Quote of the Day

Gentlemen's Quarterly is not typically the defining mechanism of a man's work. At least it shouldn't be, not by my narrow concept of what is still a predominantly style-based magazine.

But when it named Colin Kaepernick its Citizen Of The Year, as told in the words of other admiring celebrity mavens, it recalibrated a lot of things we have taken for granted.

Like conscience. He had one. He exercised it at considerable personal cost and became a national touchstone on the real beginning of the new century. He put a cleaver to our national pretense of "one country" and made it plain that football isn't meant to be the be-all and end-all of a football player's life. A man must have a code, after all, and human decency for all under an umbrella of America-as-it-ought-to-be is his.

But his code was revealed in rejecting football (or actually, having it reject him), and while the national tide has swirled around him, he also helped reveal the slowly but discernibly rotting underpinnings of the National Football League which is responding to all this external struggle by eating itself. The NFL's power and resources are vast, so the cannibalism will take a decade and likely more, but it is happening right where everyone can see.

. . . Kaepernick decided one man's voice wasn't too small, and one man's platform wasn't too rickety.

And he wasn't even going after football. He was going after social inequity and cruelties, the way a good citizen should.

– Ray Ratto
Excerpted from "In Naming Kaepernick 'Citizen of the Year,'
GQ Recalibrates What We Have Taken for Granted
Yahoo! Sports
November 13, 2017

Related Off-site Links:
Colin Kaepernick Will Not Be Silenced – The Editors of GQ (November 13, 2017).
Colin Kaepernick Is Named Citizen of the Year by GQ Magazine – Chuck Schilken (Los Angeles Times, November 13, 2017).
GQ Honor a Fitting Tribute for Colin Kaepernick – Rochelle Riley (Detroit Free Press, November 13, 2017).
Colin Kaepernick Requested to Only Wear Black Designers for His GQ Cover Shoot – Crystal Tate (Essence, November 15, 2017).
People Are Already Boycotting GQ Over Colin Kaepernick Being Named "Citizen of the Year" – Justin L. Mack (IndyStar, November 13, 2017).
Colin – The Leveret (June 22, 2017).

UPDATE: Colin Kaepernick Named Face of Nike's 30th Anniversary of 'Just Do It' Campaign – Tim Daniels (Bleacher Report, September 3, 2018).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Progressive Perspectives on Colin Kaepernick and the "Take a Knee" Movement
• Welcome to America . . .

Images: Martin Schoeller.