not treated its dark-skinned citizens with morality and humanity and are loathe to admit they have been anything but benevolent.

Kapler is one of those humane former athletes deeply concerned about social problems. He and his former wife began a foundation to help those in abusive relationships. As for not standing for the national anthem, it is directly tied to the slaughter in Ulvade, Texas but isn’t necessarily about Ulvade, Texas only. It’s a last straw kind of thing where Kapler doesn’t want to stand for the anthem until there is change in the direction of the country, which frankly, can mean anything although Kapler may suspend his boycott on Memorial Day.

“Every time I place my hand over my heart and remove my hat, I’m participating in a self-congratulatory glorification of the only country where these mass shootings take place” Kapler wrote.

Not true. Mass shootings have happened in other countries. It’s only in this country, however, where mass shooting consequences lack ethics or justice. For instance in New Zealand, 51 parishioners at two mosques were murdered. New Zealand then banned every assault weapon used in the attack. Gun owners had six months to sell their weapons. In Norway, 77 people were murdered. Semi-automatic weapons were banned. In the Tasmania region of Australia 35 people were murdered. Semi-automatic rifles were purchased by the government and melted into slag. Furthermore, gun owners had to prove they “needed” to own a weapon to obtain a license.

In this country we aren’t bothered by mass shootings. We are more passionate over the murder of dogs than the murder of children. While Kapler’s protest is singular to him and frankly doesn’t do much more than bring attention to Kapler himself, he is willing to put his reputation on the line for something he cares about. That he is weaponizing the national anthem to further his own personal sorrow about what happened in Texas instead of advocating to vote the bozos out of office who prefer guns to children is the flaw in his argument but one he has the right to make in a democracy. Every citizen in this country owns the national anthem and has the right to applaud it or protest it any way they choose.

That Gabe Kapler isn’t being called a traitor is one more example of preferential treatment when you are white. He hasn’t been labeled ungrateful either. He isn’t being harassed and told that if he doesn’t like this country, he should leave it. That’s what happened to Colin Kapernick. That’s what happened to Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. There are two very distinct levels of punishment for the white skinned protester not holding his countrymen accountable for racism and the brown skinned protestor demanding equal treatment. (At the time of his death, Martin Luther King had a 75% disapproval rating.)

I wasn’t raised in a household where the national anthem was symbolic of anything even though my father and grandfather and now my nephew were in the armed forces. I was raised in a household that honored critical thinking and black lived experience. That you can stand for the national anthem on Sunday and then on Monday someone is calling you a black whore or a ni**er. It’s a song I believed but didn’t own and it’s a song Gabe Kapler owns and now doesn’t believe.