Best Of: Colin Kaepernick / Danielle Brooks

Fresh Air

Colin Kaepernick reflects on his childhood, football career, and activism a decade after taking a knee during the national anthem to protest

Key takeaways

• Kaepernick's early experience of racial violence as a child shaped his lifelong commitment to justice.
• His parents' well-intentioned but colorblind approach created emotional distance around race.

Main topics

• Racial identity and childhood trauma
• Athletic activism and NFL exclusion

Notable quotes

"We want to stop police killing Black people. And the NFL had an issue with that being said."

Conclusion

Both Kaepernick and Brooks illustrate how personal history, racial ide

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) This is Ira Glass. On This American Life, we tell stories about when things change. Like for this guy, David, whose entire life took a sharp, unexpected, and very unpleasant turn. And it did take me a while to realize it's basically because the monkey pressed the button. That's right. Because the monkey pressed the button. Surprising stories every week, wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 7 (0:24) From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley in Los Angeles. Today, former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick. He took a knee during the national anthem to protest police violence and never played in the NFL again. A decade later, he says the point of that protest is still being missed. Speaker 8 (0:44) We want to stop police killing Black people. And the NFL had an issue with that being said. I want people to just take a moment and think about that. Why would that be an issue for anybody to say we want police to stop killing Black people? Speaker 7 (1:01) Also, actor Danielle Brooks. She first became known as Tasty on Orange is the New Black. While shooting the series, she also auditioned for the Broadway revival of The Color Purple. She knew she had to be ready. Speaker 3 (1:14) I remember, like, they had a table with... the director and producers. And I went straight up to that table and I tapped that table and I was like, all my life I've had to fight. And I Speaker 6 (1:27) just remember them being like, whoa. That's coming Speaker 7 (1:29) up on Fresh Air Weekend. Speaker 1 (1:35) This message comes from WISE, the smart way to manage your money around the world. With WISE, you can send, spend, and receive money in over 40 currencies at the mid-market rate. Learn more at WISE.com. T's and C's apply. This week on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, we talk with Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Hernan Diaz about how he's used the same fountain pen for the last 30 years. What would happen if you lost it? Do you guys know those big pens with four colors? Oh, yeah. I grew up with that. Don't miss our full conversation and the rest of our games. Listen to the Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Pelosi, whether you love her, one of the best speakers. the House of Representatives have ever had. Or hate her. Speaker 2 (2:21) That crazy Nancy, she is crazy. Speaker 1 (2:23) She's a force to be reckoned with. Speaker 4 (2:25) We're not letting anything stand in our way. Speaker 1 (2:28) From KQED, part of the NPR network, The Speaker, how Nancy Pelosi changed the face of power. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 7 (2:38) This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. Ten years ago, quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the National Anthem before San Francisco 49ers game, protesting police brutality against Black people. He said he wouldn't stand to show pride in a flag for a country that oppressed Black people and people of color. Within days, he was the most talked-about athlete in America, and after that season, he never played another NFL game. Kaepernick later filed a grievance accusing NFL owners of colluding to keep him out of the league and later reached a settlement. He went on to found the Know Your Rights camp and a publishing company and co-created a Netflix series with Ava DuVernay about his childhood. He became a father, and through all of it, he kept training for another shot at the NFL, a shot that still has not come. Over the last decade, Kaepernick has given very few interviews. Well, now he's written a new memoir called The Perilous Fight, and it begins not with a protest against the anthem, but with Kaepernick as a Black child, adopted by white parents, and growing up in a predominantly white town, learning about race in ways that would shape the rest of his life. Colin Kaepernick, welcome to Fresh Air. Speaker 2 (3:58) Tanya, thanks for having me on. Very excited for the conversation today. Speaker 5 (4:02) Well, Colin, I'd like to actually start where you begin in the book. You are eight years old. You are walking home from playing with friends. You are drunk on the freedom of being a kid in the summer. And you spot this group of middle schoolers inside of someone's open garage and you decide to walk over. And can I have you pick up and read from there? Speaker 2 (4:28) Yeah. I stopped short. and the three boys stared back at me. They were all white, like almost everybody in Turlock. The boys exchanged words with each other. Then two of them sprinted towards me. The other one went off deeper into the garage. My heart jumped as they grabbed me around my arms. Hey, what are y'all doing? They pulled me toward a large rose tree that stood next to the house. The third boy reappeared from the garage with a rope in his hands. With my back pressed against the tree, they started wrapping the rope around me. It was happening so fast, I didn't understand. All three were laughing hysterically. I began to panic and then cry. The threads of the rope, coarse and itchy, bit into my arms. Why are they doing this? Stop, I cried out, hot tears streaming down my