DOWN AND OUT

Ten years ago, NFL player Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the pre-match national anthem. He was accused of disrespecting the flag, the game, America, and promptly went from superstar to pariah. In a rare interview, he tells Steve Rose about inspiring a global gesture of civil rights – and why he longs to play again

‘I WAS AMAZED AT HOW VISCERAL THE RESPONSE WAS 

TO SAYING WE SHOULDN’T BE KILLING BLACK PEOPLE’

26 Sep 2026 - THE GUARDIAN / Saturday Magazine

Colin Kaepernick still gets up at 4.30am every morning to train. “Strength training, speed training, position training – still do all of the same type of workouts I did while I was playing,” he says cheerily. “And then go about the rest of my day.” It is almost 10 years since Kaepernick last played a game of top-flight football. His career was abruptly and cruelly cut short just as it was peaking, after the National Football League (NFL) effectively closed ranks and shut him out for being too political. Now, at 38 years old, he is well aware that his chances of a return are dwindling by the day, but he remains as game-ready as ever. “I stay relentless at it,” he continues in his easy drawl. “I look at it from the perspective of, ‘What are the things that I can control?’ And what I know I can control is being prepared for when opportunity knocks, and to also continue knocking, on my end, looking for ways and opportunities … just staying resilient and focused and disciplined – that is what’s gotten me to this point in my life.”

Kaepernick’s story is defined by the events of late 2016, when he repeatedly refused to stand for the pre-match national anthem – resulting in a chorus of booing on the pitch, insults and outrage off it, and exclusion from the sport he still loves. He was one of the biggest names in the game at the time; quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, a national celebrity, sponsored by major brands, and looking back, his actions fed into so much that has happened since: the rise of Donald Trump, the Black Lives Matter protests and a global reckoning with racism, then the backlash against what is now being called “Woke 1.0”, and the resurgence of a white nationalism that the US complacently assumed was in the past.

Through all of this, Kaepernick has largely held his silence. He has rarely spoken to the media and restrained from making public statements. Why so, I ask. Surely there must have been times he’s wanted to speak out?

“Oh, absolutely,” he replies. “But I go back to, like, what am I trying to accomplish by doing so?” The temptation to rebut all the lies, the bad takes, the accusations was great, he admits, but, “I realised that, coming out of the protests in 2016, there was a lot of movement and effort made to try to make it as if I was the singular voice in this space doing work, and I was the person solely leading this movement, and that’s just not the reality.”

In person, Kaepernick is friendly and relaxed, speaking on a videocall from his agent’s office in New York (understandably, he doesn’t like to disclose where he lives or spends his time). Even when he’s talking about the worst moments in his life, which is most of the time in our 90-minute conversation, his face defaults to a smile and he’s quick to laugh. He’s looking as dapper as ever: black dress shirt, top button done up; neatly trimmed facial hair; his voluminous afro a work of tonsorial topiary.

The reason Kaepernick is talking now is because he has a new memoir: The Perilous Fight, which details his upbringing, his illustrious sporting career, and the events leading up to and from that pivotal moment in his life. This is not Kaepernick closing off a chapter of his life, he insists, he just felt that now was the time to speak up: “It’s important for where society is, where we’re at as a country, and some of the direction that the world’s heading in, to be able to continue to move things forward.” Also, he says, “we’re coming up on the 10-year anniversary. So a lot things just naturally aligned.”

He doesn’t need to clarify the anniversary he’s referring to. Kaepernick’s decision to protest was the culmination of “a lifetime of experiences of being Black in America,” he says. But in the moment, it was also spontaneous: “It is not something I discussed with anyone else. It was a personal belief and conviction, and originally I did it not knowing or thinking anybody would see or ask about it,” he says. He didn’t even tell his then fiance (now wife), Nessa Diab. The first three times he did it, hardly anyone noticed. At the 49ers’ preseason game in Santa Clara, California, on 14 August 2016, Kaepernick did not take the knee; he simply sat on a cool box during the pre-match Star-Spangled Banner. He was recovering from injury and not dressed for the game, so he was inconspicuous. He did the same thing for the next two games.

