Definition: In this task, you will be presented with a passage and have to answer a question based on your understanding of the events inferred from the passage. Try to find the best answer that is most likely to fill in "_". Note that the URLs in the text have been replaced with [Link].
Input: (CNN) Before Monday's preseason game between the Cleveland Browns and the New York Giants, the ongoing series of national anthem demonstrations by NFL players broke a barrier. For the first recorded time, a white player took a knee. As the anthem sounded, several Browns players knelt in what they later said was prayer. Among them was Seth DeValve, who is white and whose wife is African-American. "I wanted to support my African-American teammates today who wanted to take a knee," he said in a post-game interview. "We wanted to draw attention to the fact that there's things in this country that still need to change."For the first time, white NFL players are participating in anthem demonstrations popularized by Colin Kaepernick last yearThe anthem itself has an unexpected connection to slavery 
 Question:It's no surprise black athletes throughout _ history have expressed a complicated relationship with the anthem and the flag for which it plays.

American