論文

The Curious Case of Colin Kaepernick
and Catachresis in Contemporary
Communication
Scott Gibson

I. Introduction
With the 2019 NFL regular season set to start at the time of this writing, thediscussion surrounding politics in football is heating up for the fourth season ina row. Former San Francisco 49ers star quarterback Colin Kaepernick has nottaken an NFL snap for more than 30 months, but the effects of his pregame
protests against racial injustice are still being felt. The Atlantic has referred tohim as a shadow looming over the league,1 and the NFL decided in February tosettle their collusion case with Kaepernick after several failed attempts to havet he case dismissed by a rbitrators . 2 As t he media cont inues to release
information about the actions of team owners during the initial controversy, it
has become difficult to argue that Kaepernick’s inability to find a team during
the 2017 season was not being orchestrated behind the scenes. 3
Kaepernick’s movement started as a small, unpublicized act of protest. In
August of 2016, Kaepernick, then quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers,
remained seated during a pregame performance of the national anthem. Thisquiet act went mostly unnoticed. It did not see headlines until the third game ofthe preseason when an N FL .com reporter, who had apparently noticed
Kaepernick’s head and shoulders at Gatorade table height in a pregame photo,asked why he had not stood. Kaepernick responded:“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that
oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger thanfootball and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There arebodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away withmurder.”101_論文_ギブソンスコット.indd 1

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Kaepernick is, of course, referring to the issue of police brutality against peopleof color in the United States and the idea that courts rarely convict officers witha crime.4 The comments caused an internet firestorm. Kaepernick, who set
several quarterback rushing records and even appeared in a Super Bowl, had
never and has not since trended more on the web or in the news. The mostprominent narrative, which would seem related to the NFL’s decades-longflirtation with conservative jingoism and deep ties to the military, 5 was that thedemonstration was disrespectful to American soldiers. Kaepernick issued a
response a few days later saying that he respected “the men and women thathave fought for this country,” but reaffirmed commitment to his cause.
Throughout September and October, more and more athletes, and particularly
football players, began to demonstrate during the national anthem. Some stoodwith one fist raised. Others locked arms with like-minded teammates. They
included some relatively high profile players such as Seahawks Legion of Boomdefensive tackle, Michael Bennett, the Denver Broncos’ Brandon Marshall, andArian Foster of the Miami Dolphins. It was around this time that Kaepernicksays he consulted with a former member of the US military on the best way to
conduct the protest respectfully, ultimately arriving upon taking a knee.6 US
Women’s soccer player, Megan Rapinoe, also knelt during the national anthem.
In a postgame interview in Chicago, she told reporters her gesture was “a nod
to Kaepernick” and acknowledged social and political issues facing black people
in America. Perhaps the most intriguing case in terms of league response(besides Kaepernick himself) was Oakland Athletics catcher, Bruce Maxwell.
Maxwell was the first Major League Baseball player to perform a Kaepernickstyle pregame protest, and it may have done irreparable damage to his career.7
Interestingly, prior assault charges, weapons charges, and a .182 batting average
had never been enough for minor league demotion.
In the three years since Kaepernick’s initial silent demonstration, the issue
has branched in a number of different directions. Millions of words have been
written about police brutality and systematic oppression, the NFL’s relationshipwith black players, free speech and democracy, the rise of European-styleleftism in the popular psyche, the military’s relationship with the National
Football League, respect for veterans, corporate responsibility, the national
anthem, Kaepernick’s abilities as a player, and even workers’ rights in SoutheastAsia.
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The Curious Case of Colin Kaepernick and Catachresis in Contemporary Communication

