Fox Sports host slams white critic of Kaepernick: 'That smacks of plantation mentality'
Fox Sports host Skip Bayless tore into ESPN's Trent Dilfer for accusing Colin Kaepernick of putting himself above his team for protesting police brutality.
"Obviously, I'm not black," Bayless told Undisputed co-host Shannon Sharpe. "But this is one thing I do know after years and years of working with a lot of black players and black commentators on many networks: That if you go to the place of you're telling a black man, or a black woman, 'You should know your place and stay in it,' you get to there, them's fighting words. That smacks of plantation mentality. You cannot go there, and he went there. Because no matter what you're trying to say in the football context, we're not in the football context any more. We have risen above it to an issue that is far more important than any football game."
Like Bayless, Dilfer -- a former quarterback and teammate of Sharpe's -- is white. On Sunday, Dilfer said that Kaepernick has "torn at the fabric" of the San Francisco 49ers by kneeling before the team's games.
"The big thing that hit me through all this is, this is a backup QB whose job is to be quiet and sit in the shadows and get the starter ready to play in Week 1," Dilfer said during a discussion on ESPN's NFL Countdown show."
Sharpe, who has also gone on record supporting Kaepernick, did try to explain Dilfer's viewpoint.
"There was a time when the backup quarterback was to be seen and not heard. His sole job was to make sure the [starting] defense got ready for the opponent. That was what he did," Sharpe said. "He was the scout team quarterback, and any reps that the starter did not take, he took those reps. That was then, this is now."
But Bayless scoffed at what he called "typical old-school quarterback mentality."
"That was so typical. Dispassionate. Disconnected to the point of being clueless," he said.
Watch the discussion, as aired on Wednesday, below.