Ten Years of Colin Kaepernick's Protest and the Dark Legacy of American Racial Backlash

America likes nice round numbers, perfect for anniversaries and reflections, and it has, suddenly, been 10 years since Colin Kaepernick first protested police killings – more accurately, police killings of Black people that went unpunished either internally or by the courts – by taking a knee during the national anthem for the entirety of the 2016 NFL regular season. He never played in the league again.

Ten years covers a lot of ground, especially in these years of American darkness, and many of the important details surrounding Kaepernick, his banishment and significance have disappeared, time replaced by more time and more darkness – time moving faster than ever, at internet speed, where nothing matters, where nothing sticks. We consume by clip, by click, by meme, and knowledge by meme is not knowledge at all.

Much of the Kaepernick story was reduced to his personal banishment, but second to Barack Obama, Kaepernick is the face that propelled white anger into a “culture war” that continues earnestly into its second decade. It has traveled through the NFL, through Hollywood, the White House, and now is now corroding the WNBA. Obama’s ascent to the White House confirmed the unlikely prospect that a Black person could be elected president, ostensibly the ultimate symbol of American possibility. It was not a universal sentiment.

In the annals of American protest, which has included suffragettes breaking windows, students blocking traffic, Black Panthers armed in public, economic boycotts and marches on Washington, Kaepernick was mild by comparison – he gave voice with 60 seconds of silence. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way,” he explained on 26 August 2016 after a preseason contest between his San Francisco 49ers and the Green Bay Packers (he sat on the bench during the anthem for that game, he would kneel for the first time the following week). “There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” Combined, however, Obama and Kaepernick represented the realization of the deepest of white fears, the assumptions and expectations of Black equality that has consumed a segment of the collective white American psyche since emancipation.

Ten years later, one view of the Kaepernick legacy can be seen through a harsh, retrofitted lens: sports leagues would largely purge the troublemakers and co-opt the protests, reducing them into useless, corporate-friendly gestures; an American electorate that voted Donald Trump into power twice, as his unapologetic, unambiguous racism reflected theirs; media outlets responding in agreement, coalescing around Trump’s whiteness, appeasing their rightsholders, readers and viewers by making the conscious choice – a clear and egregious dereliction of journalistic duty – to silence the voices within who make them uncomfortable; a player class that was never nearly as bold as its greatest legends well aware of Kaepernick’s fate, unwilling to repeat it, and operating as puppets.

They didn’t have far to go. While Trump called NFL players “sons of bitches” in his first term and demanded Kaepernick be banned from the league, NFL players undermined him. Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott assured his bosses in 2018 that he was no radical, not merely by playing football but demeaning Kaepernick’s protest. “For me, I believe in doing something, action. It’s not about taking a knee,” Prescott said, undermining centuries of evidence to the contrary about the efficacy of physical protest. Even the most devout Cowboys fan could probably not name a single example where Prescott took action. He simply didn’t want to get involved.

Michael Vick, ex-convict, killer of dogs, but redeemed by the NFL following his prison sentence, told Kaepernick to “cut his hair” if he sought a pathway to forgiveness. Hall of Famer Ray Lewis told Kaepernick to “keep his mouth shut”. It should be noted that Kaepernick was exiled from the NFL for kneeling – kneeling – while Lewis, connectable to an incident that resulted in two killings as an active player, was fined $250,000 by the NFL for pleading guilty to obstruction of justice and never missed a game.

Whether hostile or oblivious, white Americans have treated this nation as a personal possession they choose to share with others, quite different from a nation that belongs to all that must be shared collectively. This country, Black people know and are harshly reminded by their white countrymen whenever they have the temerity to forget, is theirs, and that proprietorship is codified by the everyday speech of white Americans – We let you attend our schools, live in our neighborhoods, be part of our communities, play in our professional sports – and is mirrored by Black speech alike. It is the fatal language of integration.

Such assumed proprietorship demands whites receive deference for their benevolence, explains their rage when they don’t get it. It also means they believe they can revoke the privilege of being American whenever that proprietorship is challenged, as Kaepernick discovered 10 years ago. The result was a continuum: Kaepernick losing his job has now become a political philosophy at the highest levels of government: Black people have not earned their positions through the grind of hard work, but from diversity initiatives.

Only in witnessing the slow-motion murder of George Floyd in 2020 during a global pandemic and the White House overreacting by rolling tanks through town and shooting at white people on the steps of their own houses did the country have a collective moment that it had all gone too far, that Kaepernick had been right all along. Even NFL commissioner Roger Goodell admitted, by pressure not conscience, that the league was wrong in its crackdown on player protest – but only briefly. The simmering hostility, never quieted, has increased anew.

The January 6 riots ended the period known as athlete activism, and in the wider sense, the Kaepernick era. They also ended whatever shreds of credibility remained from this nation of laws, and exposed the players as having surrendered. Wired to accept challenges and refuse defeat, the players were finally vindicated as hordes of white, real Americans, the ones who told them there were other ways to protest, wore T-shirts to stand for the flag and kneel for the cross, countered the Black Lives Matter protest without cleverness or style with Blue Lives Matter, and – at the order of the President of the United States – stormed the most symbolically important legislative building in the world. The players – perhaps mollified by Goodell’s apology, or Obama’s advice to NBA players to stop their protests after a weekend work stoppage following Jacob Blake’s shooting in Kenosha, general fatigue or knowing they were overmatched – didn’t say a thing. A cop – a member of that sacred occupation for which they ostensibly held so much respect – died in the aftermath of the January 6 riot. The mob ransacked the Capitol, and the American media tripped over itself debating whether to even call it a riot. It made sense. This is theirs, and you cannot trespass or riot on your own property.

There is the lesson of Kaepernick and there is his legacy. They are not the same. The lesson was largely directed toward other players. It was a threat. Kaepernick was the NFL’s Metacomet at Plymouth, head on a stake for the world to see, a warning for the rest to stay in line – and they have. What passes for protest today is a player writing something mildly profound on their cleats, but only on the designated game days when the NFL allows it.

The devastating rest is the legacy, far darker and yet in its own sense inspiring. The inspiration lies in the freedom of acknowledgment. There is no reason to continue the naive exercise of negotiation, of waiting for permission, of believing the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, of believing equality is a shared American goal. It is not. What the country has become in these 10 years, with its 1,500 pardons, the proud anti-Blackness from this White House, the malleable ethics of a cowering corporate media that has largely stamped out the voices it once embraced as a “racial reckoning” – has proven it. Look at the wreckage.