20 DEAR KAEP,
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Needed you aware of my immense gratitude for your sacrifices, for what you’ve done for our collective conscious-ness, for how you’ve transformed my thinking and train with a horde of Jets fans (poor souls) returning from MetLife Stadium. Dozens and dozens decked in Jets jerseys and hats, no few recapping game highlights:
That dude’s an animal, some said, their breath a brewery.
Such and such is a beast, they said.
Did you see that hit? That guy’s a savage!
This was around the time the King of White Audacity threatened, “You shouldn’t be playing,” that “maybe you shouldn’t be in the country.” Which means you’d already gone from sitting to kneeling, were—unbeknownst to you, I suspect—becoming the target of perhaps the most infamous blackballing in sports history, were damn near 40-yard-dashing down a path that would transform you from a superstar Super Bowl–starting quarterback into a civil rights icon, which is also to say: a symbol.
The language used that day on the train was nothing I hadn’t heard before, but in that moment it was a caustic that scraped the inside of my ears and ramped my pulse. Because my impressionable son was with me. Because I’d been writing about
