When Colin Kaepernick first sat down during the national anthem, he was protesting a specific kind of injustice. Everything else is just noise.

In the most politically active sports weekend in recent American history, one image stood out above all others: Pittsburgh Steelers tackle Alejandro Villanueva, alone at the mouth of the tunnel at Chicago’s Soldier Field, chest puffed out and gloved hand over his heart. None of his teammates were anywhere to be seen as the Steelers refused to take the field for the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Photo by Joe Robbins/Getty Images

So-called anthem protests have been part of American sports for just over a year now, since last August 26, when then–San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick quietly remained seated before a game. (He didn’t start kneeling until later on.) If you want to make a commotion, a 49ers preseason game isn’t the most visible venue, and by the time anyone noticed, Kaepernick had already been sitting for two weeks. He talked about it only when asked directly.

“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” Kaepernick said. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

The idea that the police ought not to kill innocent people shouldn’t be that controversial, but many interpreted not standing for the anthem as unpatriotic or disrespectful to members of the armed services who risked or even lost their lives in defense of the United States. That’s not surprising or even necessarily a strike against kneeling, which Kaepernick began to do at the suggestion of former Green Beret Nate Boyer. The purpose of protest, after all, is to bring unpleasant truths into public places, so that complacent people who think they have no stake in changing the status quo will be forced into action.

Since then, the NFL has essentially blacklisted Kaepernick, who remains unsigned after becoming a free agent this offseason. However, prior to this weekend, dozens of other athletes in the NFL and in other sports had followed his example and undertaken some form of protest to express their dissatisfaction with our country’s unwillingness to confront its ongoing history of racism.

Then, after a year of simmering détente, Donald Trump barged into the fray. At a speech in Alabama, the president called on NFL owners to respond to players like Kaepernick by saying, “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired! He’s fired!”

Within 48 hours, “anthem protests” that had started with a few politically active football, basketball, and soccer players had become the dominant topic of discussion in North American sports. For the first time, an MLB player, Oakland’s Bruce Maxwell, knelt for the anthem. Entire NFL teams either stood in solidarity—sometimes arm-in-arm with the very owners who, through campaign donations or outright vocal support, helped get Trump elected then turned around and ensured Kaepernick wouldn’t play in NFL this year—or refused to come out for the anthem at all.

That’s how Villanueva, a 6-foot-9 former U.S. Army Ranger, came to be standing all alone—the soldier dutifully saluting his flag, respecting his country no matter what abuse he took or what the rest of his rabble-rousing teammates said or did. The symbolism of a former soldier bravely saluting the flag alone—in contrast to Kaepernick, with his Afro and Fidel Castro T-shirt—is outrageously powerful, and jersey sales numbers bear that out.

But more than anything, Villanueva’s lonely—and, it turns out, unwitting—counterprotest recalls the viral images of the Missouri teenager who stood by herself to “protect” a line of cops in riot gear in Ferguson two years ago. And when you look at the purpose of the protest and the opposition to it, the image is just as ridiculous.

In the United States, unlike numerous other democracies, federal elections—and many at the state and local levels—operate under a first-past-the-post electoral system: Whoever gets the most votes wins. In 1946, French social scientist Maurice Duverger observed that plurality voting—like we have in the United States—leads to two-party political systems, an observation later named after him and folded into political science orthodoxy.

Duverger’s Law doesn’t hold everywhere, but it holds in the United States, which has, for all the geographic and policy realignment over the past 150 years, been a battle of Democrats vs. Republicans since the Civil War. Our political arguments have come to mimic our elections: There are two sides to every issue, and both are worthy of exploration.

Many people find it offensive that athletes might not stand for the national anthem—that’s one side of the issue. Kaepernick and those who follow him represent the other side of the issue, and, in a political environment governed by a two-party system—and in which both parties are assumed to be operating in good faith—both sides of the argument have to be honored.

The trouble is defining those sides. Even among the Steelers, the message is mixed as to whether remaining off-field for the anthem was itself a protest or a deliberate attempt to avoid controversy. Quarterback Ben Roethlisberger took to his website to say he didn’t think it was right to sit or kneel during the anthem. Meanwhile, Villanueva told reporters that he regretted showing up his teammates and giving the implication that he didn’t support their right to protest—when, in fact, he does.

It’s easy to get confused. How subversive can a protest be if it involves not just owners, but such odious owners as Jerry Jones and Dan Snyder? Is kneeling or sitting or raising one’s fist during the anthem the same as kneeling before the anthem, or locking arms? Or do those two actions blunt the message, watering it down to make it palatable to as many people as possible? Was the president’s commentary just a catalyst for dozens more athletes to mobilize against racism and police violence, or is this now a protest against Trump himself?

Whatever the intention behind the protests is now, opponents are still spinning it as anti-America or anti-military. (It’s troubling that we so readily conflate our country with its military, and that we so readily assume that American military goals and actions are by definition righteous and worth defending, but that’s a different story.) These ambiguities make it easier to misunderstand, honestly or deliberately, why Kaepernick and those who followed him knelt or spoke out, and to avoid confronting a question that has but one correct answer, however uncomfortable it might be.

Solving American racism, whatever that means, would be like putting a man on the moon: It can be done, but it’d be a time-consuming, expensive, and tedious process that might not even be possible as long as “America is the greatest country in the world” remains a bipartisan call-and-response. Exceptionalism, after all, doesn’t tend to foster self-reflection.

But Kaepernick’s words pinpoint a specific expression of racism in American society, one that is identifiable and soluble—one that the citizens of St. Louis are protesting right now. Those “bodies in the street” include Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, John Crawford III, and countless others—mostly African American—who were either killed by police or died suspiciously in police custody. Castile’s and a few of Gray’s killers were acquitted, and Rice’s, Crawford’s, Garner’s, and Brown’s killers—along with the other officers investigated in the Gray case—have not stood trial.

This isn’t about the anthem, or the flag, or the military, or even specifically about the president. To Kaepernick’s broader point, modern police brutality is part and parcel of our nation’s racist legacy, from the genocide of Native Americans to slavery to internment camps to Jim Crow to the suggested brutality of “welfare reform” and the prison-industrial complex, and now to a president who rode to power by emboldening hateful people to say openly what once was merely insinuated.

It’s about the fact that police officers can mow down people of color without any consequence.

It’s understandable, given the complicity of so many of us in such horrors, that white Americans would want to avoid thinking about this legacy of racism at all costs, even as it costs lives across the country right now. It’s unsettling enough that there’s a class of people in this country that’s armed to the teeth, acts like a street gang, and brings its force to bear disproportionately on people of color.

But the police are the civilian manifestation of the government’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force. That society is the result of people coming together for mutual protection is an idea as old as Thomas Hobbes; German philosopher Max Weber said a monopoly on the legitimate use of force is what makes a state a state to begin with. And here we have those state-appointed protectors not only abusing the most sacred trust we can give them—trust in the very thing that makes us a country with a flag worth saluting, in Weber’s terms—but using it against the population it’s supposed to protect. There is no betrayal quite like betrayal by one’s erstwhile protectors, and you can see why so many people can’t or won’t entertain that we live in a country like that.

The recent killings (which include children) and the righteous outrage those killings spawned have been met with cops and prosecutors not rooting out the rotten and untrustworthy among themselves, but instead closing ranks and shutting out the public they were empowered to serve.

That’s what this debate is about: Some say cops shouldn’t be able kill people of color with impunity, and others want everyone else to shut up and go back to watching football. There aren’t two worthwhile viewpoints here, and there’s no greater condemnation of our culture than the idea that both sides deserve equal consideration.