Some of these conversations pushed events into very bizarre territory. Donald
Trump’s call on Twitter for an NFL boycott at the beginning of the 2017 season
prompted entire NFL teams, including their right-leaning executives, to kneel inprotest of Trump himself. 8 Denver Broncos Hall of Famer Champ Bailey said, “Ifeel like it’s for show. I don’t trust Jerry [Jones] or any of the owners on issuesof social justice.” The rhetoric grew even more heated when Kaepernick’s
girlfriend, Nessa Diab, compared the owner of the Baltimore Ravens and theirhall of fame Mike linebacker, Ray Lewis, to a plantation owner and his
obsequious house slave from Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 Western, Django
Unchained.9 Lewis garnered further negative reaction on social media when heclaimed to have knelt only to “honor God in the midst of chaos” and clarified
that he absolutely was not protesting.10
Other conversations were productive. Brandon Marshall ended his pregame
demonstrations when the Denver Police Department agreed to review their use
of force policies.11 Had more police departments reacted this way or had pundits
been able to stay focused, kneeling during the anthem may have been a nonissue. But the reaction, very little of which directly addressed the content ofKaepernick’s demonstration,12 was so dramatic that it sparked protests, counterprotests, boycotts, and burnings in effigy. Comedian Dave Chappelle joked thathe could kill every white person in America by having OJ Simpson kneel on the
50-yard line during the Super Bowl. “That’s a brittle spirit,” he would say.
This catachresis, the phenomenon by which the conversation is effectively
intercepted and carried off in the wrong direction is a point of interest in thistale. Narratives being written and rewritten ultimately overdetermining theroot subject is not an unusual process in political discourse. The modern media
environment certainly seems to accelerate that. However, the reaction in thiscase is strikingly similar to phenomena observed in rural Japan whereindividuals questioned on issues of race impress their understanding onto the
problem and, consciously or unconsciously, avow and impute motives that picksix the conversation.13
The Kaepernick saga brings up questions about the nature of public protests
and conversations that surround issues of race and racism in the United States.
Kaepernick defined the meaning of his initial protest, but once images andwords about the event enter the digital realm, all control over the narrative islost. What do these conversations mean? Innumerable supporters and detractors
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have jumped into the discussion, wrestling it away from and back toward its
initial focus. Since those initial comments on NFL.com, the issue has expanded
well beyond what Kaepernick likely imagined. Even multi-billion-dollar
corporations and Russian troll farms participated in the discussion.14 What does
their participation speak to in American culture? This phenomenon may tell us
something about institutionalized and implicit behaviors that the current
framework of racism studies cannot.
The utterances that appear in this intense colloquy are in themselves
empirical data to be studied. As C. Wright Mills theorizes, they are “verbalized
appendages of institutionalized behaviors” and socially situated.15 There seems
to be a similarity between the macro-level reaction the United States as anation had to these events and the documented motive talk of individuals
confronting accusations of bigotry or other improprieties. Americans are
pa i n f ully awa re of how pola rized our polit ics have become. W hat ca nconversations about this event tell us about the cultural environment?
We will examine media coverage of the event and observe how netizens
handled various topics in a highly politicized media landscape. Google Trends isuseful here. In 2016, events that generated the most media coverage and searchterm traffic for ‘Colin Kaepernick’ were the initial protest, Trump saying
Kaepernick “should find a country that works better for him,” Kaepernickcomments on Hillary Clinton’s alleged crimes, and Kaepernick wearing pig
socks and a Fidel Castro t-shirt. In 2017, Trump calling the players “sons ofbitches,” players and owners protesting Trump, Trump specifically mentioning
the “respect for flag and country” narrative, Kaepernick filing a collusion
grievance against the NFL, and Kaepernick being named GQ magazine’s
Citizen of the Year all generated headlines and searches. Significant events of2018 were Nike’s ad campaign featuring Kaepernick, the resulting protests andcounter-protests, and Trump tweeting about respect for the flag.16

II. Internet Discussions
Thanks to internet forums and comment sections, analyzing utterances has
never been easier. While this erases some of the charms of ethnomethodology,
such a rich source of information has significant advantages. Without conducting
interviews or making life histories, one can access an immeasurable amount of
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talk about virtually any popular subject. The body of literature that examinesinternet forums is growing, and the practice is beginning to emerge in fields
closer to the sciences, such as psychology.17 American anthropologist, Nancy
Baym, and Estonian researchers, Peter Holtz and Wolfgang Wagner are somestrong examples of academics working in this genre.18 The latter even publisheda guide for other researchers in 2009 having analyzed forums over a number of
papers.
One significant advantage of utilizing internet forums that Holtz and teamnote is just sheer volume. Even smaller sites can have hundreds of members
contributing thousands of posts. News aggregator fark.com is not even a top
7,000 Alexa-ranked site, but it has over 5,000 active posters and 25,000 ‘lurkers’
in the comment section. With more topic-focused forums, one can examine anarrow group but still have a lot of data. A study conducted at the nursing
school at Emory University even referred to internet forums with specific topics
as “unmoderated focus groups.”19 Because the data sets are large, they can be
examined more quantitatively. One can pore over conversations directly as
would an ethnomethodologist, use software and grounded theory techniques tofind trends, or both.
There is another advantage to forums in that data are potentially cleaner andfriendlier to review than that which can be gathered personally. Users are
entirely separated from the observer and can be examined in something of anatural environment (though it is important to note that conversations are notdefinitely natural). Issues such as survey bias, acquiescence, or order effects are
non-existent. Furthermore, the data is publicly available.
Without having to confront the consequences of their words directly or face
pushback from a n i nterrogator, individua ls a re more likely to discuss
controversial topics. In long-form interviews or focus groups, there is always
potential for interviewer effects or partiality. Techniques of conversation
analysis can be employed to account for some slant, 20 but the danger is still
there. For example, research into anti-Korean proto-alt-right groups by Makiko
Shoji of Doshisha University used life histories to put a face on Japanese antiforeign sentiment. While this research is unique and exciting, the process will
have influenced the results. Shoji admits to being strangely attracted tointerviewees and feeling guilty about enjoying events and contact. 21 The closeup format may also give the impression that interview subjects are the target
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文of condem nat ion rat her t ha n t he cu lt u ra l f ra mework t hat g irds t heir
understanding. 22 Analyzing forums could accomplish a similar flavor, but withpotentially fewer problems.
This impersonality carries disadvantages. As Holtz and team note, there is an
ethical issue with making subjects of the unwitting. While internet forums aremostly public, there may be forum members who would object to being part ofa study. Depending on how much data is attached to each username, it may bepossible to reverse engineer personal information about the individual. Whenthe topic is something sensitive, such as politics or race, privacy concerns areamplified. One must also account for ‘deindividuation effects’ (familiar to anyone
brave or stupid enough to read YouTube comments). In the case of an online
study, it resembles a kind of new extreme responding. Posters will write
obscene or radical things for seemingly no other reason than to offend, provoke,or ‘ f lame.’ The impulsivity a nd lack of conscience resembles a ntisocial
personality disorder. 23 Ecological validity is difficult to determine in a study ofutterances, and deindividuation effects further complicate matters.
That performative element of online commenting is an obstacle. Participants
compete for eyeballs, votes, and feedback; whether it be reddit.com karma, fark.
com ‘smart’ and ‘funny’ votes, clicks on the ‘like’ button, or even just angry
responses. Further, many individuals play characters or even operate multiple
accounts, sometimes within one discussion. ‘Trolls’ post offensive or digressivecomments so they can sit back with popcorn and watch the resulting carnage.
There is also research that suggests individuals attempt to one-up each otherwith their offensive comments. 24 That is not to say trolling is entirely worthlesswith a Millsian approach. We know golden retrievers love tennis balls. In thesame respect, the material with which trolls and ‘sockpuppets’ distract people
can give us valuable information. 25
The Goldingesque lack of typical social structure should be accounted forwhen relying on this data. It is here that Holtz and company deserve somecriticism. In their guide, they say there is evidence that posters are not offering
the most extreme opinions possible, but their real opinions in the most extreme
manner possible. 26 The evidence is a single paper from 2002 by groundedtheory pioneer, Jack Glaser, which examines white supremacist internet forums
in A merica . Drawing a ny conclusions about t he behavior of a ll on line
commenters based on white supremacists participating in a private bulletin is601_論文_ギブソンスコット.indd 6

