ABC will air a Colin Kaepernick inspired segment on Friday's episode of What Would You Do? just a day after the kick off of the 2018 NFL season, TheWrap reported on Thursday.
The docuseries will introduce a scenario where high school football players will tell their coaches that they want to take a knee during the national anthem before the first game of the season.
The scenario goes like this: a football player will tell his coach he wants to take a knee before the game, not to disrespect the flag or the military, but to protest police brutality. The scenario will be done twice in Bardstown, Kentucky and Bronx, New York, with a black football player and a white coach and again with a white football player and a white coach.
In the trailer for Friday's segment, the show asks, "What would you do if you saw a high school coach threatening a player?" The coach will threaten to kick the student off the team in a public space and will see how the unsuspecting people around them react.
"New York customers tell a coach that he needs to understand his black student's perspective," according to the episode description, "while a Kentucky customer tells a white student that kneeling is disrespectful to the military."
What Would You Do? is hosted by John Quiñones and presents a series of social experiments meant to reveal how people behave when they think no one is watching.
The segment will air in the wake of Kaepernick's Nike advertisement for the 30th anniversary of the company's "Just Do It" campaign. The advertisement is a close-up black and white photo of Kaepernick with the words, "Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything," emblazoned across his face. Kaepernick tweeted the image on Monday when the campaign launched.
Many expressed their anger at the advertisement and began destroying their Nike gear in response. Kaepernick received widespread criticism in 2016 when he began kneeling during the national anthem before NFL games.
The scenario presented by What Would You Do? is not that far-fetched, since two teenagers in Texas were removed from their high school football team in October 2017 after they kneeled during the national anthem before a game.
What Would You Do? airs Fridays at 9 p.m. ET on ABC.
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