When the season began, and Kaepernick again became the center of a controversy for a quarterback with skills not being signed by a number of teams in need, I thought about the Packers, and because their position is secure with Aaron Rodgers, I didn’t give it a second thought.

There wasn’t a need. Rodgers gave our team a lot of confidence week in, week out. That was before this afternoon. When Aaron Rodgers went down with a shoulder injury I immediately thought of Colin Kaepernick. There are a number of reasons why I imagine him to be a good choice to be signed immediately by the Green Bay Packers.

In the immediate, the Packers need a quarterback that can step in and read a defense like a veteran, one who is willing to take risks rather than wonder about the possibility due to limited exposure. Perhaps Brett Hundley will prove the skeptics wrong, but right now, he’s a rookie with green skills playing for a team loaded with talent. If Kaepernick is as good as the critics want him to be then he would be capable of coming in and running the offense of the Packers right away.

The reason Colin Kaepernick is not playing in the NFL in a lot of people’s eyes is because of his statement towards an American tradition, the Star Spangled Banner, and its symbolic measure of our country and society’s allegiance toward a patriotic sentiment. However, the argument has been clear that he’s not slamming our nation for being the icon of freedom we are due to our armed forces and national pride. What Colin Kaepernick speaks of with his actions is the sad reality of the treatment of his own race based upon the color of his skin. That’s an argument a lot of our society would like to ignore and rather than continue dialogue, they might just as soon as brush it off with erroneous statements of race-baiting and displaced systemic error. The fact is, our society needs to face its ills.

Colin Kaepernick represents an athlete with certain skills that are asking for an opportunity to be showcased. I personally stood in line with the critics in that I felt like he was a player surrounded with talent, and when that began to fade, so did his skills. There were seemingly no teams in the league that wanted his talents, and a lot of the scrutiny appeared based upon his abilities, somehow making it easy to ignore the issue of race having anything to do with his pariah-like identity.

So now there is a team that needs him to step in immediately, not a team that at the beginning of the season was willing to shake up their plan. The Packers had a plan and that player went down, and there is precedent for this move.

Our society needs this gesture, in that, if Kaepernick came in and succeeded he would be everything the critics suggest he is not – someone capable of moving a team forward because of his skill-set, someone still capable of leading a team, someone with genuine passion for the game. He plays for the Packers for six weeks, or perhaps the rest of the season, and next year he signs with another team in need, now having redeemed himself as a player in the eyes of his critics.

At the same time, society has to take a step back, and wipe off the egg they have allowed themselves to face due to their own ignorance of the perpetuated nature of his gesture toward the National Anthem. Society can now readily acknowledge the man behind the action actually did have a point to be made, and Colin Kaepernick can step onto a team and play the game he loves and have a chance to prove he can play amongst the best rather than spending the rest of his career being displaced because of a sentiment of systemic privilege.

I have reasons why I want Colin Kaepernick to play for the Green Bay Packers. Primarily, I want them to win games, and I think he’s capable of moving the team forward. But more importantly, I want the saga of his banishment to be acknowledged and brought to light in a manner that gives both him the football player a chance to succeed on the field and our society a chance to redeem its own lack of humility when it comes to facing the ills of racism in this modern century.