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The Curious Case of Colin Kaepernick and Catachresis in Contemporary Communicationquestionable. Care must be taken to accurately assess comment content without
being influenced by the prospective treasure trove of material.

III. Previous Research
Papers that analyze web forums or comment sections to study ethnic
exclusionism are not immune to the usual pitfalls of racism studies. Many
works, including those of Dr. Holtz, tend to point out that there is some racism
somewhere. Others offer a list of the no good, very bad words that racists use.
One analysis from the guide to analyzing internet forums examines Neo-Nazi
message boards connected to the far-right National Democratic Party ofGermany. The team looked at 5,000 posts from forums totaling nearly 2,000
users. They found that German white supremacists were concerned with black
men procreating with white women, German identity, and Jewish power andinfluence. While the paper is valuable for its methodology, the results fall in line
perfectly with established racist tropes. The value of unmoderated discussion is
lost.
Another report in the guide solves this issue somewhat. Researchers observeda handful of forums frequented by young Muslim men of Turkish descent livingin Germany and identified ‘typical discourses.’ The distinct types of talk they
identify here allowed for a correspondence analysis that identified very religious
but not politically radical and very secular but also very politically radicalgroups. While it may not seem surprising at first blush that communities withvarious mixes of religiosity and political radicalization exist amongst Muslim
immigrants to Western nations, it shows the necessity of a multi-dimensional
approach when studying radicalization and reveals some motive vocabularies
used in those communities. For example, very political young men were foundto use the word ‘kuffar,’ or infidel, quite frequently on other expats. The value of
unmoderated discussion is appreciable.
It is also common to analyze internet data via word counts. Researchers use
software to count the number of times a particular word or phrase appears
throughout a conversation and run analyses using various statistics software
suites. Given that quoting varies wildly from site to site, it means that a person
must still check the data. Jokes, sarcastic use of terms, and context too require
a human eye. If this human check is necessary, it makes sense to hand-tag or
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文‘code’ phrases in the first place.
The cost of this method is much time, but time alone, and the result is a large
data-set. No panel discussions, no questionnaires, no interviews, no life histories.
With taboo topics such as white supremacy, religious extremism, or Nazism,
this approach is easier and potentially more valuable than those methods.

IV. Framework
The concept of ‘catachresis’ is utilized to identify colonialist structures insociety and identify a defect or impropriety. 27 Similar to literary catachresis, likethe ‘deepest winter’ of Lord Timon’s purse, it describes a meaning or system ofunderstanding forcibly imposed. Literary theorist Gayatri Spivak and otherpostcolonial Marxist critics utilize this concept to address ideas like ‘woman’ or‘the proletariat’ that ground social phenomena. Thought experiments may easilystrain these ideas, and there are no “true examples.” To answer the questions
set out for this project above, we will analyze comment sections of a handful ofarticles that cover or provide commentary on the ‘anthem protests.’ 28 These
comment sections are selected for their relevance to the initial content of Colin
Kaepernick’s protest: police brutality against people of color and systemic
racism. 29 In this manner, we can catalog vocabularies and examine how peopleare (again, consciously or unconsciously) massaging the conversation or
imposing different meanings upon it.
This process is similar to that in political conversations observed in rural
Japan. Natives filter topics with much weight through the local history andsystem of understanding. In the city of Iga-Ueno, Mie Prefecture, eventransplants interviewed about perceived problems of racism in town and inJapan steer the direction toward local history or points of local pride. 30 It must
be repeated for emphasis that whether this catachresis is purposeful orincidental does not matter. Imputing a thought process in this situation would
constitute motive mongering. However, utterances and the vocabularies used
therein are empirical data to be studied. Further, they represent a symptom orcomponent of structural bias and racism.
To better understand this, let us look at an example. On YouTube, fark.com,
and news sites covering the protests, it is common for comment threads totransform slowly (or in some cases immediately) into football conversation. In
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The Curious Case of Colin Kaepernick and Catachresis in Contemporary Communicationt he m idst of t hat , com menters d iscus si ng racism br i ng up ‘ t he blackquarterback,’ a well-explored sociological concept. While this may seem in linewith the original topic, it is very much different. Whether this imposition is anintentional act of racism or not does not matter. We can still glean from thisprocess that the issue of police brutality is losing to football. There is a
stymying effect whereby superficial topics subsume crucial political speech. As
participants jockey to make their points, they impose an entirely new sense of
meaning upon the initial conversation.

