Colin Kaepernick is still fighting – for justice and for his football career

Fresh Air

In this episode of Fresh Air, Colin Kaepernick reflects on his life, activism, and ongoing fight for justice and an NFL comeback, ten years after taking a knee during the national anthem to protest police brutality against

Key takeaways

• Kaepernick's early experiences with racism—such as being tied to a tree by white peers—shaped his understanding of systemic oppression long before his NFL protest.
• He learned to navigate racial dynamics in a predominantly white community without support from his adoptive parents, who struggled to engage with Black culture.

Main topics

• Colin Kaepernick's childhood experiences with racism
• The impact of racial identity on adoptive family dynamics

Notable quotes

"I don't accept that that is going to be the end outcome of this, and will do everything I can to make sure that I change that narrative."

Conclusion

Colin Kaepernick remains committed to his dual mission: fighting for racial justice

Transcript preview

Speaker 6 (0:00) This message comes from Glass Half Full with Craig Melvin. In this podcast, the Today Show anchor talks with A-listers and athletes about the moments that shaped them. Listen, and you might get a fresh perspective. Search Glass Half Full wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 8 (0:15) This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Ten years ago, quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the National Anthem before a 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 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 hasn't come. Over the last decade, Colin has given very few interviews. Now he's written a memoir called The Perilous Fight, and it begins not with the protest against the anthem, but with Colin as a Black child, adopted by white parents and growing up in a predominantly white town, learning about race and ways that would shape the rest of his life. Colin Kaepernick, welcome to Fresh Air. Speaker 3 (1:32) Tanya, thanks for having me on. Very excited for the conversation today. Speaker 8 (1:37) 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 3 (2:03) 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 8 (3:58) 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 3 (4:29) I think the experiences that I had up to that point in my life. At Speaker 2 (4:36) a young age, Speaker 3 (4:37) I Speaker 2 (4:37) 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 8 (5:10) And Speaker 2 (5:10) 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 8 (5:32) 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 2 (5:48) It showed up in relation to how I dress, the music I listen to, my hairstyles, who I looked up to and admired. Speaker 2 (6:00) 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 2 (6:27) 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 8 (6:48) 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 (7:04) Yeah. Well, I would say the part that I was navigating is culturally, how do you show up? As a young black Speaker 5 (7:15) 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. Speaker 2 (7:24) 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 8 (8:13) 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 3 (8:27) 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 Speaker 2 (9:17) football, culturally there were more black people within football, so I got to have more of that sense of community around it. Speaker 8 (9:26) 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 3 (9:51) Yeah, August 2016, I had, at this point, I had played in the Super Bowl, had played Speaker 2 (9:59) in the NFC Championship game, back-to-back years. I've gone through this process of educating myself on black history, on systems, on the politics of black culture. And that had been going on for years. And then... Alongside that, we also are in the wave of seeing very viral and very visceral instances of police killing black folks. We had seen this with Mike 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 see Philando Castile in Minnesota. Speaker 2 (10:50) And Speaker 3 (10:52) having all of that history, all of that context, to be able to put those moments into a systematic issue led to the moment of Speaker 2 (11:05) when the Star Spangled Banner played, I didn't stand up for it because I didn't believe in the propaganda that the U.S. ultimately is putting out. The treatment of black people and the systems that have been built to continue to oppress black people and people of color more broadly. That's not something I was okay with. And I wasn't going to show pride in those systems that are continuing to kill us, continuing to target us and hold us back and discriminate against us. And to your point, at that point, I wasn't playing. I was coming off of injuries. Speaker 5 (11:47) But that ultimately led into the moments that followed that became the much broader conversation of the protest that I think most people are familiar with. Speaker 8 (11:58) Right, right. Taking the knee. Okay, so for years, the story of how the knee came to be has gone like this. You were sitting during the anthem, as we just talked about. A former Green Beret named Nate Boyer wrote you an open letter. Then he came to San Diego, sat with you in a hotel lobby, and the story goes that he talked you into kneeling instead as a way to respect the military. And you even said as much