Kaepernick’s lasting effect on the game came on the sidelines, when, in the wake of several police shootings of Black men, he took a knee in protest during the national anthem, embarrassing the barons who run the league and enraging the likes of Donald Trump, who called on Kaepernick to be fired from his post. Kaepernick’s gestures of solemn dissent—and the noisy reactions that followed—are in line with other moments of protest in sports history, including Muhammad Ali’s clash with the draft board and the U.S. government during the war in Vietnam, and the actions of the sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith, who, after winning medals at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, raised gloved fists and bowed their heads as the anthem was played during the victory ceremony. And yet, somehow, Kaepernick, who could not get another gig as an N.F.L. quarterback, has been heard from only intermittently in the past decade.
He has now written a memoir, “The Perilous Fight,” and recently spoke with me for The New Yorker Radio Hour. We discussed his persistent, despite-everything love of the game, his antipathy to those who rule the N.F.L., his activism, and his anxiety about football’s undeniable damage to those who play it. Our conversation was edited for clarity and length.
You were such an all-around athlete as a kid. Why’d you choose football over all the others?
There is a camaraderie that’s built in the huddle and on the field—
That you don’t have in baseball.
That you don’t have in baseball, that you don’t have in basketball—because, especially as a quarterback, your physical safety is dependent upon ten other people doing their jobs. It builds this sense of camaraderie and dependence on each other.
And you loved it.
Loved that element of it. There is a brotherhood there, because you know what’s at stake, you know what’s at risk there. But you go out and you put the work in to be able to accomplish that goal together. And it was hard to find that anywhere else. And football was also, culturally, very different for me.
How so?
There were a lot more Black players. For me, being a young Black boy, adopted into a white family, in a predominantly white community—
You needed that.
I found community in football, and that was also an important element for me.
That seems to be the heart of your origin story, Colin, if I may: adopted by however well-meaning white parents, who were also making mistakes all the time—of language, of intent. You set these out really beautifully in your book. And you have to teach yourself Blackness in a way that was not there in the house. Tell me about that process.
Yeah. It’s an interesting process because the important piece for me is: I think sometimes people assume there was a journey to find my Blackness, and I just don’t view it that way.
How do you see it?
I knew I was Black at a very young age. You know you’re Black. Society tells you you’re Black. My parents were very open and transparent about that. That wasn’t a secret. The evolution comes from putting your experiences as a young Black boy into the context of larger Black society and Black history that you don’t receive in your own household. And, for me, largely, in Turlock, there were no Black mentors. There weren’t—
Teachers?
I had a few, but most of them were coaches.
Tell me about the town you were growing up in. You were where?
Turlock, California—central California. I tell people, when you think about California, normally you think: blue state. You think of L.A. or San Francisco. Central California is red. So, very different environment there. I think Turlock, at that point in time, was between one and three per cent Black. So, the Black community, the Black population, were not significant.
So I had to figure out how to be able to navigate these situations, these circumstances, without really having a guide. And getting older, and later in life being exposed to literature like Malcolm X and [James] Baldwin and [Frantz] Fanon and Huey Newton and Angela Davis—getting a broader perspective helped put my experience growing up into context, but also helped put it in a broader context of Black community and Black history that was important to get me to understand systems-level thinking.
