English: homework (p.

140)

HUANG Kevin Seconde 5

“You cannot glorify Muhammad Ali and vilify Colin Kaepernick” is document from the New
Jersey Opinion, appeared in August 30 2016. This document is talking about some people’s
achievements, and the fact that they can also be despised, hated. In a first part, we are going to see what
the document wants to tell us. In a second part, we are going to explain why the people that were
mentioned in the document can be honored and how they can also be hated. Finally, we are going to
recapitulate and speculate about the reason why this article was written.

We can see in the document that many people were celebrated: John Carlos; Tommie Smith;
Jackie Robinson, Jim Brown, Billie Jean King… Some were considered as a hero, some were being
admirable for “raising their fists in Mexico City in 1968 as a protest against racial inequality”, while
others were praised for their courage…. Even with those great achievements which can lead one to
consider them to be heroes, we can also notice that even “heroes” can be hatred: some were pilloried;
some suffered from the hostility of being hurled.

This text talks more particularly about Colin Kaepernick and insists on the “avalanche of hate”
that he is receiving. The article tells us that a bunch of people appreciate Colin Kaepernick. They have
a positive opinion about him and the people we mentioned earlier. But one may highlight the fact that
there are plenty of other people that hate Colin Kaepernick, too. Those some people “glorify
Muhammed Ali”. We can’t really explain the reason of the hate, but one thing is certain: you cannot
glorify one and hate the other, while the two of them shares one common thing: the courage that led
them to stand, to speak up.

To put it in a nutshell, what we can pull out from this text is the fact that it is ironic to celebrate
Muhammed Ali while vilifying Colin Kaepernick. In my opinion, I think everybody have their own
reasons to hate or to appreciate someone. Colin Knapernick embodies a movement that many took part
in. Although people have their own point of view, but the fact that those same people that disagree with
the movement respect and glorify the heroes mentioned earlier is very contradictory. At the end of the
day, we can think that Colin Kaepernick is going to become a hero, too, a person that will be celebrated
in the future, because every hero has been hated before.