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In his new memoir, The Perilous Fight, Colin Kaepernick is opening up about his childhood, his activism and what his protest of the NFL has taught him about power.
Noam Galai/Noam Galai/Getty Images for The Gordon Parks Foundation
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Noam Galai/Noam Galai/Getty Images for The Gordon Parks Foundation
A decade after Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem, the moment still follows him.
In 2016, the former San Francisco 49ers player first sat, then knelt, during the anthem to protest police brutality. The gesture spread across professional sports and turned Kaepernick from an NFL quarterback into one of the country’s most recognizable athlete-activists.
It also ended his football career.
Kaepernick has not played in the NFL since that season. He told NPR’s Morning Edition he still trains and prepares to play.
“If there’s a small chance of success or probability, my goal is to be able to go out and capture that, ” said the Superbowl quarterback on the odds of him returning to the field.
In his new memoir, The Perilous Fight, due out Sept. 15, Kaepernick goes back much further than the summer of 2016.
He opens with a memory from childhood: neighborhood children tying him to a rose tree. Growing up as the adopted Black son of white parents, Kaepernick told Morning Edition, meant encountering racism early and not always knowing whether the people closest to him would understand what was happening to him.
Years later, as videos of police killings of Black people spread across the country, Kaepernick said he had already spent years studying Black history and the systems behind what he was watching.
“You then have to ask yourself, well, what am I going to do about it?” he said.
Kaepernick sees that fight partly as one over power. He said NFL players have far more of it than they may realize, and that his protest exposed just how uncomfortable that could make the people running the league.
“I think this was really a dynamic of we need to make an example out of Colin in this situation to try to send a message to the rest of the players to stay in line,” he said.
The Perilous Fight also revisists Jay-Z’s 2019 decision to partner with the NFL through the rapper’s entertainment company Roc Nation — with the deal including Roc Nation advising on the selection of talent for the Super Bowl. Roc Nation’s partnership with the NFL came while Kaepernick remained out of the league and during a time that Kaperinck said players “were still actively protesting during that time and carrying the work forward.”
In his conversation with NPR’s Michel Martin, Kaepernick described being let down by Jay-Z’s partnership with the NFL.
“I find it disappointing,” Kaepernick said. “I had seen him come out publicly [to] support me, wear my jersey on Saturday Night Live. I had reached out prior to try to connect with him just to say thank you.”
“His organization, Roc Nation, tried to recruit me as an athlete previously, which I had turned down at that point. And then to see him come out and sign a deal with the NFL to deliberately undercut and undermine the protest is disappointing, to say the least,” Kaepernick continued.
Kaepernick added that he was additionally frustrated to finally receive a phone call from the rapper possibly anticipating questions about the Roc Nation and NFL partnership.
“That’s the only reason that he had called — to be able to say that he had spoken to me in that press conference,” Kaepernick said.
Kaepernick contends Roc Nation went as far as trying to plant stories about him in the media.
“I’d say the part that was even more disappointing was after the fact — because of the backlash that he got for doing the deal to undermine the protests — was [him] trying to go out and place hit pieces against me and say that I didn’t want to play football anymore,” Kaepernick said.
When asked by NPR if he knows “for a fact” that Jay-Z and Roc Nation attempted to place hit pieces against him, Kaepernick doubled down by saying the media told him so.
“We got the calls from reporters. We got the calls from journalists trying to validate are these things true,” Kaepernick said. “Ultimately some of those stories got pulled. But some of [the stories] organizations ran with.”
NPR reached out for comment from Roc Nation and did not hear back. In his interview, Kaepernick also discusses what came after the kneeling: the football career he still wanted, the teams he says wanted him and the NFL owners he believes kept him out.
And after a decade of everything that followed, was taking the knee worth it?
“Absolutely,” Kaepernick said.
Editor’s note: Some of the material in this story was not included in the version that aired on Morning Edition. Listen to the interview by clicking the blue button above.
