Editorial | Kaepernick, anti-racism protests deserve Nobel prize

UNDER THE rules, it’s too late to nominate someone for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, for which, according to the committee, there are 318 candidates – 211 individuals and 107 organisations. Nominations closed at the start of February.

By now, the committee would have already formed its shortlist of nominees and begun a deeper scrutiny of the group, ahead of announcing the winner in October. The prize is awarded in Oslo, Norway, in December. A nomination that arrives after February 1 of the year of the prize joins the pool of nominees for the following year.

Sometimes, though, unprecedented situations demand exceptional action. These are extraordinary times. They warrant the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, by whatever necessary and legal method, making exceptions to its rules to admit an additional nominee(s), who should be the recipient of this year’s prize.

First, this newspaper believes that Colin Kaepernick, the 32-year-old quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers in America’s National Football League (NFL), should already be among the committee’s shortlisted candidates, and very close to the top of it, for the 2020 prize. In 2016, he emerged as – and for the better part of the four years has been – a living symbol of the fight for racial justice for African Americans, especially with respect to police violence against young black men.

As a protest against the shooting death of several unarmed African-American males, law-enforcement officers and the systemic racism faced by minorities, Mr Kaepernick refused to stand for America’s national anthem at the start of his team’s NFL games. Instead, he knelt on one knee.

Although he was joined by other sports stars, the biracial Mr Kaepernick has been repeatedly denounced as unpatriotic by America’s xenophobic and white ethnonationalist president, Donald Trump. There were other costs for Mr Kaepernick, too. When, for instance, he became a free agent in 2017, no NFL team would recruit him. Mr Kaepernick, however, hasn’t relented in his activism.

“I am not anti-America; I love America,” he said. “I love people. That’s why I am doing this. I want to help make America better.” In this respect, Mr Kaepernick sits in the pantheon of the likes of the boxer Muhammad Ali, who leveraged his fame in anti-war activism – and paid a price for it; and the civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr, who won the Nobel Prize in 1964, but was assassinated four years later.

The relevance of Mr Kaepernick’s protest had greater currency in the United States of Donald Trump, whose political impulse, in the absence of a moral core or ideological substance, is to fan latent racist sentiments among white Americans in an effort to corral voting support. Mr Trump, in that sense, is a confluence of racism, cynicism and parasitic opportunism.

It is hardly surprising that it is in Mr Trump’s America that nearly 160 years after slavery’s end, and more than half a century after the Civil Rights Act, that the conditions have so worsened, to give rise to the ongoing protests against racism after George Floyd’s callous death at the hands of police officers. These protests have spilled beyond America’s borders to become a global phenomenon.

A Rainbow Enterprise

Notably, the demonstrations have transcended black people to become a rainbow enterprise. Black, brown and white people of various ethnicities are marching under the same banner with a single theme – in the name of justice. There is a sense that the United States, and, indeed, the world, is at a critical moment in time which could lead to profound change. That ought not to be lost, lest what comes later is nasty, violent and uncontainable – as has been the case, too often in history, when societies and the world have failed to read the signals to seize the moment. There is a continuum between Colin Kaepernick and the current events.

The Nobel Peace Prize Committee, if it is perceptive enough, will recognise this time, in these circumstances, what they are and what they have already achieved. Not only should it applaud that, but to give greater legitimacy, and efficacy, for what more can flow from this situation. In this regard, this year’s Nobel Prize for Peace should go jointly to Colin Kaepernick and the American/global anti-racism protests.