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Since opting out of his contract, former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has remained unsigned. — AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee, File
While NFL owners have made Colin Kaepernick sweat it out, there still exists a decent possibility that the quarterback, believed by many to be blackballed by the league for his refusal last year to stand for the playing of the national anthem and for speaking out about the shooting of unarmed African Americans by police, will eventually wind up on an NFL roster in 2017.
The African-American quarterback who four short years ago was good enough to lead San Francisco to a Super Bowl appearance has been dangling in the wind since opting out of his 49ers contract.
While Kaepernick has conceded that he will honor the anthem in the future, he has neither compromised nor backed down from his position. This was evident earlier this month when he traveled to Ghana for July 4 and questioned, legitimately so, how African Americans could celebrate independence when Blacks in 1776 clearly had none.
It’s clear that he is resolute and unwavering. But the bigger question is how will the larger Black community, which loves to respond emotionally to situations like this when they arise but often is unwilling to make the requisite sacrifice to bring about real change, respond to the bold lead he has taken? Will it act as if it is all good and that something has been accomplished to benefit us all if he gets signed? If so, it will be an opportunity missed.

There have been cries to boycott the NFL since the Kaepernick case surfaced and, quite frankly, the NFL has earned it.

This season the league is welcoming back boorish country singer Hank Williams Jr. to sing the “Monday Night Football” theme song. Williams’ arrhythmic honky-tonk tune “All My Rowdy Friends” was the “Monday Night Football” theme song for 22 years before ABC ended that relationship in 2011 after Williams compared then-House Speaker John Boehner playing golf with former President Barack Obama to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu golfing with Adolph Hitler.
What’s more offensive is that this is the same guy who in 1988 wrote and recorded a song titled “If The South Woulda’ Won.” This banjo-strummer garbage included lyrics like this: “If the South woulda’ won we’d a had it made, might even be better off!”
Imagine, if you will, how the Jewish community would respond to the writer of a song morbidly fantasizing about a Nazi victory in World War II being invited back to sing the opening song for a Pop Warner football game, to say nothing of “Monday Night Football” and its millions of viewers. The NFL, of course, would never consider this. However, the league knows that Black folks won’t go the extra mile to hurt them in their pockets over this Williams Jr. foolishness.
The latest findings about (CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy), the degenerative disease found in people who suffer repeated blows to the head, and the NFL’s deliberate approach to keeping this in the closet, also speaks to the NFL’s lack of morality. Discovered in 2005 by Nigerian-American physician Bennet Omalu, whose findings were published in the journal Neurosurgery in 2005, any doubts surrounding the existence of this condition were put to bed last week when a study revealed that CTE was found in the brains of 110 of 111 examined former NFL players.

While there are huge white stars in the NFL such as New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and Houston Texans defensive end J.J. Watt, the fact remains that 70 percent of the players in the NFL are African American. The sad news, I suspect, is that while other communities begin the steady withdraw from youth football — there are indications that the numbers are already dwindling — African Americans will almost certainly  continue to push our children into football, foolishly over-indexing in the far-fetched dream that this is a realistic career choice.

The 2015 movie “Concussion,” starring Will Smith, chronicled the efforts by the league to intimidate and silence Omalu from publicizing the terrible findings of his research. Whether the NFL would have done this if its primary talent pool were mostly white is unknown. But all we have to work with are the actual numbers, not a hypothesis. So while it’s true that the players are extraordinarily well compensated, there is a sense that with 31 out of the 32 league owners being white, they are still engaging in a level of exploitation.
That should make it easier to turn away this fall.

John N. Mitchell has worked as a journalist for more than a quarter century. He can be reached atjmitchell@phillytrib.com and Tweet at @freejohnmitchel.