V. Analysis
We will examine the comment sections of news aggregator fark.com andcomment system Disqus. 31 Discussions take place on Fark and are attached toan outside article. Disqus allows for conversation directly below a news article
or on disqus.com. The sites are relatively diverse, and audiences are a majority
American according to Alexa rankings. Fark targets mostly 25- to 40-year-old
affluent individuals but is politically diverse. These sites were chosen for theirrelative neutrality. Faced with trolling and flaming, many news and opinion sites
have stopped allowing comments, so communities that discuss current eventswith no particular focus are the best for our purposes. Studying how narratives
evolve in targeted communities would be interesting, but is beyond the scope of
this paper.
Threads are laid out cleanly and lend themselves well to coding, particularly
on Fark. Both communities require an account for use. Disqus allows users tologin with Facebook, Google, or Twitter credentials, potentially reducing
deindividuation effects. 32 Quoting and attribution is clear, decreasing the chanceof counting the same post twice or using the same code many times on a single
user. Moderators are relatively hands-off. They will remove obscene posts,
comments that exhibit flaming behavior, or those that veer too far off-topic.
Fark’s feedback mechanisms are particularly useful. ‘Smart’ and ‘funny’ voting
options give a bit more information about the intent of posts than typical sites.
Coding sarcastic or humorous posts exposes the process to extra subjectivity,
but with these vote counts one can defer to the crowd rather than determine
the tenor of a post. While not perfect, this medium level of moderation andsecurity should give us a good idea of discourses.
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Comments were classified into five different types before other codes wereapplied, so a pattern of typical discourses could be established. The five types
are: disagree, contrary, neutral, supportive, agree. Comments tagged as‘disagree’ must contain some language where the poster outright states thatthey believe Kaepernick is wrong in his protest or methods. Comments that failto meet that requirement but argue against Kaepernick or supporters are‘contrary.’ Similarly, ‘supportive’ comments are those that argue in favor of
Kaepernick or supporters but do not contain an explicit endorsement. ‘Agree’
posts are those that contain explicit support. Finally, neutral posts are thoserelated to the topic where there is no opinion stated, or a coder should not makea determination. 33 The types on either side of neutral are coupled together intocode groups called ‘positive’ and ‘negative.’
Posts are also coded based on how relevant they are to the topic of thearticle. If a significant number of different posters are talking about the same
unrelated topic across threads, that topic receives a tag such as ‘football,’‘anthem,’ or ‘economic.’ These codes belong to the group ‘tangent’ and represent
the catachresis that we hypothesized above. If a discourse as tagged appears
too infrequently or the fit of a particular comment is difficult to establish, it isomitted. Some additional codes that account for the tenor of a post include‘vitriolic,’ ‘on-topic,“ authoritarian,’ ‘straw man,’ ‘racist trope,’ ‘joke,’ and ‘sarcasm.’
In total, the project has 72 codes, 32 of which met the threshold for a typical
discourse, which is 50 instances.
ATLAS.ti performs correspondence analysis between codes. The softwaremarks related codes with a percentage of explained variance and automatically
identifies relationships of interest that a human may miss. The tests ATLAS.ti
performs are similar to a chi-squared test, and it provides a Cohen’s kappa for
agreement. However, given that codes are researcher generated and data is
typically from complex surveys, interviews, or other nonrandom data, nop-values or significance levels can be provided. The software warns users thatits data visualizations are not enough to establish statistically significant
relationships. Holtz and team graph their data and use a cosine distance method
recommended by Michael J. Greenacre of Pompeu Fabra University to test
sig nifica nce. For our purposes , we will avoid definitive statements . A
permutation test or even a simple chi-squared test would not be wholly
inappropriate given the independence of our variables and how we have1001_論文_ギブソンスコット.indd 10

