Colin Kaepernick Empowers Youth To Know Their Rights: The Police Are Still Killing Us Today

Colin Kaepernick

Colin Kaepernick Empowers Youth To Know Their Rights: The Police Are Still Killing Us Today

Colin Kaepernick’s protests are still going strong. He might not be kneeling during the NFL national anthems to protest police brutality, but he explained why protesting is still necessary.

Kaepernick, who has been a leader in protesting against police brutality, says that the Black Panther Ten-Point Platform and Program is still very much relevant, despite being started back on Oct. 5, 1966.

The program featured 10 demands and 10 beliefs of the group. One of those demands in the draft written by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, included,

“an immediate end to police brutality and the murder of Black people.”

Kaepernick provided examples of people who were killed by police within recent years, showing that the program’s demands still have not been met, to say the least.

“That was over 50 years ago. And what has changed? Oscar Grant, Rekia Boyd, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice. What has changed? Laquan McDonald, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray. The Panthers’ demands are still alive today because the police are still killing us today.”

Kaepernick’s protest actually began months before he first kneeled during the national anthem of an NFL game in 2016. His intent was to protest police brutality in the nation. But 10 months before that, he and his longtime girlfriend Nessa Diab, developed the Know Your Rights Camp (KYRC) for youth. It aims to educate Black teens on health, self-empowerment, and finance, as well as how to know their rights when they encounter a police officer.

Colin Kaepernick, Nessa Diab

Kaepernick said,

“This discussion happened shortly after the execution of Mario Woods.”

Woods was tragically killed in December 2015 by the five San Francisco police officers. He was 26.

Diab added that this is what sparked Kaepernick’s action against police brutality in the Black community.

“If Colin wasn’t reviewing a playbook he was reading a history book.”

Some of those books included The Autobiography of Malcolm X; Women, Race, & Class by Angela Davis and Revolutionary Suicide, Newton’s autobiography.

He then started and funded the camp in October 2016. It traveled to areas like New Orleans, Miami, Amsterdam, Harlem, and Baltimore, which had more than 450 attendees alone.

Kaepernick said,

“This movement needs all types of people. From athletes to healers to poets and artists to scholars and lawyers, we need everyone to contribute to the struggle. The struggle is affecting all of us. Period. And the camp’s 10 rights are timeless because they are human rights.”

Colin Kaepernick

Those rights are the right to be free, healthy, brilliant, safe, loved, courageous, alive, trusted, and educated, as well as the right to know your rights.

Attendees are also provided with a DNA Kit that Kaepernick said,

“is a powerful reminder to the youth that the beginning of their history predates the United States and is not shackled to the institution of slavery. The beginning of their history is based in freely thriving African civilizations.”

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