Colin Kaepernick donates $100K in COVID-19 relief to minority communities

Former San Francisco 49ers quarterback and civil rights activist Colin Kaepernick has announced that he’s donating $100,000 to coronavirus relief in minority communities because he believes African Americans are being placed at greater risk due to systemic racism.

‘Black and brown communities are being disproportionately devastated by COVID-19 because of hundreds of years of structural racism,’ Kaepernick said in a video he posted Thursday on Twitter. ‘That’s why we’ve established the Know Your Rights Camp COVID-19 Fund to help address these issues.’

After guiding the 49ers to a Super Bowl berth at the end of the 2012 season, Kaepernick became a national figure in 2016 when he began protesting racist police brutality and inequality by kneeling during the national anthem. A nation-wide controversy ensued after Kaepernick was joined by other players, many of whom have continued to protest even though he has been out of the league since March of 2017.

Kaepernick, 32, earned over $43 million over his six-year career, according to spotrac.com. In recent years he has donated over $1 million to various educational and social justice charities.

According to its website , the Know Your Rights Campaign is ‘a free campaign for youth founded by Colin Kaepernick to raise awareness on higher education, self empowerment, and instruction to properly interact with law enforcement in various scenarios’

San Francisco 49ers teammates Eric Reid and Colin Kaepernick kneel on the sideline during the anthem, as free agent Nate Boyer stands prior to the game against the San Diego Chargers

According to its website, the Know Your Rights Campaign is ‘a free campaign for youth founded by Colin Kaepernick to raise awareness on higher education, self empowerment, and instruction to properly interact with law enforcement in various scenarios.’

The organization plans events with children and teenagers across the country.

The COVID-19 outbreak has disproportionately affected African Americans in many parts of the country.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that this trend is starkest in the south.

In Louisiana, for instance, black Americans accounted for 70 percent of the COVID-19 deaths as of Tuesday, but are just 33 percent of the population. Alabama’s population is only 26 percent black, but African Americans accounted for 44 percent of coronavirus fatalities in the state as of Tuesday.

‘The rate at which black people are dying, compared to whites, is really just astounding,’ Courtney Cogburn, an associate professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work, told the Associated Press. ‘There are patterns at this intersection of race and socioeconomic status that make it very clear this is just not a story about poverty.’

‘It’s sick. It’s troubling. It’s wrong,’ Mayor Bill de Blasio agreed, adding, ‘we are going to fight back with everything we’ve got.’

African Americans and members of some ethnicities share an additional vulnerability: They are overrepresented among workers like nurse aides, grocery store clerks, emergency dispatchers and public transportation employees who cannot telecommute. That forces them out into the general public at a time when others are under strict stay-at-home orders.

Provident Hospital of Cook County nurse Kate Ikenyi participates in an end of shift demonstration, Monday, April 6, 2020, in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. The city is launching a health campaign focused on the city’s black and brown communities, following a media report highlighting the disproportionate number of black residents among those who have died of COVID-19 complications in the city

Staff members at Woodlin Elementary School distribute computers to parents of Montgomery County students who do not have them March 26, 2020 in Silver Spring, Maryland. Due to the outbreak of COVID-19, students across the U.S. are increasingly attending their classes online due to the closure of schools

‘All one has to do is stand on a platform and you’ll see that the trains are filled with black and brown and low-income people going into communities to service those who are able to telecommute,’ said Eric Adams, president of New York City’s Brooklyn borough.

Milwaukee community organizer Sylvester Jackson, who was recently diagnosed with COVID-19, lives on the city’s predominantly black north side, home to a concentration of cases. ‘It is unbelievable that people on one side of this city are dying like this,’ he said.

Each loss leaves a ripple, forever altering families and communities.

The pastor of a black church in Baton Rouge was one of Louisiana’s first confirmed coronavirus deaths, followed days later by the loss of a Shreveport clergyman known for his street ministries. The virus claimed one of the state’s most revered musicians, Ellis Marsalis, along with a popular New Orleans DJ who was a leading figure in the city’s bounce music scene.

In Detroit, the deaths include Gloria Smith, a fixture at the city’s African World Festival, who died within a week of her husband, and educator and playwright Brenda Perryman.

Marsha Battle Philpot, a writer and cultural historian known as Marsha Music, said a Facebook memorial page is flooded daily with stories of loss among black people in Detroit.

‘I think this is going to be a collective loss that is going to reverberate through generations,’ she said.

African Americans and members of some ethnicities share an additional vulnerability: They are overrepresented among workers like nurse aides, grocery store clerks, emergency dispatchers and public transportation employees who cannot telecommute. That forces them out into the general public at a time when others are under strict stay-at-home orders. In this file photo, two nurses extend their arms out to maintain social distancing during a protest outside Provident Hospital over the decision to close the hospital’s emergency room amid the coronavirus pandemic

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