They are kneeling because of Colin Kaepernick's kneeling protest during the National Anthem before football games. The kneeling gesture was chosen because it was respectful while still visible and not the usual response to the National Anthem.
Kaepernick was the San Francisco 49ers quarterback who started his protest in a context of police brutality and ongoing oppression of African Americans.
While the kneeling has generated a good deal of anger about the perceived disrespect to the flag and to the memory of fallen service personnel, many African American veterans point out that they are often the victims of racists in their everyday civilian lives. There is a good deal of hypocrisy in the anger against the protest, therefore.
There is a good deal of umbrage being taken on this thread after criticism of ignorance. Quite honestly, I do not think this response is merited.
This article sums up why:
medium.com/national-equity-project/what-if-white-people-took-responsibility-for-our-role-in-this-moment-12b979d27eb6
It is not our “fault” that we don’t know or understand our role as white people in perpetuating white supremacy — most of our schools don’t teach us about whiteness — whiteness is simply the unspoken norm. But it is our responsibility to urgently and rigorously, educate ourselves and our white children about the history of whiteness...
...We can either actively work to dismantle the structures, policies, practices, and belief systems that contribute to a world where an unarmed black man can lay in broad daylight pleading for air and calling out for his mother while he dies at the hands of white police officers. Or, we can go about our lives believing that we are not a part of that awfulness and tacitly accept the rules, benefits, and consequences of white supremacy...
We need to Do our own work to understand the history of whiteness in the United States and how a system of white supremacy has both benefited and harmed us.
Check out the 'pyramid of white supremacy' in this article.
Think about how the history we are taught positions white people as the default actors, with other people playing bit parts that are reflections of white history. We cannot simultaneously be central to world history, aka the history of whiteness operating in the world, and peripheral to the experience of the other people in society.
If we don't know what the problem is, how can we participate in fixing it - how can we begin to the work of fixing us if we get our hackles up when challenged on our ignorance?
The problem with 'Not all police are racist' is the same as saying school shootings are not a problem - because 'Not all schools'. No, not all schools, but guns are everywhere (in the US) and almost anyone who wants one can get one, or twenty.
It's the same as the problem with 'Not all men are like that' - the system is set up to give the police a huge advantage over those they have contact with, and they can rely on basic assumptions about how the world should be ordered to generate support for them when they brutalise black people. That is the problem. It's not individual bad apples. It's the culture in a municipal police department. It's the locker room jokes that are tolerated. It's the off duty parties and fishing trips where police buddies loosen up and share prejudices. It's the leadership that fails to recognise that all of this is a problem and fails to establish a different culture, fails to set a standard higher than the ignorance and prejudice of the fundamentally racist cultural context. It's the bedrock assumption that police are there to safeguard white people and their property from black people and that black lives do not matter.
Shock, horror, a Minneapolis police officer (a Somali-American) shot a white Australian women dead a few years ago and was acquitted of the most serious charge brought against him but found guilty of lesser charges. This shooting occurred shortly after the murder of Philando Castile, also in Minneapolis. The Minneapolis PD was found by inquiries in the wake of those murders to have many problems - built-in, systemic, institutional problems in its policing approach. Nothing was done to change things.
White people know perfectly well how this all works, as seen in the incident in Central Park in NYC when Amy Cooper (white) threatened to call the cops on Christian Cooper (black) with a concocted story about him threatening her life. She made her threat and carried it out on camera. She weaponised her advantage. She expected bias from the police. She expected they would teach him his place, perhaps brutally - she knew he would realise the implications of a police call too, a call about an 'African American man' threatening a white woman. She knew the operator would know she was white because she mentioned 'African American man', and she had her accent going for her. Her calculations were absolutely correct. Her confidence and her threat came from a lifetime of experience and observation.
Up until people started filming and posting footage online it was possible to dismiss complaints about police heavy handedness, bias, and brutality as the work of agitators and meddling lefty journalists. There are still people who won't believe what they are seeing, who insist on the bad apple theory.
In the current perfect storm of covid-19, massive job losses among the poorest, a disproportionate death rate among the poorest, who happen to be African American and Hispanic, and now the reopening of the economy and with it the looming threat of millions of evictions because people who are unemployed can't pay their rent, Amy Cooper tilted her head sideways and taunted her victim with the entire weight of American history, and a Minneapolis police officer suffocated a man to death.
The pushback has been a long time coming.