Kaepernick's Latest Project Wants Policeless, Prisonless "Utopia"

Colin Kaepernick has a bright run in the NFL for about 15 minutes. Then other teams figured him out and his stats dropped. They weren’t awful, but his team wasn’t winning, so he got benched. Then he started showing his ass and became a huge distraction and no team in the league actually wanted him.

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His actions since then indicate that he figures he benefits more from being out of the league than actually playing football.

Now, though, the quarterback turned activist has a new project with a vision for the future.

Former professional NFL quarterback turned social justice activist Colin Kaepernick has launched a new project aimed at building a utopian police-less and prison-less future.

In “Abolition for the People,” Kaepernick teamed up with Medium publication, LEVEL, to publish “30 stories from organizers, political prisoners, scholars, and advocates” over the next month with the goal of furthering the pursuit of “abolition” for minority individuals.

Reforms such as “use-of-force policies, body cameras, more training, and police accountability” simply won’t cut it, Kaepernick argues in an essay introducing the project. In fact, he says, reforming the white supremacist institutions of police and prisons ultimately only serves to commend them.

Instead, project creators say: “The only answer is abolition, a full dismantling of the carceral state and the institutions that support it.”

After all, Kaepernick writes, “The central intent of policing is to surveil, terrorize, capture, and kill marginalized populations, specifically Black folks.”

As for prisons, they only exist to “isolate, regulate, and surveil” black and brown people.

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I don’t know, that last bit sounds kind of racist. I mean, I’ll grant that African-Americans are disproportionally represented in prisons in comparison to their representation in the general population of the country, but there are a lot of white people locked up too. To say that prisons and policing exist solely to hurt black and brown people makes no sense in light of the fact that around 30 percent of the prison population is white.

Frankly, though, I don’t think Kaepernick really wants what he says he wants.

A world without police would be a world where the people Kaepernick says have issued him death threats would be free to act without fear of punishment. Further, there would be no law enforcement available to help protect the former quarterback from those who supposedly want him dead.

Honestly, I don’t think the man has done the math on this one.

Oh, I’m quite sure that he figures he’s immune to all of it. After all, he’s got the money to hire private security. But what about the rest of the black community?

After all, if the nation is so populated with racists, who is going to protect the average black man or woman from these white nationalists that pop up everywhere? Most folks of any ethnicity can’t afford private security and many in the black community can’t even afford a handgun. What about them? Who is going to protect them?

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Yeah, yeah, I know. Kaepernick thinks they have more to fear from the police than anyone else, though if that were true, why are there any left alive more than a century and a half after emancipation?

What Kaepernick’s project, if successful, would actually bring about is a dystopian nightmare where it would really become kill or be killed just to potentially make a grocery run. I hate to break it to him, but if he thinks that world would work out better for black Americans, he’d be very wrong. That world wouldn’t be good for anyone.

I’d make cracks about has been quarterbacks, but there are too many I actually like that fall into that category, so I won’t taint them with association with Kaepernick.

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