“This Is Bigger Than Football”: Growing Up With Colin Kaepernick

Growing up as a husky, bespectacled Black kid in the Midwest, I loved football, even though it wasn’t until after I stopped playing the game that I benefited from a late-adolescent growth spurt. Still, watching Sunday afternoon and Monday night football with my father are among my most cherished moments. His all-time favorite team was the then Washington Redskins, though I was always bothered by any team that chose to have human beings as its moniker.

Depending on what stage of childhood or adolescence I was in at the time, my allegiance shifted between the Pittsburgh Steelers, the New England Patriots, or the St. Louis Cardinals (my hometown team before they moved to Arizona). Even the most casual observer knows that the quarterback is fundamentally the “headliner” for a football team. He’s the face, “the show,” the de facto leader on whose shoulders the fate of the team typically rests. The Q.B.s get the best commercial endorsements, the Super Bowl MVP awards, the trips to Disneyland. When I was younger, the few Black starting quarterbacks in the National Football League could be counted on less than one hand, but I always made it a priority to watch them play, even if their teams were playing against my faves. Guys like Randall Cunningham, Doug Williams, Warren Moon, and Donovan McNabb seemed like aliens in an American professional sports league so painfully vanilla in comparison to Major League Baseball or the National Basketball Association. There were few Black coaches either, and definitely no Black team owners. I remember when the CBS football commentator Jimmy the Greek made a comment, on air, about Blacks being bred to be physically strong, but I was too young to understand why the men in my family and church were livid about it.

Fast-forward to the 21st century. Dynamic quarterbacks of color have revolutionized the position, redefining it by blending strategy and poise, resilience and athleticism, endurance and intellect and focus, creating reel after highlight reel every Sunday afternoon. And none captured my attention more than Colin Kaepernick. Bewildered, I watched the slender six-foot-four pass caller for the San Francisco 49ers fire rockets deep into opposing teams’ territory but also weave with a nimbleness and speed belying his build. He seemed so skinny going up against defenders who far outweighed him. I always worried that a solid, direct hit would bury him in the turf. When “Kap” led his team to an unsuccessful Super Bowl berth, in 2013, I, like many fans across the country, were captivated by the field commander with the close-cropped Afro and the laid-back, easygoing smile and attitude. His life story—having been adopted by white parents and growing up in a multi-racial family—seemed ready-made for a television movie.

But that all changed on September 1, 2016, five years ago this week. On that otherwise inauspicious Thursday, Kaepernick took a knee for the national anthem during a road game. Days before, after sitting during the anthem before a preseason matchup, he told the press in a postgame interview, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” In consultation with Nate Boyer, a former NFL player who’d been a U.S. Army Green Beret, Kaepernick had decided a more appropriate form of protest would be to kneel. The gesture, in effect, honored America, the anthem, and the flag, even as it drew attention to the deaths of largely Black women and men at the hands of law enforcement officers as well as to the larger issue of systemic racism faced by people of color in this country. (It should be noted that before Kaepernick, women in the WNBA protested against police violence.)

Five years can seem like an eternity in American life, but this was before national demonstrations erupted over the violent killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Adam Toledo, and far too many others. Surreally, in June of last year, amid mass civil disobedience in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner, made a statement at the urging of Black players and their allies in response to the massive uprisings protesting the deaths of Black and Latino Americans at the hands of police officers: “We, the National Football League, condemn racism and the systematic oppression of Black people. We, the National Football League, admit we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier, and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest. We, the National Football League, believe Black lives matter. I personally protest with you and want to be part of the much-needed change in this country.”

The video message, posted on the NFL’s official Twitter account, made no acknowledgement of Kaepernick or credit him for the conversation he seeded in 2016. It is important to note the timing because even though a large percentage of Americans, by 2020, had come to recognize the persistence of endemic racism and bias toward people of color in policing, far fewer did back then, when Colin Kaepernick first knelt.

The backlash in 2016 had been swift and toxic, personal and political. That season, Kaepernick and his fellow player-protesters were singled out as anomalies, ingrates, unrepentant. He reported receiving death threats, and video footage from the period—of challenges to players’ patriotism, and the burning of Kaepernick’s team jersey—can still be pulled up on YouTube. Infamously, Donald Trump, first as a candidate and then as a president, savaged NFL players who kneeled during the anthem. In 2017, Vice President Mike Pence appeared at an Indianapolis Colts game, not as a spectator but as the star of a choreographed photo op, meant to display his political outrage: He stood for the anthem and then, knowing players would kneel, swiftly bolted from the stadium, tweeting, “I left today’s Colts game because @POTUS and I will not dignify any event that disrespects our soldiers, our Flag, or our National Anthem.”

I do not know, nor have I ever spoken to, Colin Kaepernick. But I cannot imagine the inner toll he has paid in undertaking a protest that so thoroughly divided his teammates, opponents, team owners, commentators, and fans. He went from basking in the adulation of playing in the Super Bowl to being vilified and scrutinized. And yet, as these five years have demonstrated, he was also embraced and affirmed. His act of taking a knee was a turning point in America’s willingness to accept protests that challenge institutions—such as the police or the U.S. military—that are entwined with citizens’ attitudes surrounding nationalism, patriotism, and security.

Even as the NFL has made symbolic moves to support the movement for racial justice, there have been fewer voices within the management ranks calling for Kaepernick’s return to the league. He remains, at least in his own sport, a pariah. To football fans, he is best known for kneeling, rather than for any of the snaps he took on the field as a Q.B. And it didn’t have to be this way. Over the years, Black athletes who have used their notoriety and fame to shine a light on social injustice—Bill Russell, Muhammad Ali, and Arthur Ashe come to mind—endured threats and damaging repercussions at the time. But they held onto their roles as professional athletes, and their reputations were ultimately enhanced by their public stands. Even Simone Biles—whose choice not to compete in most of her events at this year’s Olympics may have been, in its way, a form of protest—eventually reemerged to win a bronze in the individual balance beam final.

Not so Colin Kaepernick. At least not yet. In some ways, I see him as the Russell Crowe character in the 2000 Ridley Scott film Gladiator, a man expected to perform for the pleasure of onlookers without being allowed to exhibit his humanity, intelligence, or independence lest he be banished to a social, professional wilderness. There are few arenas in American life where men of color can express anger or outrage, physical rage, or violence without repercussion. Ostensibly, one would have thought that professional football was one of them.

Nonetheless, Colin Kaepernick, today, is a man reinvented. His exposure increased dramatically with his 2018 Nike ad campaign, which, even as it spurred a short-lived boycott, helped enrich the company’s coffers by $6 billion. Through Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp, he is educating young people of all backgrounds about the history of protest and about their legal rights should they find themselves in encounters with members of law enforcement. Later this month, Dave Zirin, sports editor of The Nation, will come out with The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World—a look at the global impact of Kaepernick’s act of protest. In October, Kaepernick’s eponymous publishing company will release Abolition for the People, a book that addresses prison and police reform, drawing contributions from nearly three dozen writers, activists, and formerly incarcerated citizens.

In addition, Kaepernick has partnered with filmmaker Ava DuVernay to create Colin in Black & White, an upcoming Netflix series. He has a deal with Disney to produce pieces by filmmakers of color exploring themes on race. Also in production: a documentary on the past five years of his life.

Colin Kaepernick, as it turns out, hasn’t gone anywhere—even though the last time he took a snap in an NFL game was on January 1, 2017, in a 25-23 loss to the Seattle Seahawks. That said, I haven’t sat down to watch a game on a Sunday afternoon or a Monday or Thursday night ever since.

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