A woman who is purportedly Colin Kaepernick’s girlfriend has issued a tweet that seemingly compared Baltimore Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti to the plantation slave owner played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Quentin Tarantino’s film Django Unchained .
It also seemed to draw a parallel between retired Ravens star Ray Lewis and the house slave portrayed by Samuel L. Jackson in the movie.
The tweet was not greeted favorably by Jason Whitlock of the Fox Sports 1 TV network (FS1), who described it as racist.
Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, is still looking for a job in the NFL. Bisciotti has publicly acknowledged that he is considering Kap as a backup to Joe Flacco, but he is also taking input on the controversial potential hire from fans, his head coach and GM, and active and former players including Ray Lewis.
Unlike most sports media pundits other than Fox Sports Radio host Clay Travis, Whitlock has expressed criticism of the Colin Kaepernick National Anthem protest against police brutality as more or less divisive, childish, uninformed, and self-serving. Kaepernick’s employment status has consumed a lot of media oxygen in the past several months and has intensified once training camps opened. In June, Whitlock strongly disagreed with a Kaepernick tweet following the not guilty verdict in the Minnesota police shooting of Philandro Castile that compared police to members of fugitive slave patrols.
The contrarian Whitlock — the former Kansas City Star and Huffington Post columnist and Ball State University football player — rejoined Fox Sports after two tours of duty with ESPN. With Colin Cowherd, another ESPN expatriate, Jason Whitlock co-hosts Speak for Yourself , an offering on FS1 that airs weekdays at 5 p.m. Eastern time, which appears to be the Fox network’s answer to ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption .
Colin Kaepernick’s girlfriend Nessa Diab compares Baltimore Ravens’ owner Steve Bisciotti to a slave master https://t.co/wWVp3XCZmT
— Daily Mail US (@DailyMail) August 4, 2017
With views that seldom fit into either the left or right paradigm, Whitlock is a vocal critic of what he considers the intrusion of progressive politics into sports culture.
He addressed the above tweet on today’s Speak for Yourself broadcast.
“Kaepernick is making it very tough on himself to get back into the league because of the people he’s associated with. I’ve said it from the very beginning: If you’re an NFL owner, if you’re an NFL head coach, or some type of executive, when you start discussing Kaepernick or bring him into your environment, you run the risk of all the people around him accusing you of being a bigot…Steve Bisciotti, the owner of the Ravens, has done the right thing being transparent, showed an interest in Kaepernick—no good deed goes unpunished. Kaepernick’s girlfriend tweets out this picture…It’s analogizing Steve Biscotti to a slave owner from Django and Ray [Lewis] to a slave…this is racist, it’s over the top…somehow we’re standing for this, that Kaepernick’s girlfriend can do this to people for no other reason than Steve Biscotti made the mistake of showing an interest in Colin Kaepernick…”
With the apparent injury to the left knee of Miami Dolphins quarterback Ryan Tannehill today on the practice field, Whitlock and the panelists discussed south Florida as a possible landing spot for Kaepernick in the upcoming NFL campaign. Whitlock noted, however, that Kaepernick’s support for Fidel Castro’s communist regime, which included wearing a Fidel T-shirt, would not sit well with Miami’s large Cuban-American community. As a general principle, Whitlock added, an NFL owner would be wise to consult the fans/ticket holders in the same way that a business often checks in with its customer base about a major decision.
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Ray Lewis, who was sitting to Jason Whitlock’s left on the set, seemed unperturbed by the Django -related tweet, however. Watch the discussion embedded below and draw your own conclusions.
. @WhitlockJason : Colin Kaepernick’s girlfriend exposes why NFL owners, executives, and coaches are scared of Kap’s racial circus. pic.twitter.com/xhnWMDuyG9
— Speak (@SpeakOnFS1) August 3, 2017
Writing at his Outkick the Coverage blog, Travis also weighed in on the Django Unchained tweet.
“Every NFL owner will see this Tweet and think, what’s the benefit here? Why would I employ a guy whose problems exceed his talents, a guy to back up my starter that if everything goes well will never see the field at all, when he’s likely to do or say outlandish things that alienate the customers of my business? And when everything his crew of social justice warriors does will also create a never ending media circus around my team?”
Travis also wondered why none of the sports networks who express concern about Kaepernick’s employment status are so far unwilling to hire him as an NFL commentator for their game telecasts.”The answer is simple, because he’s bad for business,” Clay Travis insisted. He also claimed that all the other players who joined in on the National Anthem protest are nonetheless on the active rosters of NFL teams.
Do you think that Colin Kaepernick, who has previously announced that he is abandoning his take-a-knee protest, will get an NFL job this season?
[Featured Image by Ted S. Warren/AP Images]