The Drew Brees Principle
I woke up Thursday morning incensed. Like, I was enraged and it took me all morning to realize what was causing me all of this rage. I mean yeah, my people are fighting for our lives right now and yeah I still have to work and also there’s a global pandemic but Thursday felt...different. Of course, whenever the police kill black people for existing, there are people on the internet that question my humanity as a joke, but Thursday, it was even more than usual.
You see, on Wednesday, the 3rd, Drew Brees did an interview with Yahoo Finance where he was asked about his take on the protesting taking place after the murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin. What was Drew’s response? Instead of talking about black people and our plight, Drew pivoted and immediately began to talk about how he could never disrespect the flag (???) and went on an entire tirade about his grandfathers fighting for this country. At first, I took this at face value, it’s another NFL quarterback being oblivious about race who has been oblivious before when he criticized Colin Kaepernick’s peaceful protest. So at the very least, I wasn’t surprised at Drew’s comments, but for some reason this time they really stuck with me. For the rest of Wednesday, I had a headache that I called Drew Brees, because it was honestly bothering me for some reason.
Looking at Drew’s past and current teammates’ reactions are what woke me up the next morning. I went back through and watched some videos and I’m seeing them say that he knows better and that he’s picking a side, I immediately realized why it bothered me. Drew Brees was the quarterback for the Saints right after Hurricane Katrina. He’d seen how slow the government moved to help black people first hand.
He knows exactly why Kaepernick was protesting, and he knows why we are protesting now. So why was it so easy for me to forget that and give him the benefit of the doubt that he just didn’t know any better?
And that’s when I realized it, it’s because the U.S. Education system barely teaches anything about the Civil Rights movement in schools, and that gives white people a plausible deniability when it comes to anything race related.
I don’t know about y’all, but when I was in the 4th grade in 2004, my history books were all formatted the same. We had individual chapters on the American Revolution, Civil War, World War I, World War 2 and then we’d have this last chapter named something on the lines of “The World Today” which also always happened to be the smallest chapter in the book. This small chapter sought to cover the Vietnam & Korean Wars (Cold War), the Civil Rights movement and 9/11. Each one of these topics got maybe a page and a half, and the Civil Rights section came complete with that one picture of Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington (yeah, you know the one), and a small blurb mentioning his peaceful protests. As I got older, the chapters on the Cold War got longer and longer but the section about the Civil Rights movement either stayed the same, or got smaller and smaller.
If you’re white, you can claim that you don’t know anything about race relations because you don’t have to live it outside of that pitiful curriculum. So along with white people having a general leg up that is poorly hidden to anyone looking, but also on top of that you have a plausible deniability to act like you don’t even know about it. I call this the Drew Brees Principle.
This is what sent me into a fury on Thursday morning, and as soon as I came to the realization, his first cookie cutter, pr fueled, weak ass apology surfaced. If the stock image on google wasn’t insulting enough, Drew makes what anyone else would probably call a mistake
“ I acknowledge that we as Americans, including myself, have not done enough to fight for that equality or to truly understand the struggles and plight of the black community.”
Everything that he says here seems pretty great, but it honestly bothers me the separation he makes between Americans and the black community, as if the two aren’t the same in this instance. It sounds like the intentional language he’d used before (especially since he took the time to capitalize “Americans” in the post).
Since this first apology, each one from Drew has progressively gotten better, til finally he admitted in a reply to 45 about whether he should be apologizing or not, he admits that the issue was never about the American flag and he knew it. “We did this back in 2017,” referring back to when Colin Kaepernick was blackballed out of the NFL.
And to the people who think it’s cute to try to throw Martin Luther King Jr. back at black people, just stop it. He was treated horribly by white people while he was alive and ultimately murdered while advocating for peace. After his death, the U.S. saw riots like it’s never seen before for seven straight days. On the 8th day, The Civil Rights Act of 1968 was passed.
You know, I’m honestly not certain of what I want to come next. Like yeah, of course police reform and defunding. But I’m not certain of what the world is going to look like on the other side of what we’re going through.
I’m excited to see it either way.
-E.
(Stay home, vote in your primaries).
F*ck Drew Brees.