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structured the data, but a study of discourses does not require econometricbluster.
The discourses below come from 3,839 coded posts over three years (20162018). With these tools, we can paint a picture of the conversations people were
having about this issue in online communities.
1.“The Wrong Type of Protest”34
As expected, a great many posters claimed to be offended by someone
kneeling during the national anthem. Not standing for the anthem was deemedanti-American or disrespectful to those “who fought and died for this country.”
As ment ioned above t h is a rg u ment was seen of ten i n t he med ia . I n aparticularly heated CNN Tonight segment in 2017, host Don Lemon challenged
a g uest on h is use of t h is rhetor ic . L ead g uest M ichea l Er ic Dyson ofGeorgetown University likened it to an abusive husband complaining when his
wife finally speaks up.
Of specific discourses, this was the one most highly associated with ‘negative’
posts. Some ‘positive’ posts also contained this language. Interestingly, ATLAS.
ti marked a relationship between ‘negative’ commenters and comments that goout of their way to mention that the protest was acceptable. When those posts
are analyzed directly, this would appear to be a technique of neutralization.
Nearly half of such posts directed vitriolic language at Kaepernick, and all
disagreed on other grounds.
Example: “He’s free to protest however he feels. We’re free to say that he’s a[expletive] idiot, who doesn’t understand what the [expletive] he’s talking about.
That’s how freedom works.”
2.“He Sucks”35
A prevalent discourse that was especially common in 2016 threads was that
Kaepernick was a just lousy quarterback. Nearly five times as many ‘negative’comments contained some variation of this theme as ‘positive.’ The attitude wasused as a bludgeon to attack the quarterback. While the idea that Kaepernick is
unfit for the NFL was expressed in overwhelming numbers by ‘negative’
posters, the disparity between expected and actual opinions for ‘neutral’ posters(and indeed football statistics) indicate that this is not the case. 36
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Example: “He protests the anthem by sitting down, and he protests the [NFL]by playing like [expletive].”
3.“Redbaiting”
After Kaepernick appeared before the media wearing a shirt depicting Fidel
Castro, many posters used political arguments to dismiss Kaepernick. It
appeared in threads well after the initial event, but numbers were few. It does
not appear to be common after 2016. A vast majority of people who used this
discourse either self-identified as a conservative or negatively mentioned‘liberals,’ ‘Democrats,’ or ‘leftists.’ Contrary to our initial predictions, thisvocabulary did not meet our threshold for a typical discourse.
Example: “[The] Washington Times wrote about him [giving] to a charity that
supports Cop Killer Assata who went to Cuba. So, Colin is not totally ignorantof the Castro brothers, Colin is an avowed leftist. Please read the Washington
Times article.”
4.“He’
s Too Privileged”37
Another ad hominem style argument that came up often was that a wealthyfootball player should not be protesting, was not helping, or could not understandoppression and thus could not protest it. Comments used Kaepernick’s white
adoptive parents as an argument were also tagged with this code.
Example: “He thinks he’s oppressed because he makes tons of money playing[expletive] football? [expletive] him and the [expletive] pony he rides.”5. Political Codes
As we expected to see highly politicized speech mimicking highly politicizedcoverage, several codes were used to track commenters who self-identified on
the American one-dimensional political spectrum, or who used blaming
la ng uage while referencing a n ideolog y or politica l party. Contrary to
expectations, this type of discourse was surprisingly rare, at least on one side.
Conservatives, Republicans, and Trump supporters were generally against theprotests as expected, but ‘negative’ codes were far less likely to be associatedwith those attacking left-lea ning ideologies tha n the reverse. Liberals,
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Democrats, and Clinton supporters were generally in favor of the protests.
‘Positive’ and ‘neutral’ commenters were associated with posts attacking theright, Trump, and right-leaning ideologies. They were highly associated withstraw man arguments and accusations of racism. There were surprisingly few
Clinton supporters tagged as ‘negative’ after Kaepernick ’s controversialcomments.
“But Democrats”38
Example: “Crimes involving non-white people against their own race isn’t talked
about nearly enough, for whatever reason. You don’t see a lot of ‘black lives
matter’ yahoos and the scene of black-on-black crime, do you? Didn’t think so.
[…] Your argument is slanted, biased, and happens to fit the ‘over-hyped’ liberal‘all whites are racists’ agenda of the moment.”“But Republicans”39
Example: “Why are most of the people who are upset about Kaepernick support
a party whose main platform is ‘Rich guy complains about America’?”6. Tangent Codes
This category is perhaps our most important as it helps quantify thecat ach resis we noted . Ta ngent codes were appl ied to com ment s t hat
participated in or started a continuing tangential conversation. One unexpected
result was that strong attitudes toward the protest had little connection towhether or not one deviated from the topic. Both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ codes
were less associated with tangential conversation than would be expected fromtheir respective populations. Under the Millsian portion of our framework, wewould expect to see ‘negative’ commenters following tangents as they explore
ex post facto lingualizations. ‘Neutral’ was the only group to exceed expectedvalues. This result makes sense in half of our theoretical framework; those withless investment in the issue are more likely to follow socially situated topics.
The most common tangential topics were football, the anthem, and the flag.
Associations for anthem and flag discussion are so close to the expected values
that if we could run a statistical test, it would not likely be meaningfully
different from random. What the disparity between football and patriotic
narratives says about the power of those narratives is unclear. Tangents that13

