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 move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO