Kitanya Responds to Comments — 26

This week I posted only once, and it was super long, so I didn’t expect it to get much traction (although I hope that changes!). I finally wrote my profile on Colin Kaepernick, and it turned out much differently and much more critical of him than I thought it would. Some of the feedback I got on Twitter was that it was a fair assessment, so I’m glad that came through. I’m not going to pretend that my previous writing doesn’t set me up as being biased in his favor — and I was trying to be impartial. I also started to wonder if I’d gone too far in the other direction and was being overly harsh to try and make up for that. Finding what I hope was the right line and tone was strangely exhausting emotionally. I think that’s one of the reasons the length ballooned and maybe got away from me — I wanted to make sure I provided clear evidence for the conclusions I was drawing. If you haven’t had the chance to read the piece, or were putting it aside until you have the time, I hope you’ll check it out and let me know what you think.

I didn’t get any comments worth responding to on the piece, so there isn’t much to discuss this week. I’ll just say that, in a strange way, I may have written the piece for Kaepernick. I think if I’d had the option to tell him all that in private, I probably would have. Probably. If it ever crosses his reading pile, I know that it might sting quite a bit, but I hope he wouldn’t take it too personally.

I’d still love to meet him one day and write a proper profile of him where he’d get to have a say, rebut some of my presumptions, and I’d have more context to make my judgments.

Just a reminder that I also have a Patreon that I’ll be more active on going forward. A good portion of my writing over there will be focused on propaganda — learning more about it, and how to combat it. Given the doctored Jim Acosta footage the White House spread, I feel like this is a worthy pursuit, and I hope you’ll check it out.

Hopefully, there’ll be more to talk about next week! Thanks for reading!