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did not meet our threshold included economic, political, and free speech
discussion. The last one is particularly surprising.
All Tangents (includes specific and blanket tangent tags) 40
Example: “I don’t think Nike cares about losing redneck [expletive] customers.
Brooks are better running shoes anyway. I made the switch several years ago.
really the best.”“Football Tangent”41
Example: “Romo hurt his back and going to miss half the regular season. The
Prescott Era begins. Or Jerrah is on the phone with San Fran right now…”“Anthem/Flag Tangent”42
Example: “Not for nothing, but when Angry Guy X says, ‘That bastard hates
America! My grandpappy died for that flag!’, I learn much more about Angry
Guy X’s wrong-headed idea of what America is or should be.”7.“On-Topic”43
In contrast to various ‘tangent’ codes, the ‘on-topic’ code was associated withposts that continued a conversation about whether or not Kaepernick wascorrect to protest or discussed the content of the protest. Posters with ‘positive’
codes were associated with ‘on-topic ’comments more often than other groups.
Those with ‘negative’ codes were less associated with both ‘on-topic’ comments
and tangents. Possible explanations to that seeming contradiction are hit-andrun troll behavior or a large number of people writing a small number ofcomments. Less than 10% of posts were coded ‘on-topic.’ This is a damningresult.
Example: “One problem is perception. law enforcement seems to work to protect
rather than punish the bad actors among them, fighting against accountability
instead of for it and this is why so many people have a problem with them. Ifthe ”good“ cops are actively or even passively staying complicit, well...”1401_論文_ギブソンスコット.indd 14

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8.“Vitriol”44
This code is not a discourse, but the associations are particularly interesting.
Those who outright disagreed with Kaepernick or argued against him weremore associated with vitriolic language than other commenters. Even in heatedexchanges, those who supported Kaepernick were associated less with hateful
language or cursing. Interestingly, even these relatively vitriolic Kaepernick
dissenters were in line with or slightly better than the typical proportion of
hateful comments on the internet at large.45 This relative cleanliness could
speak to the quality of chosen communities or at least their content moderation.
Example: “Kaperwhatshisface is an attention whore. ‘Oooh. No one has noticed
me for the last few weeks’. [expletive] him.”
9.“Racist Trope”46
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the use of racist tropes were much more likely to be
associated with ‘negative’ attitudes.
Example: “You’ve done nothing for blacks buts sit down in protest and personify
the ‘Thug life.’”
10. Millsian Code Groups
The Millsian code group covered motive talk that we might expect given thesubject matter. While some of the anti-Kaepernick rhetoric associated withnegative posts falls in line with condemning the condemners, the requirements
were strict for those codes. A commenter had to use condemning language
defensively. Not one of the Millsian codes or groups met our typical discourse
threshold. ‘My black friend’ was two comments shy of the requirement, while agroup of victim-blaming codes fell short by one. ‘My black friend’ is exactly
what it sounds like. The victim-blaming code group was a number of ‘on-topic’posts that dealt with language attacking or blaming those experiencing police
violence. Codes included ‘but black on black violence,’ ‘but criminals,’ and ‘racism
everywhere.’ They co-occurred with ‘negative’ codes often.

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11.“Meta”47
This final code group was fascinating. It was almost exclusively associatedwith ‘positive’ commenters. Posts that received this tag were cognizant of theidea that anti-Kaepernick commenters were pushing the argument away fromthe essential themes (but interstingly unaware that more neutral individuals
were also participating). These individuals were aware of ma ny of thecatachreses that we discussed above, including those that we expected to see
but could not make any definitive statements about given the data. Anothernoteworthy aspect is that the ‘meta’ code appears to increase across theobserved three year period.
Example: “anyone going to bother to dispute the validity of what he said or are
you just going to ‘lol shut up football man’ for the rest of the afternoon”
12. Miscellaneous Codes
Other codes that met typical discourse requirements, but were close to
expected values were ‘joke,’ ‘sarcasm,’ ‘straw man,’ ‘but the media,’ ‘you’re atroll,’ ‘no you,’ ‘but BLM,’ ‘All Lives Matter,’ and ‘Blue Lives Matter.’ Given thatthe final two are typically considered counter-movements to Black Lives Matter,
this is surprising. ATLAS.ti did mark correspondence between ‘negative’attitudes toward Kaepernick and All Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter codes,
but it was small. It would seem that despite the ideological lines that we would
expect given media coverage, those threads simply turned into general All
Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter discussions. For the most part, participants
did not appear to take political sides. Those threads were associated with an
uptick in vitriolic language (“A lot of [expletive] bootlickers in this thread”) andaccusations of racism (“You lot think black lives don’t matter.”).

VI. Conclusions
If we retroactively apply something of a null hypothesis, our results ultimately
support the catachresis we initially observed. People did not follow current
events and media coverage, nor did they adhere to substantive conversation.
Instead, we observed an imposition of socially situated understandings over
events. As news stories were used to resolve narratives, we should expect to16