By the third time, NFL Network reporter Steve Wyche (who is Black) had clocked it, and spoke to Kaepernick about it. Wyche had also noticed that Kaepernick had been posting all year on his social media about Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, Muhammad Ali, Black Panther co-founder Huey P Newton and Tupac Shakur. That January, for example, he had posted a quote from Dr King: “He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”

Kaepernick had certainly been on a journey in terms of his Black history education, partly thanks to Diab – who, a few years earlier, had given him a copy of Malcolm X’s autobiography and told him he’d be “for ever changed”. But his decision to act was also motivated by recent police killings of innocent Black men: Mario Woods, shot and killed by five officers in December 2015 in San Francisco, where Kaepernick was living at the time, using what was later judged “unnecessary force”; Alton Sterling, shot and killed in Louisiana in July 2016; Philando Castile, shot and killed in Minnesota the day after Sterling’s death.

“You then get to a point of, if you understand the problem and you understand the reality and you understand the experience, you either look at yourself in the mirror and say, ‘I’m gonna take action and try to do something about it’, or, ‘I’m not going to, and I’m going to be complicit in this’,” he says. The reality had become clear to him: that “the United States is not a representation of my ideals and my beliefs and has not been representing myself or the Black community. And that has been true since its inception.”

By the time Kaepernick took the knee for the first time, at the suggestion of his team-mate Eric Reid, who knelt alongside him, the issue had become a global news story. He, Reid and others continued to kneel through that season, often to boos and chants of “USA! USA!” Opponents accused Kaepernick of disrespecting the flag, the country, the military, and law enforcement, repeating the familiar mantra that politics should be kept out of sport. People began selling T-shirts outside football stadiums showing him in the scope of a rifle or telling him to, “Shut up and stand up!” Social media posts against Kaepernick turned vicious and racist. He began to receive death threats, including letters sent to his home address. Unfamiliar cars would park outside the entrance to his and Diab’s house, within a gated community. He temporarily moved out, for their safety.

Trump, then a presidential candidate, seized on the controversy: “I think it’s a terrible thing. And maybe he should find a country that works better for him,” he told a radio interviewer. Steve King, at the time a Republican congressman, invoked Diab’s Egyptian heritage to argue that “this is activism that’s sympathetic to Isis”. President Obama’s response was different: “I think he cares about some real, legitimate issues that have to be talked about,” he told reporters.

Kaepernick felt largely supported by his immediate teammates; less so by the NFL as an institution. By the end of the 2016 season, by which time dozens of other players had joined in the knee-taking, it had become clear to him they were “trying to get rid of me”, he believes. In February 2017, the 49ers’ new coach and manager gave him a choice: he could opt out of his contract now, or they would cut him later – knowing that if he left later, his chances of signing for another team would be greatly reduced. In other words, they were pushing him out, but wanted to make it look like he was leaving of his own volition. “It was a cowardly way for them to handle it,” he says.

Kaepernick was “both surprised and not” by the response. “History tells us that a reaction like this is likely to take place. At the same time, because I have a belief that people are fundamentally good and want to do right, I was amazed at how visceral the response was to saying we shouldn’t be killing Black people. It is almost unfathomable to me that that is something that’s a debate in this country. And on the back of that was a realisation of: good, we need to have this conversation. It made it very clear where a lot of people’s beliefs lay, which then became a much more honest place to be. And there really wasn’t a whole lot of middle ground.”

It must have been an alienating experience, I suggest. Were there times when it all got to him?

“The same way it revealed a lot about society at large, it also revealed a lot about the people around me,” he replies. He talks of how it led to deeper relationships, new friendships, an expanded community. “So while a lot of the immediate reaction is, ‘Oh here was all of the backlash and all of the things that were difficult’, it’s also, ‘Here are all of the great things that came out of this.’ Both of those exist, but we have to put things in perspective. Maybe that’s the eternal optimist in me: I like to look at things through the lens of ‘these are opportunities to get better’.”

