Colin Kaepernick, the former quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, is being blackballed — itself a revealing phrase — from the National Football League with the collusion of the all-white owners. He is ostracized because a year ago he exercised his First Amendment right to free speech by taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem.

Kaepernick isn’t hooked on drugs. He isn’t a felon. He hasn’t brutalized women. He is treated as a pariah because he protested the continued oppression “of black people and people of color.” He wanted, he said, to make people “realize what’s going on in this country. … There are a lot of things going on that are unjust, people aren’t being held accountable for, and that’s something that needs to change.” Born in Milwaukee, Wis., one of the most racially segregated cities in America, Kaepernick is particularly concerned about police brutality and the shocking police shootings of unarmed African Americans.

The historians are coming.

Across the country, untold millions have suddenly awakened to the historical significance of various and sundry statues honoring the great Confederate generals of the Civil War. While their energy is no doubt commendable, their newfound knowledge has not yet permitted them to draw a distinction between education and glorification.

Our newly minted annalists, while wrong-headed, are not necessarily wrong. Although these triumphant monuments are somewhat misleading about the war’s outcome, they are quite informative about the Jim Crow era in which they were built. They also provide renewed motivation for debunking the “lost cause” historical narrative that has convinced generations of schoolchildren that the Civil War was fought by noble southerners over some obscure federalism issue.

Why does it seem, ever since the Charlottesville incident, that so many racist roads lead to Ohio? James Alex Fields, Jr. of Maumee, Ohio, ran his car into the counter-protestors, killing Heather Heyer and injuring several others. The “Huffington Post” of the white supremacist movement, The Daily Stormer website, is the creation of Worthington’s own Linworth High School graduate Andrew Anglin. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there are 27 white supremacist groups in Ohio.

It may not be just the overt racist groups we should consider – sometimes the haters could be civil servants, like firemen from northeastern Ohio, as the following story reveals.

Shawnee Township Fire Chief Todd Truesdale’s 45th birthday inspired his fellow firefighters to throw him a party with a Nazi-themed birthday cake – decorating the cake are the words “German Fire Dept” encircling a swatiska, on the left-hand corner sits a tall replica of an oven also with a swastika on the side, and cake decorating frosting depicts presumably Jewish people marching toward the oven.

Thank god there are no statues to the Rolling Stones.

Gold coast slave ship bound for cotton fields
Sold in the market down in New Orleans
Scarred old slaver knows he's doin' alright
Hear him whip the women just around midnight

Brown Sugar how come you taste so good
Brown Sugar just like a young girl should

Ahem. When I first heard the first verse, first two words, I had no idea what the hell a “gold coast” was. So, having nothing else to do in study hall, I got a pass and went to the library and looked it up. Huh, Ghana. Interesting.

Ghana has had the unfortunate (or perhaps fortuitous--Indians have been known to toast “two cheers for colonialism”) of having been colonized by the British, Germans, Danish, Dutch, Portuguese and Swedes. A veritable colonialist gang bang which inspired a colonialist rock'n'roll song of sexual exploitation a couple centuries later.

Drums beating cold English blood runs hot
Lady of the house wonder when it's going to stop
House boy knows that he's doin' alright
You shoulda heard him just around midnight

My name is Micah Naziri. I am a doctoral student; have penned numerous published articles and books; I am months away from getting my PhD and then beginning teaching part time at a local university; I am a business man, a real estate investor and an activist.

Last Saturday, August 19, I was asked to attend a protest in the City of Columbus. Myself and a small group of activists with largely executive protection, martial arts and military backgrounds, were asked to be at the Christopher Columbus statue protest at Columbus City Hall in dual roles as activists and security. The concern was that an incident like the domestic terrorist attack in Charlottesville would happen here.

As we have at numerous other protests where security was needed, we showed up wearing relevant political anti-racism t-shirts and concealed our lower faces in the event that local Neo-Nazis showed up and took pictures to identify us. We had visible, legally-carried weapons – not to intimidate the public or the police, but to intimidate the Nazis who had pledge to counter protest.