A decade after his stance against racial injustice made headlines far beyond the sports world, former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick says that while his mission goes on, his love for the NFL is long gone.
Speaking with NBC News, the 38-year-old admitted he no longer watches the NFL, saying, “I’m not gonna support an organization that one, is actively blackballing me, but two, has targeted my brothers who have been protesting as part of this as well. I watch college football.”
During the 2016 preseason, Kaepernick and then-49ers teammate Eric Reid kneeled during the national anthem before a game. While he had previously sat on the bench during the anthem earlier that preseason, the image of him and Reid on a knee while their teammates stood for the anthem quickly circulated around the world.
At the time, he told the NFL Network, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
Kaepernick, who led the 49ers to the Super Bowl to conclude the 2012 season, was out of the league after 2016 and would never play again. He and Reid would later sue the NFL alleging collusion in keeping them out of the league. They settled in 2019.
Kaepernick has since devoted his time to initiatives such as Know Your Rights camps, whose aim is “to advance the liberation and well-being of Black and Brown communities through education, self-empowerment, mass-mobilization and the creation of new systems that elevate the next generation of change leaders,” and helping pay for independent autopsies for people who died as a result of incidents involving police.
Asked by NBC if he thinks about his football legacy, Kaepernick said, “I don’t think about legacy a whole lot. What I think about is what are the areas that I can do work that I think are going to have an impact and help us move towards that future together. At the end of the day, people will decide what that legacy is, and hopefully that’s a positive one.”
Kaepernick wrote a memoir, “The Perilous Fight,” that will be available on Sept. 15.