You are relentlessly positive, aren’t you, I say to him. He laughs. “I try to be! That’s not to say that that negative thing doesn’t exist, but I don’t want to just live in that negative thing. I think there’s always a solution, and a way forward.”

IF THERE IS ANY MIDDLE GROUND to occupy when it comes to race issues in the US, Kaepernick could make a pretty good claim to it. His racial identity is more complicated than it appears. He was born to a Black father and a white, teenage mother, and was adopted at five weeks old by a white family from Wisconsin (he has never met his biological parents). Rick and Teresa Kaepernick were conservative, church-going, Republican-leaning. Rick was a manager for a cheese company. They already had a son and a daughter, but had lost two sons due to heart defects and were eager to have another one, irrespective of race. So Kaepernick grew up in predominantly white communities, first in Wisconsin, then, from age four, in Turlock, California.

As such, his early experiences of being Black in the US were largely as an isolated individual, often made more acute by his parents’ lack of understanding or even awareness of his racial difference. “They came in with a perspective of, ‘Hey, if we do things the same way we did with my brother and sister, everything will be OK’, and that just wasn’t the case.”

Growing up Black in a white community had its advantages, he says. “You get to see and experience a lot of things that otherwise may not reveal themselves. There was a level of comfort there of like, ‘Oh well, if this Black boy is in this white family, he must have assimilated into some of the white perspectives and cultural elements. That makes it OK for us to talk freely and openly in front of him.’ You get a lot of valuable insights into people’s true perspectives, and it gives you a better understanding of how to be able to navigate that.”

But he was often treated very differently when strangers did not realise he was his parents’ son. In his memoir he recounts how, aged eight, he was tied to a tree by some older white kids in his neighbourhood, who called him the N-word and told him to “go back to Niger”.

Kaepernick’s youthful attempts to connect with Black culture did not always go down well with his parents, either. When he first got his hair braided in cornrows, like his hero, basketball star Allan Iverson, they told him: “You look like a thug.” They were happier when he brought home a white girlfriend than when he brought home a Black one. There were a lot of arguments, he says, over his taste in hairstyles, clothes, music. “But what I will say is, the areas that there was no question around were the idea of being a moral person and doing the right thing and treating people well … The foundational piece is, I know my parents love me as their son.”

Sport was one route to connecting with his racial identity. He was outstanding from a young age – as talented at pitching a baseball as throwing a football, and a pretty good basketball player, too. As he ascended the ranks of school and college football, he came into contact with more Black peers. He also experienced the US’s racially charged law enforcement first-hand. As a teen he was pulled over and given a ticket driving his mother’s convertible with three Black friends – “driving while Black”, he jokes. Another time, at college, the cops pulled guns on his Black roommates, who were helping someone move; they had assumed it was a burglary.

But Kaepernick’s discipline and commitment began to pay off: by the time he turned pro, in 2011, he was already a clear talent. The following year he led the 49ers to the Super Bowl (they lost to the Baltimore Ravens). He was one of the best “dual-threat” quarterbacks in the league – as effective running with the ball as he was passing it. In many respects, before 2016, he was living the footballing dream: he was rich, famous, one of the biggest stars in the game. He had a glamorous girlfriend (Diab was hosting a hip-hop radio show and appearing on MTV), big-name sponsors like Nike, was on the cover of magazines. “Suddenly, I was everywhere all at once,” he recalls.

As much as he still loves the sport, Kaepernick’s protest changed his relationship to it, almost irreparably. And as much as he sought to expose racism in policing, he exposed it within football. More than 70% of NFL players are Black, but historically, team owners and coaches have been overwhelmingly white, and there have been mechanisms in place to keep it that way. In his book, Kaepernick likens the NFL’s scouting combine, where college players are assessed by NFL teams with a series of physical tests and demeaning medical assessments, to a slave market. He recounts how commodified players often are, how their injuries are often glossed over in the interests of short-term results, even how Black players’ baseline intelligence is assumed to be lower than that of white players, which makes it harder for them to claim medical benefits for brain injuries later on. “It is something that historically we will look back on as a society like, how did we ever let that fly? The same way that we ask, how did we ever allow slavery or Jim Crow to happen?”

