In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Colin Kaepernick. Kaepernick is a former NFL quarterback, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author, and civil rights activist. He is the founder of the Know Your Rights Camp, Kaepernick Media (Formerly Ra Vision Media), and Kaepernick Publishing, and Lumi Story AI. His book is The Perilous Fight.
Roberto Sirvent: You write that when you were young, “Sports was the air I breathed.” What were some of the earliest sports memories that shaped you as a person? And what were some of the aspects of sports culture that you found troubling or perhaps even harmful?
Colin Kaepernick: Some of my earliest sports memories are going to my brother’s games. He was ten years older than me, and I wanted to do everything he and his friends were doing. I was constantly picking up a bat and swinging it around, throwing baseballs and footballs, trying to get shots up on the basketball court. I was always playing something. Eventually, that earned me the nickname “Bo,” after Bo Jackson, because I was playing every sport I could.
Another memory that really shaped me came later, when I was playing travel baseball in middle school. I was pitching one game and got rocked. They moved me to right field. I wasn’t hitting well either. I was walking on and off the field with a terrible attitude. When we got home, my parents had somewhere they needed to be, so my dad didn’t sit me down and lecture me. He just left me a note. It said something to the effect of: “If you want to start solving your problems, start by looking in the mirror.”
He never talked to me about it afterward. He didn’t need to. That note hit me because it forced me to ask whether what was happening was because of everybody else or because of my own actions and attitude. In that instance, the change needed to start with me. That became a defining lesson that has stayed with me.
At the same time, there are parts of sports culture that I think are worth examining. To play sports at a high level, you have to be a little bit off. You have to willingly put yourself through extraordinary levels of pain and discomfort. Particularly in football, getting yelled at, screamed at, and told exactly what to do is normalized. You generally aren’t being asked questions; you’re being given instructions and expected to execute.
There are positive things that can come from that environment, resilience, perseverance, discipline, grit. But it can also create a culture that doesn’t necessarily encourage independence, self-determination, or critical thinking. Both of those realities can exist at the same time.
We were fortunate to interview you for your children’s book, I Color Myself Different, in the Black Agenda Report Book Forum a few years ago. How did the creative process behind writing a memoir compare to the experience of authoring a children’s book?
The processes were similar in some ways and drastically different in others. With a children’s book, one of the challenges is distilling a narrative down to essentially as few words as possible and communicating an idea in its clearest, simplest form. Every word has to do a tremendous amount of work.
Writing a memoir is different because you’re dealing with such a significant span of your life. You’re not only trying to accurately capture individual moments; you’re trying to understand how those moments connect. There are themes and ideas that have to develop across the book, make sense alongside each other, and ultimately create a coherent narrative for the reader.
The memoir process was also simply longer and more tedious. You’re revisiting experiences across years of your life, thinking about what they meant then and what you understand about them now. That requires a different level of reflection and examination. Both forms require clarity and intentionality, but the scale and complexity of the memoir made it a very different writing experience.
Was there a part of the book that was your favorite to write?
The parts of the book that were probably my favorite to write were the ones where I got to write about my loved ones, the people who have been with me throughout this journey and what we’ve built together.
Whether I was writing about my wife, my daughter, or reflecting on my relationship with Eric Reid, those were meaningful moments for me. Writing gave me an opportunity to go back and reflect on what we experienced together, what we were able to accomplish together, what we had to endure, and how those relationships developed through all of it.
When people see public moments, particularly something as visible as the protests, they often see an individual standing in front of the cameras. They don’t necessarily see all of the relationships, conversations, support, sacrifice, and love surrounding that person.
Being able to reflect on those relationships and give some of those people their flowers was one of the most rewarding parts of writing the book. These were not experiences I went through alone, and it was important for the book to reflect that.
You include a lot of observations about racism during your time in the NFL – starting with your experience in the Combine. What kind of resistance did you face from teammates, coaches, executives, the media, and even fans whenever you brought up issues of racial justice?
The response depended greatly on who I was talking to.
With teammates, the conversations were generally easy to have. A lot of players knew these issues existed because they had experienced them themselves or seen them in their communities. My teammates were overwhelmingly supportive. Whether people were willing to take action behind that support is a different conversation. Oftentimes, players understood the problem but weren’t necessarily sure how to solve it or what their role should be in addressing it.
Coaches and executives were different. Speaking generally about my experience within the NFL there was significantly more resistance. Those environments are structured around hierarchy, control, and players doing what they’re told. Challenging the institution or raising questions about racial injustice disrupts that dynamic.
With media and fans, it depended on the person and their perspective. Some were extremely supportive. Others weren’t trying to hear it at all. Ultimately, you’re navigating people, their politics, their experiences, and the narratives they have already accepted.
Overall, I experienced substantial support from teammates and many fans and members of the media. Institutional resistance from coaches, executives, and people in positions of power was a very different story.
You write about some specific injuries you experienced as an NFL player. Given the way you analyze race in the context of sports, what do you wish more outside observers knew about the physical, mental, and financial toll of high-contact or collision sports on Black athletes?
One thing I wish people understood is how the relationship between fans and players has changed. With the rise of fantasy football, sports betting, and gambling, fans can begin to think about players almost the way an owner or general manager does, as assets producing value for them.