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see discourses that in some way echo events. While those discourses were
present, they are confounded by football and patriotic narratives. That is notoutwardly surprising, but the tangential conversation that results is. Once theinitial topic is painted over, participants run headlong into Wile E. Coyote’s
tunnel.
Intense debates about America and free expression may be a tertiary effectof the political environment. It is interesting that even those people who support
Kaepernick appeared to consider the issue from a free speech perspective. We
should be careful not to boil this effect down to “netizens do not understand thefirst amendment.” That vocabulary is genetically imputed. It would require
further study, but we may expect less parenthetical discussion if the kickoff
were something more direct. Black Lives Matter would be a good example.
That is not to blame Colin Kaepernick for the effects we observe. One mightargue that tailoring a message to the majority puts the onus for change on the
oppressed. In this case, however, it is more akin to Bellichicking an opponent’s
weapon off the field of play.
How well our results map to the broader population remains to be seen (wecertainly bumped into the limits of this method), but given the nature of these
online communities, the observed gap between media coverage and discussion
is striking. That seems to be especially true of individuals with less investmentin the material. Football is the most popular and profitable spectator sport inthe country, but it represents more than that here. Here it is an iceberg off
Colin Kaepernick’s starboard side. The ease with which football inserted itself
into conversations makes a compelling argument for including rhetoric in
implicit bias training. Think back to the precedent of Brandon Marshall and theDenver Police Department. Colin Kaepernick ’s protest had potential for
immediate change when the table was properly set.
The protest has lost some of the public’s attention, and its goals are far from
fulfilled. While discrimination is the obvious and easy answer, fine details merit
exploration. Most Americans are not outright racist and do not believe
themselves to be. It must be stressed that they are still participants in thatsystem. Conversations that move valuable intellectual resources away from asolution, even inadvertently, are part of the problem. Some might dismiss this asa form of implicit or aversive racism. However, an ethnomethodologicalexamination gives a more intimate look at the mechanism.
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Endnotes
1

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/09/the-colin-kaepernickshadowlooming-over-the-nfl/569494/ :: 10 Aug. 20192 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/15/sports/nfl-colin-kaepernick.html/ :: Accessed 10
Aug.2019
3 The case’s sudden settlement in February of this year unfortunately means we will
likely never know. The terms remain undisclosed, but tapes provided to the New YorkTimes by an anonymous source show that players agreed he should be on a roster. In ameeting between owners and prominent players in October of 2017, owners reportedlysounded pa nicked when con fronted with the idea that they were blackba lling
Kaepernick . W hen Philadelphia DL Chris L ong brought up the idea of sig ning
Kaepernick and introducing some positivity into the conversation, owners were
noncommittal. Terry Pegula, owner of the Buffalo Bills, acknowledged the divisivenessof Trump’s rhetoric, but said, “All of us now, we need to put a Band-Aid on what’s goingon in the country.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/sports/nfl-owners-kaepernick.html :: Accessed
30 Apr.2019
4 Professor Philip Stinson found that as many as eight percent of police officers arearrested for crimes in the first four years of their careers, highlighting a significant
cultural issue inside police departments. He is quoted in a 2019 NBC report saying, “An
officer gets on the stand and says ‘I feared for my life,’ and that’s usually all she wrote.
No conviction, more often than that, no charges at all.”Stinson, 2017.
5 Historian Jesse Berrett argues that the NFL is such a powerful force in American
politics that it actually remade the political landscape. He outlines the NFL’s sticky
relationship with the military in a Washington Post perspective.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/12/10/the-nflmarketingploy-that-was-too-successful-for-the-leagues-own-good/ :: Accessed 11 Aug.
2019
6 https://edition.cnn.com/2017/09/27/us/nfl-anthem-protest-race-trump-trnd/index.html/ ::Accessed 11 Aug. 2019
7 https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/mlb/report-maxwell-may-never-play-in-mlb-againafteranthem-kneel/ar-BBQWi5F :: Accessed 27 Jul. 20198 https://theundefeated.com/features/nfl-all-22-week-3-did-cowboys-owner-jerry-joneskneelwith-players-for-the-right-reasons/ :: Accessed 27 Jul. 2019
9 The tweet joins an image Ray Lewis hugging Steve Bisciotti from behind with a stillfrom the film where distraught house slave Stephen hugs his dead master from behind.
As of this writing, the tweet was still available on her account, 2019. https://t.co/N9k7nDgmDh :: Accessed 30 Sept. 201910 http://www.5z8.info/rickroll_t4w6cc_creditscore :: Accessed 26 Aug. 201911 https://thinkprogress.org/nf l-player-stops-national-anthem-protest-after-denverpolicerewrite-use-of-force-policy-591f80ae114f/ :: Accessed 24 Jul. 201912 This author could find but one major publication that disagreed with Kaepernick’s actual
message. A 2019 Quillette article entitled “Don’t Blame Police Racism for America’s
Violence Epidemic” attempts to argue that police shootings are a symptom of America’s

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13
14

15
16

deeper issues with gun violence.
ht t p s : //q u i l l et t e . c o m / 2 01 9/ 0 7/ 2 7/d o nt - b l a m e - p o l i c e - r a c i s m - for- a m e r i c a s violenceepidemic/:: Accessed 26 Aug. 2019
Gibson, 2017.
Online network research firm, Graphika, claims that Russian sockpuppet accounts wereinvolved in the backlash against Nike after their “Believe in something. Even if it means
sacrificing everything.” ad campaign featuring Kaepernick. Graphika CEO John Kelly is
on record with the Daily Mail saying “they were definitely participating in the Nike
hashtag and in particularly driving it at the beginning.” According to their research,more than 80,000 different Twitter accounts had posted messages with anti-Nikehashtags within less than a day of the campaign launch. They claim ‘many’ were linked
to the IRA. The finding is interesting, but the vague wording should be noted.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/sportsnews/article- 6257003/Colin-Kaepernickadvertcriticism-heightened-Russian-run-social-media-accounts.html :: Accessed 26 Aug.
2019
Mills, 1940.
Blips represent events mentioned above. Google Trends data is normalized to thehighest number of searches in a given period. As such, data represent relative
popularity and height differences may not be an indication of overall search popularity.
Searches cannot be compared across graphs. Source: Author.