After he left the 49ers in 2017, no other team picked him up. Other players who protested had similar experiences, including Reid, even as scores more continued to take the knee. Trump, by then president, told a rally that he’d love to see NFL owners respond by saying: “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired.” Many of those owners were his people: white, Republican-leaning billionaires. Some were friends and direct supporters, including New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, the Dallas Cowboys’ Jerry Jones, and Miami Dolphins’ Stephen Ross (who held a fundraiser for Trump in 2019).

Kaepernick believes the NFL made an example of him: “By blackballing me, denying me employment because of fighting to create a better society and fighting to keep people alive, there’s very real implications about who they are as an organisation and what they believe. I think, largely, the community and society knows it and sees it,” he says.

In October 2017, he sued the NFL for “collusion” in shutting him out in retaliation for his activism. The NFL settled out of court in February 2019 for an undisclosed sum. Kaepernick has signed a non-disclosure agreement so cannot go into details, he says, although he would be “very open to the NFL releasing all the documentation and letting society decide”. But he clearly regrets the way things panned out: “I was not protesting the NFL; I was protesting what was happening directly in communities and Black people being killed by police. And the NFL inserted themselves within that conversation and took a side.” (NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has denied Kaepernick was blackballed, saying personnel decisions are made by individual teams.)

As well as being the 10th anniversary of Kaepernick’s protest, it is also, of course, 10 years since the arrival of Trump on the political scene. Their fates seem intertwined: Trump capitalised on Kaepernick’s protest to whip up political support, then his associations with NFL owners helped shut Kaepernick out of the sport. What would Kaepernick say to Trump if they met?

“Well here’s the funny part,” he says breaking into a broad grin. “My lawyers got a phone call with him asking for me to come in to a meeting, I believe it was 2017 or 2018.” There was not a lot of clarity around why Trump wanted to meet him, but it was “a very easy no”, he says. “I am willing to work with anyone who has a genuine interest in creating a better environment and a more equitable society. I do not think that is the case there. I would be curious why there would even be a call and what the topic would be beyond trying to do a photo op.”

Within a few tumultuous years, Kaepernick’s stance began to look less controversial. The Black Lives Matter movement had already begun before he started kneeling, but by 2020 the catalogue of police killings of innocent and unarmed Black men, many of them captured on video, had become intolerable. The murder of George Floyd, in Minneapolis in May 2020, was a tipping point, sparking huge anti-racism protests worldwide. As a consequence, players began taking the knee across US sports – football, basketball, baseball, soccer, hockey – at every level, from high school upwards. In England, football players began to take the knee before kick-off for every game, including the national team. Sportspeople and public figures across the world joined in. Where Kaepernick had once knelt virtually alone, now he had inspired a global gesture. He takes no credit for what happened, simply observing that, when it comes to highlighting police brutality, “there are people that have been doing work on the ground directly in communities for years and decades, and a lot of this bubbled up and came to fruition and got elevated during this moment”.

In terms of the so-called “racial reckoning” that ensued in the immediate aftermath of 2020, he observes that “people and organisations were pledging large sums of money to address everything but police brutality. A lot of it became about businesses using the moment to further their interests.” There was some radical reassessment of racial attitudes on all levels – societal, political, corporate – but there was also a lot of political virtue-signalling, such as house speaker Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris and other Democrats taking the knee in the Capitol in June 2020, scarves of kente cloth around their shoulders. Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner also performatively knelt, as did many others. Even some progressive politicians cringe at the recollection now. We are speaking shortly before Alexandrio Ocasio-Cortez gave her assessment that “Woke 1.0 was crazy” – suggesting that progressives went too far, post-BLM. This comes on top of ongoing efforts by Trump to roll back all manner of civil rights and inclusion advances: removing high-ranking Black officials from the military; allowing immigration officials to target Black and brown people; effectively operating a whites-only immigration policy. It is sometimes difficult to see what progress has been made. What does it say, for example, that Trump is still in power, a decade on?

