Yet, when some of those NFL players, like Colin Kaepernick, are using their platforms and prominence to peacefully voice their concerns and highlight the discrimination that the black community is facing, they get ostracized by the rich NFL owners because supposedly such protest will affect their teams’ financial bottom line. The argument and pretext of the NFL owners, like the one by New York Giants’ John Mara is that Kaepernick’s national-anthem protest might lead to a (white) fan backlash resulting in a decrease in viewership and merchandise purchase. Although there might be some validity to his argument, most black people are suspicious of the motive, partly due to the slavery association they make between the NFL and the black players, but mainly because they believe there is a clear historical pattern of crackdown of black protests that dates back to slavery in the 18th-19th centuries to the current Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. It seems like whether it’s the violent Haitian revolution (the most violent attack ever of blacks on whites) in the Caribbean centuries ago or the recent Kaepernick peaceful protest (arguably one of the least aggressive civil rights protests ever) in the US, there is a blatant parallel approach to the responses of the whites in the position of power.
Average rate of incarceration by race and ethnicity, per 100,000 population .Bureau of Justice Statistics
Adding to the racially disproportional margin that exists in income, is the staggering discrepancy in the incarceration rate between blacks and whites in the US. Though one might argue that the disparity in imprisonment between the races could be correlated to the wage gap (the chicken and the egg paradox), but many studies like the one published by The Sentencing Project in 2016 have argued and suggested it can only be traced directly through the criminal-justice system, from racial profiling by the police to implicit racial bias judgments in the courts against blacks and latinos.