face. What are you doing? I thought these kids were my friends. Why are they trying to tie me to a tree? Please stop, I shouted, the tears now clouding my vision. I felt thorns pressing into my back through the t-shirt I was wearing. Go back to Nigeria, one of them spit out. The other two giggled in response. Just then, one of our neighbors drove by, a white man who lived on the corner. Hey, what are you kids doing, he said, slowing down in the middle of the street with a curious look on his face. My captors took off running, laughing the whole time. Speaker 5 (6:23) Thank you for reading that, Colin. You know, the start of a book often tells us a lot about the greater story that we're about to read. And kids, for better or for worse, don't often tell their parents everything they experience. And for you, a black boy adopted by white parents, you seem to instinctively know this was something you could not tell them. What made you unsure that they wouldn't have your back? Speaker 2 (6:54) I think the experiences that I had up to that point in my life. At a young age, Speaker 8 (7:02) I knew how teachers were engaging with me and the response there. I saw how the community would engage with me. I saw how people would treat me when I'm by myself versus when my parents were there. And I also knew that our house wasn't one that talked about race or talked about issues or problems more broadly. And again, instinctively as a black boy, I didn't think they would believe me. I didn't think they would have my back in that moment because I hadn't seen that show up in that way. Speaker 6 (7:35) And Speaker 8 (7:36) I think it's one of the things that I knew I had to get myself together before walking in that house. I went and got cleaned up, came downstairs and went about the day like nothing had happened. But it was a moment that also shaped and defined me. Speaker 5 (7:57) You write about your parents that you understood they loved you. That was not a question, but that there was only so much blackness that they could stand. What did that look like in your house? Speaker 8 (8:13) It showed up in relation to how I dress, the music I listen to, my hairstyles, who I looked up to and admired. Speaker 8 (8:25) Just culturally, there was a pretty consistent tension and clash there just as far as who I was being a young black boy and what they thought was best being two white parents coming from Wisconsin. And my parents very much took the approach of, hey, we're going to treat all of our kids the same or treat all of them equally. Speaker 8 (8:53) And I think the intention behind that is right. But the reality is how I have to navigate the world as a young black boy and how they need to think about how they show up for a young black boy is drastically different than what my brother and sister would need as far as support. Speaker 5 (9:13) You know, one of the striking things that you write about in the book are your experiences with black people in this mostly white town. What were your experiences with the small number of black people that you would encounter? Speaker 2 (9:29) Yeah. Well, I would say the Speaker 8 (9:32) part that I was navigating is culturally, how do you show up? As a young black boy within a community that largely doesn't have black folks in it. And where do you get guidance? Where do you get mentorship from? And. I saw that from other black folks in the community in different ways. Some of my teammates, their mothers being ones that are looking out for me and giving me guidance and support while we're playing sports. It showed up as friends and teammates giving me guidance in relation to navigating hair and some of the politics around that. But also more broadly, As I'm getting older, understanding how to navigate police, understanding how to navigate situations where you may be targeted, understanding how racism shows up within a community. Those are things that I had to learn outside of my household. Speaker 5 (10:39) You were naturally an athlete from a very young age, an optimum athlete. And it sounds like sports kind of became your escape. Is that a good characterization? Speaker 2 (10:52) It did become an escape in many ways. It's not to say that those issues don't still arise there. But one of the things that I always appreciated about sports is it became much more difficult for people to approach things from a subjective lens. Sports is very you won or you lost. You did your job or you didn't. You scored a touchdown or you didn't. You completed the pass or you didn't. And having that level of definitive clarity that people can't manipulate to say, oh, you aren't good or you aren't capable, it becomes much more difficult when things are so objective. And I will say particularly with football, culturally there were more black people within football, so I got to have more of that sense of community around it. Speaker 5 (11:52) Okay, Colin, it is August 2016. You're with the 49ers, a preseason game at home against Houston. And you're not even playing because you have gone through some surgeries. You're in a sweatsuit on the sideline, and the anthem starts. Take me to that moment, what was happening in the world, and what was happening in you. Speaker 2 (12:16) Yeah, August 2016, I had at this point, I played in the Super Bowl, had played in the NFC Championship game, back-to-back years. I've gone through this process of Speaker 8 (12:32) educating myself on black history, on systems, on the politics of black culture. And that had been going on for years. Speaker 8 (12:46) Alongside that, we also are in the wave of seeing very Speaker 2 (12:52) viral and very visceral instances of police killing black folks. We had seen this with Mike Speaker 8 (12:59) Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner. But leading into the 2016 season, we see Mario Woods in San Francisco. We see Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge. We