“It says we have a long way to go,” Kaepernick acknowledges. But as ever, he accentuates the positive: “I also think, within that, it has created such a clear and stark reality for so many people that they are rejecting the politics of the administration and looking for something that actually serves everyone.”

This is where Kaepernick’s energy is focused: building the movement. He may have been quiet but he has been busy over the past decade. His Know Your Rights Camp tours the country teaching young people “not just how to survive but also how to thrive”. His charity funds legal assistance and independent autopsies for those who need it (including the family of Nolan Wells, the Black Mississippi teenager who died in mysterious circumstances on a trip with his white friends this July). He runs a publishing company, and has donated over $1m to community projects. He’s thinking in terms of Ella Baker, the relatively unsung activist who laid the foundations for America’s civil rights movement, from the 1930s onwards. “That was centred around: yes, we need strong leaders, but we need strong people, and how do we elevate more people to become leaders so this truly becomes a movement?”

Progressive politics is making a comeback, he says, especially within younger generations. “When we think about gen Z and gen Alpha, they’re very much coming from a perspective of, ‘Do you represent my beliefs? Do you represent who I am? And if you don’t, we’re not going to support you’ … As more and more pressure is able to be exerted from the ground up, I think those high-level conversations and positionings are going to start shifting and swinging as well.” He has a four-yearold daughter now, he adds, describing her as “relentlessly fierce”: “Being a father heightens the sense of urgency.”

Given all this, isn’t Kaepernick more an activist than a sportsman now?

“I look at myself as multi-faceted,” he says. “I still love playing football. I still train for it, make sure that I’m ready and prepared. I also care deeply about people. And if that gets framed as being an activist, by all means, great, let’s do that. But at the core of it, I think people should be able to live, they should be able to thrive, they should able to have dignity, have justice, and that should extend to everyone.”

Kaepernick was always mindful of the roll call of Black sportspeople who took a stand for civil liberties and paid a price for it, he says. “That was something I was aware of prior to ever protesting.” Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted into the Vietnam War and was stripped of his heavyweight boxing title. Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in Black Power salutes on the podium at the 1968 Olympics, which effectively ended their sprinting careers. Curt Flood challenged the “reserve clause”, which prevented baseball players from choosing their own fates, in 1969, and forfeited his career. More recently basketball player Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, refused to stand for the national anthem throughout the 1995-96 season, for similar reasons to Kaepernick, and was suspended and fined by the NBA as a consequence.

Kaepernick has had a few tryouts with interested teams, most recently in 2022 with the Las Vegas Raiders – their head coach told him, “You look bigger, faster, stronger than when I last saw you,” Kaepernick says. But the longed-for return has not happened. Is there a part of him that accepts his sporting career may be over? “We don’t have to accept that as the reality,” he replies. “There’s an opportunity to change that … so that when an athlete or when someone speaks up to try to create a better life and better future for a people, for a community, for society, they aren’t met with exile, but they’re actually embraced and people say, ‘You know what, you’re right. Let’s take the actions to actually make this better.’ When we can lay that foundation, that creates significant opportunity for change.”

So he will continue to train, he says. “I will not let go of that as a discipline, as part of who I am.”

If he was back on an NFL team again, would he still take the knee for the national anthem?

“Absolutely,” he says. “The work still needs to be done. More people need to be brought into that work and into that conversation. And more people need to be taking action around it. And I will continue to do the work. I will continue to protest because, quite literally, people’s lives are at stake.” •

The Perilous Fight by Colin Kaepernick is published by Grand Central at £28. To order a copy for £25.20, go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.