Megan Rapinoe Pigeon Holed

Megan Rapinoe is not in the starting XI tonight, but does indeed still kneel on the ground. pic.twitter.com/8ad7FuULRQ

— Andrew Jerell Jones (@sluggahjells) September 16, 2016

The only thing America cares about less than a backup quarterback is soccer. Even the backup quarterback doesn’t care about soccer really. Megan Rapinoe has now effectively locked herself into being known as that soccer chick who takes a knee during the National Anthem. Or as the USA Today painfully dubbed her…

….the first active non-black professional athlete to show support for San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s cause.

Wow. Were no colored pie charts available to express that reach? Rapinoe once again took a knee, though this time while playing for the U.S. Women’s Soccer team in a friendly with Thailand. Friendly with Thailand more typically refers to sex tourism, but this just meant a women’s soccer match in Ohio you could make twice the effort to forget was taking place. That seemed to be the feeling throughout the largely empty stadium as Rapinoe took a knee during the National Anthem.

It’s unclear what if any steps Rapinoe has taken to alleviate social injustice in America since her last knee, but let’s assume it’s somewhere between letting her wife lick the grass stains from her knee and nothing. It’s hard not to label this entirely for show. At least Kaepernick’s been Tweeting for a solid year. That’s a something, relatively speaking. He’s also black, which might be superficial, but not entirely tangential to Black Lives Matter.

Megan Rapinoe now becomes the classic victim of her self-beatification. If she stops taking a knee, she runs the risk of being questioned as to her loyalty to this whole loosely defined social injustice honeypot. She could be taking a knee well into her golden years. Anywhere the anthem comes on. At Pinkberry buying yogurt with her lady. Oh, fuck, you Francis Scott Key. These old legs are getting tired. If only cops would start beating well-off white women.