Most players are out there because they love the sport. They want to be great at what they do, and they are putting everything they have into achieving that. Inevitably, things aren’t always going to go your way. I’ve seen players suffer significant injuries and then hear responses like, “You messed up my fantasy team.” Meanwhile, that person may have torn a ligament, broken a bone, or suffered an injury that affects their livelihood and potentially the rest of their life.
That lack of empathy is concerning.
There’s a mental toll as well. There are few environments where you experience a spotlight like professional sports. Now combine that with social media. You make one bad play or have one bad game and thousands of people can immediately attack you. That constant scrutiny is something people should be more mindful of when thinking about athletes as human beings rather than simply as entertainment or commodities.
What are some reflections you include in this book about the 2016 protests that might surprise readers, even those who followed the protests closely?
I think one of the biggest surprises for people will probably be the story involving Nate Boyer and how the decision to take a knee actually happened.
There has been a narrative repeated for years that Nate Boyer was the person who told us to take a knee. That isn’t what happened. Taking a knee was Eric Reid’s idea.
The idea that Nate instructed us to kneel has become one of those stories that has been repeated so many times that people now treat it as historical fact. There’s also another part of that story: Nate had said he was going to take a knee alongside us and ultimately bailed at the last minute.
That’s one example, but there are a number of stories surrounding the protests where the public narrative and what actually happened are very different. There are misconceptions and assumptions that have hardened into conventional wisdom over the past decade.
The book gave me the opportunity to put those moments into the historical record from my perspective and explain what was actually happening behind the scenes. For all of those details, people will have to go check out the book.
I’m sure readers might remember Houston Texans owner Bob McNair using the phrase “we can’t have the inmates running the prison” during an NFL owners meeting amidst the protests. He and others dismissed this as a “figure of speech,” but can you shed light on what this reveals about how Black NFL players are treated?
The comment was revealing because it spoke to a broader mentality that exists within professional football. Players are too often looked at as commodities. You are there to produce value, you are expected to do what you are told, and when you stop producing value, or when the people in power don’t like how you are using your position, you can be gone very quickly.
There’s a moment I reference in the book where one of our players was let go because, as our coaches and GM described it, he had too many “miles on his legs.” Think about that language. That is the language used to describe a horse, a vehicle, or an asset that is depreciating, not a human being.
That mentality has consequences. You aren’t necessarily being viewed as a person with self-determination, autonomy, and the freedom to decide how you want to use your voice. You are being viewed as someone who has been brought into an organization to perform a specific function. When you understand that dynamic, the backlash that occurs when Black players assert their autonomy or challenge the institution becomes much easier to understand. McNair’s comment wasn’t meaningful simply because of one offensive phrase. It exposed the underlying power relationship.
You write: “I had grown up in a white family, in a white community. I had a good sense that white people would be upset. And there was a strong historical precedent to the American establishment making people pay for protesting against American oppression, from Paul Robeson to Rosa Parks, Muhammad Ali to Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. But with everything I knew, everything I was reading, everything I was seeing happening in the news, I couldn’t go back to blissful ignorance. I had to do something.” You also mention Malcolm X later in your memoir. Can you share more about how your study of this radical Black intellectual tradition (and history of Black-led social movements) prepared you for how the world was going to react to your protest?
Studying Black intellectuals and revolutionaries was incredibly important to my development. That includes everyone from Malcolm X to Frantz Fanon, Huey Newton, H. Rap Brown, Steve Biko, Angela Davis, and many others.
Those thinkers gave me a lens through which I could better understand society, my position within it, our collective position within it, and the systems that shape our lives. They helped me understand concepts like hegemony and assimilation, how power reproduces itself, how culture is preserved or erased, and ultimately what it means to pursue freedom while maintaining who we are.
That history also prepares you for the resistance that comes with challenging existing power structures. There is a long history of people being punished for confronting American oppression. When you study that history, you understand that creating meaningful change is rarely comfortable. Oftentimes, people experience demands for justice and equity as though giving someone else freedom or opportunity means something is being taken away from them. It doesn’t. It means leveling a playing field that was never level to begin with.
Studying this tradition gave me a framework for understanding both why change was necessary and why there would inevitably be resistance to it.
From your writings and many public-facing projects, it seems like your community work continues to be firmly grounded in this Black radical tradition. What do you hope your book offers to regular readers of Black Agenda Report?
I hope the book gives people confidence to go out and create the society they want to live in and the resilience to continue pursuing that change when they encounter resistance.
I hope people walk away understanding that we cannot wait for somebody else to create justice for us. We have to be willing to act. We have to be relentless in that pursuit and unwilling to allow other people’s discomfort, criticism, or attempts to stop us to determine what we believe is possible.
At the same time, that pursuit has to be grounded in just intent and in a collective and community-centered understanding of freedom. This isn’t simply about individual advancement. It’s about asking what kind of world we are creating together and who is able to live freely within it.
If you have that grounding, then go after it aggressively. Go after it relentlessly. Don’t let anybody stop you.
History changes because people decide that the conditions they inherited are unacceptable and then have the courage and discipline to create something different. I hope your readers see themselves as the people who will create something different and better.
Roberto Sirvent is the editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum.
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