Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Life

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s “Dumb” Remark About NFL Players’ Protest

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has, alas, said something disappointing. She told Yahoo’s Katie Couric that she finds football player Colin Kaepernick and others’ refusal to stand for the national anthem was “really dumb.” Ginsburg added that she believes the protest should be legal, but the criticism of what is, after all, a peaceful anti-racist protest nevertheless risked the justice’s status as, as Barry Petchesky aptly put it, a “woke Twitter folk hero.”

In the same Deadspin post, Petchesky called the kerfuffle “a great reminder that performative online love of any powerful person will ultimately reflect poorly upon you,” which may be right. But I think the social-media-age takeaway is more that nobody gets everything right, and that holding anyone (Ginsburg, Ginsburg’s admirers) to a purity standard gets us nowhere. That’s one takeaway. The other, if we may shift the conversation away from Ginsburg’s thought-purity for a moment, is that American anti-racism remains a work in progress. Even allies who don’t merely get it but do tremendous good are products of the broader culture, one that isn’t ever entirely convinced that racism is a thing, or is a problem.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy edits the Sisterhood. Her book, The Perils of “Privilege”, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2017.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.