The NHL stands, The NFL kneels

There are only 15 black American players in the NHL, and one can assume that they grew up in suburbs rather then ghettos due to the fact they could afford the equipment and training to become NHL caliber hockey players. While the NFL has players who have grown up in the thick of police brutality and discrimination, and may feel they owe it to their communities to use the platform of their involvement in proffesional sports entertainment to stand (or kneel) united, I would assume the predominantly white NHL would not partake. As a soldier sees an injustice in the world and fights against it. I would rather the enraged communities being targeted and unlawfully murdered at the hands of police take a non violent approach to protest the injustices they see in their country and their communities. We're it better to stand silent as your brothers fall or to kneel in protest against their felling? Race is a very complicated problem in America, and not to kid ourselves, in Canada too. When we allow ourselves to dehumanize people because they don't look or believe like us, they become numbers and statistics rather then sons and fathers, brothers and friends. Everyone of us has a beating heart and goals and dreams, some yet to be discovered and some forever lost in the blaze of a gun muzzle as the blood of another kind of creature pools underneath where a life had been. You can deride the NFL players silent protest, against a society that's set up to imprison blacks for minor infractions, that sees traffic stops turn to fatalities, that sees banks prey on undereducated dreamers, keeping them in a cycle of debt and poverty, as a whiny pussy move. But to do nothing is to be part of the problem, not the solution. And to propagate the idea that what the NFLers is doing is anything less then a cry for help for the broken families left in the wake of racial violence and discrimination, is to undermine what freedom to think, feel and live free from the fear of your own judicial system, cops, courts, prison and death. Can you truly blame them for not standing united?