oUR MANIFESTO

Our Project:
On August 14th, while his teammates rose at the first notes of the national anthem, 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick remained seated. His message: he will not stand for a country that perpetuates racialized brutality and violence. Days later, his silent protest became a mass media sensation. Media outlets portrayed the black athlete as unpatriotic and immoral. They vilified Colin for exercising his right to protest. Our project is a short video series exploring the biased manner in which the mass media reacts to sports protests, with a particular focus on Kaepernick exercising his right to sit. We are asking our audience to question the way the manipulative nature of their surrounding media landscape. In doing so we aim to grant visibility to the negative response that sports protests receive. How does this media response affect sporting players and more importantly, how does it affect the public’s views on the fight for social change?
Our Goals:
  1. Emphasize the need for critical thought when consuming mass media, specifically media regarding sports protests.
  2. Analyze how easily mass media can manipulate its audience and spread biased portrayals of people and events.
  3. Parallel Colin’s protest with historical sports protests to spotlight how athletes can use media exposure as a platform for change.
  4. Question whether media portrayals of protests have changed over time. How far have we come?
Platform and Audience:
We will introduce our project to a wider audience by uploading a series of short videos pertaining to Colin’s protest and subsequent media portrayals. We have chosen YouTube as our platform is due to accessibility, archiving, and activism. YouTube videos can be easily shared and distributed via social and mass media. Videos can be easily viewed and easily embedded which allows for ease of accessibility. Our YouTube channel will grant us the ability to archive our videos for posterity as response to Colin’s protest continues. We hope these videos appeal to multiple generations of activists and sports fans. We want our audience to be able to connect to our series of short videos by: displaying various mass media response to Colin’s protest; highlighting social media support for Colin and resulting backlash; spotlighting the history of protest within athletics; and analyzing the long history of mass media and negative portrayal of racialized protests.
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