17 Skitka, 2006.
18 There are dozens of fascinating articles that use internet forums and grounded theory,
but for this paper, we will pay less attention to these. The methodology is complicatedand, according to Grbich, requires the researcher be extraordinarily impartial anddisconnected from existing theory. It would be quite easy to proffer a bad theory withthe given subject matter.
Grbich, 2013.
19 Moloney, 2003.
20 Researchers such as Mizukawa Yoshifumi, Maeda Hirofumi, and Gregory S. Poole havebeen producing quality scholarship here in Japan with these methods for years. The
former released a guide to ethnomethodology wherein they describe a method that
reproduces interviews in excruciating detail. This process may allow the reader to
identify where the interviewer misinterpreted, missed, or ignored something important.
21 Shoji, 2014.
22 That is a criticism this researcher received while researching ethnic exclusionism inrural Japanese villages.
23 Bishop, 2013.

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24 Williams, 2002.
25 In Senate testimony, Director of Research for New Knowledge Renée DiResta outlines
how the Moscow-based Internet Research Agency used ‘sockpuppet’ accounts to disrupt
forums and comment sections on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Russian agentsrecognized America’s racial tension as a fracture point and attacked it specifically. They
released divisive content targeted at African Americans on issues vital to them, such aspolice brutality. The fact that a foreign power was able to exploit this weakness in
American society while YouTube and government agencies claimed that “IRA content
was not targeted to the US or to any particular sector of the US population” is asignificant finding.
Senate IC Hearing, 2018.
26 Holtz, 2012.
27 Hawthorne, 2013.
28 Even this term is loaded. It can sound as if the anthem itself is being protested rather
than the systemic problems of the country the anthem represents.
29 https://www.mediaite.com/tv/don-lemon-confronts-cnns-ed-martin-for-bashingnflprotests-what-protest-is-acceptable :: Accessed 8/13/19
30 Gibson, 2017.
31 Initially, YouTube comments were also included in the analysis, but the amount ofcontent that had to be coded as ‘vitriolic’ or ‘trolling’ was close to 60% for some videos.
32 Santana, 2014.
33 For example, in a thread discussing his protest and methods, a user posted an image ofKaepernick sitting on the bench listening to music captioned: “Colin during the anthem.”
The same image is again posted below captioned: “Colin after the anthem.” Thecomment is decidedly negative, but the content is too open to interpretation. This post iscoded as ‘neutral.’Another example would be a post with no quotes for context that said: “Stand up forwhat is right, sit down for what is wrong?” This post appears to be a negative reaction
to Kaepernick, but there is not enough information.
34 “The Wrong Type of Protest”
Code counts (count/total posts): negative - 160/1,227, positive - 60/848, neutral - 78/1,914
Expected (count/total posts): negative- 92/1,227, positive - 63/848, neutral - 143/1,914
35 “He Sucks”
Code counts: negative - 172/1,227, positive - 30/848, neutral - 85/1,914
Expected: negative - 88/1,227, positive - 61/848, neutral - 131/1,914
36 https://theundefeated.com/features/33-quarterbacks-signed-before-colin-kaepernickfreeagent :: Accessed 1/11/19
37 “He’s Too Privileged”
Code counts: negative - 147/1,227, positive - 15/848, neutral - 70/1,914
Expected: negative - 79/1,227, positive - 49/848, neutral - 111/1,914
38 “But Democrats”
Code counts: negative - 31/1,227, positive - 1/848, neutral - 38/1,914
Expected: negative - 22/1,227, positive - 15/848, neutral - 35/1,914
39 “But Republicans”
Code counts: negative - 7/1,227, positive - 119/848, neutral - 194/1,914
Expected: negative - 98/1,227, positive - 68/848, neutral - 154/1,914
40 All Tangents
Code counts: negative - 176/1,227, positive - 128/848, neutral - 558/1,91420

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Expected: negative - 265/1,227, positive - 183/848, neutral - 414/1,914
41 “Football Tangent”
Code counts: negative - 19/1,227, positive - 9/848, neutral - 115/1,914
Expected: negative - 44/1,227, positive - 30/848, neutral - 69/1,914
42 “Anthem/Flag Tangent”
Code counts: negative - 54/1,227, positive - 58/848, neutral - 95/1,914
Expected: negative - 64/1,227, positive - 44/848, neutral - 99/1,914
43 “On-Topic”
Code counts: negative - 75/1,227, positive - 181/848, neutral - 77/1,914
Expected: negative - 102/1,227, positive - 71/848, neutral - 160/1,914
44 “Vitriol”
Code counts: negative - 211/1,227, positive - 44/848, neutral - 108/1,914
Expected: negative - 112/1,227, positive - 77/848, neutral - 174/1,914
45 Santana, 2014.
46 “Racist Trope”
Code counts: negative - 111/1,227, positive - 3/848, neutral - 43/1,914
Expected: negative - 48/1,227, positive - 33/848, neutral - 75/1,914
47 “Meta”
Code counts: negative - 3/1,227, positive - 128/848, neutral - 39/1,914
Expected: negative - 52/1,227, positive - 36/848, neutral - 82/1,91421

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