SAY WHAT NOW?: Why Does Michael Vick Think He’s Qualified to Say Colin Kaepernick Needs to “Cut His Afro”?

I don’t know why Michael Vick would think that he is in any position to tell anybody how to rehab his image, but the convicted dogfighter and gambling-ring operator did just that when he offered quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who is obviously being blackballed, advice on how to get back in good with the white folks over at the NFL. His advice? “Cut off your black-ass afro.” OK, he didn’t use those exact words, but he did say that Kaepernick should cut his hair.

"First thing we got to get Colin to do is cut his hair." — @MikeVick advises Kaepernick on rebuilding his image pic.twitter.com/YENvUPOIgP

— Speak For Yourself (@SFY) July 17, 2017

“The first thing we got to get Colin to do is cut his hair,” said Vick on FS1’s Speak for Yourself on Monday. “Listen, I’m not up here to try to be politically correct, but even if he puts cornrows in it, I don’t think he should represent himself in that way in terms of just a hairstyle. Just go clean-cut. Why not? You’re already dealing with a lot of controversy surrounding this issue. What he needs to do is just try to be presentable.”

I understand that this is one black quarterback telling another what he thinks is “presentable,” but there is just so much wrong with this that I don’t even know where to begin.

Vick, who was famously jailed for almost two years in 2007 for his involvement in a dogfighting ring, had cornrows himself in his last year with the Atlanta Falcons before he got shipped off to the pokey for 21 months. When he got out, he cut his hair and had a career with the Eagles and a few other teams for a few years, and ostensibly lived happily ever after. But Mike, let me bullet-point out what is all kinds of wrong with your statement.

I say, if Kaepernick wants to let his kinky hair fly, so be it! Nobody asked all those guys with dreadlocks to cut their damn hair. Oh, I get it—it’s to make NFL owners and racist fans feel as if he’s getting in line. It’s fine when black football players are shooting themselves in the leg, making it rain in strip clubs or beating black women down—but social justice, that’s just a little too close to home for the 1 percent owners and the league’s racist fans. It’s time to call a spade a spade.

We Love you, Michael, but sometimes you wrong. So sit down, put a muzzle on it and do something right for and by your people. Or your words might come back to bite you in the ass.

Kaepernick appears to have responded to Vick’s words with a simple tweet entitled “Stockholm Syndrome.”