In 1936, Avery Brundage, head of the American Olympic Committee, wrote that sports “cannot, with good grace or propriety, interfere in the internal political, religious, or racial affairs of any country or group.” He was arguing against those calling for the United States to skip the 1936 Olympics in Berlin because of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. Brundage thought it best to stay out of what he called “the Nazi-Jew conflict.”

Three years after the first concentration camp opened at Dachau, Brundage succeeded in keeping up the pretense of staying neutral, and the United States sent athletes to Berlin. Today we recognize that he was squarely on the wrong side of history. Yet we can still hear echoes of his “grace and propriety” argument in the controversy over San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s protest during the national anthem.

Kaepernick — and now hundreds of professional, college, and high-school athletes — refuses to stand for the national anthem. He has articulated his objections to police brutality and systematic racism, and no honest sports fan has been surprised by the reaction: sportswriters and cultural commentators lament his tactics, lambast him for “disrespecting the anthem” (or the flag, or the military, or the police), and question why anyone would listen to a quarterback on these issues. Kaepernick, we are told, is at best a distraction from his team’s goals, and at worst — in the words of one anonymous NFL executive — “a traitor.”