The Perilous Fight

National anthem protests led by Colin Kaepernick are fueling a debate about privilege, pride & patriotism.

Eight days after San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick dropped to his knee as the national anthem was played before a Sept. 1 NFL preseason game in San Diego, Preston Brown gathered the Woodrow Wilson High School football team on their practice field nearly 3,000 miles away in Camden, N.J. Like his young, mostly African-American players, Brown grew up in the ailing city outside Philadelphia, and its bleak statistics–52% of kids below the poverty line, a college-graduation rate under 9%–left a lasting mark. “Come and experience some of the things these kids have to go through,” says Brown. “We’re hurting, we’re in pain. We see injustices.”

So on Sept. 9, one day before Woodrow Wilson’s first game of the season, the coach stood on the field and announced that he planned to follow Kaepernick’s lead and kneel during the national anthem to protest racial injustice. The players were welcome, but not required, to join him. All but two did.

They were far from alone. In the weeks since Kaepernick began his protest, athletes across the country have taken a knee, locked arms or raised a fist during the anthem. The movement has spread from NFL Sundays to college-football Saturdays to the Friday-night lights of high school games and even trickled down into the peewee ranks, where a youth team in Texas decided they, too, needed to take a stand by kneeling.

By the third week of the NFL season, the protests had been echoed on volleyball courts in West Virginia, football fields in Nebraska and at a baseball stadium in Oakland, Calif., where a school band knelt during its performance of the anthem before the A’s played the Houston Astros. And on Sept. 15, the movement reached the international stage when Megan Rapinoe, an openly gay member of the U.S. women’s soccer team, kneeled for the anthem before a match against Thailand.

“I thought a lot about it, read a lot about it and just felt, How can I not kneel too?” Rapinoe tells TIME. “I know what it’s like to look at the flag and not have all your rights.”

All challenges to the social order provoke strong reactions, but these protests have been particularly divisive. “The Star-Spangled Banner” has been a ritual before American sporting events since World War II, as professional leagues have made a concerted effort to associate their brand with love of country. None has done so with more fervor than the NFL, whose product is the most-watched sport in America. For many fans, Kaepernick’s act of defiance was more than an unwelcome intrusion of politics into their leisure time–it was a rejection of the nation itself. Military veterans called the protesters unpatriotic, police unions threatened to stop providing security at NFL games, and Donald Trump suggested that Kaepernick could find another country to call home. Kaepernick has reported receiving death threats. In the fever pitch of social media, even the youngest protesters were called the N word and threatened with lynching, while far more reasoned critics supported the message but took issue with the medium.

“I would not challenge our flag,” NFL Hall of Famer and civil rights activist Jim Brown tells TIME. “I would not do anything that has to do with respecting the flag or the national anthem. I don’t think it’s appropriate.”

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