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In addition to being painful, sad, maddening, unfair, and malignant, the Colin Kaepernick saga has no discernible end. Baltimore, the last team in search of a back-up quarterback, was serious enough that they polled season ticketholders and advertisers to gauge potential backlash. They ended up going with journeyman Thad Lewis. But just because there are no more second-string jobs remaining, it doesn’t mean Kaepernick has exhausted his usefulness—or that we’re even remotely close to hearing the last of Kap.
In the wake of last weekend, Kaepernick’s message has never been more resonant. Long before there were Nazis overrunning the streets in Charlottesville, Kap got millions of people to pay attention to his critique of white supremacy. His bleak, unremitting vision of America he described became common currency with Trump’s election. And now, as virulent racists parade around in broad daylight without fear of consequences, Colin Kaepernick is unable to find a job.
We’ll keep talking about Colin Kaepernick because the longer his situation drags out, the more absurd it becomes. Kap has long been a polarizing figure, but if his politics were unwelcome a year ago, now they’re downright incendiary. The more extreme the right gets, the more intransigent it becomes. And when so much of public life depends on feigned civility and plausible deniability, the last thing racists want to hear is that they’re racists. It’s why Richard Spencer goes out of his way to explain he’s pro-white male, not anti-everyone else. Your uncle and cousin fly off the handle when Kaepernick comes up because very existence threatens to expose them when they desperately want (and need) to remain in the shadows.
But Kaepernick isn’t simply being punished for the substance of his convictions. He’s paying the price for having dared to hold any in the first place. That he’s made right-wing fans—and more importantly, the NFL’s many right-wing owners—angry and uncomfortable is an affront to the role athletes are supposed to play in American society. “Stick to sports” mandates that pro athletes perform for our amusement while displaying only as much personality, individuality, or autonomy as we permit them. It also suggests that they aren’t afforded a voice because they don’t warrant one, a nasty cluster of assumptions that’s inevitably rooted in race and class-based biases.
This strain of thinking is particularly fierce around the NFL, where primarily African-American men are dehumanized as a matter of course. The sheer violence of the game requires that opposing teams, coaches, and fans think of a player that way—there’s also reason to believe it affects the way he construes himself. You can scoff at this as armchair psychology but when CTE and painkiller addiction are occupational hazards, there’s strong evidence for its conclusions. This invisibility can also work to players’ advantage, as it allows anything short of murder to fall by the wayside. Crimes can’t adhere to people who barely exist.
In any sport, Kaepernick’s views would’ve caused an uproar. Athletes just aren’t supposed to go that hard in the political arena. But Kaepernick scored a direct hit on the NFL itself, and so much of what Kap has fought for is rooted in the basic assumption that people of color are, well, people; the NFL and its fans frequently behave as if they are not. Kaepernick bucking “stick to sports” to this degree didn’t just violate decorum, it effectively dismantled the culture of his sport. That Kaepernick’s activism emerged from the NFL isn’t just ironic. For the league, it was damning. By calling out larger systems of power, Kaepernick also highlighted the ways in which the NFL embodies some of the worst they have to offer. While he may have been aiming at something altogether bigger, his prospective employers were collateral damage. In hindsight, an NFL player championing Black Lives Matters made perfect sense, whereas Kaepernick’s peers in the NBA were flummoxed by the idea of staging an open revolt against an entity that is relatively sympathetic. They ended up going with some watered-down, league-sanctioned gestures of unity that fall fell short of Kap’s radicalism.
For many Americans, consuming sports is a primary pastime. It’s insane to suggest that it exerts no influence on the way they see the world. Kaepernick’s impact is proof that sports don’t happen in a vacuum, but nor do they simply hold up a mirror to our country’s psyche. The NFL doesn’t just replicate patterns in society. It reinforces and at times even generates them. Any serious analysis of American culture simply must take their role into account, which is why Colin Kaepernick struck such a nerve. Kap didn’t assert that sports are part of the world’s connective tissue. He showed us that they are a priority. He wasn’t just using sports as a platform or a form of celebrity, he believed they could catalyze change.
Yes, Kap is in the news because the NFL season is right around the corner. But at a time when uncompromising leadership is badly needed and people are looking for hope anywhere they can, he’s distinguished himself as someone willing to take a credible stand and back it up no matter what the cost. Colin Kaepernick isn’t a blackballed back-up quarterback. He’s an invaluable public figure who both articulates hard truths and symbolizes the importance of sacrificing for a cause.
But make no mistake: Kap hasn’t transcended sports. If anything, he’s proven that such distinctions are illusory. Making too big a deal of Kaepernick’s occupation runs the risk of discrediting him, as if his intelligence and cogency were always relative to lowered expectations. On the other hand, discussing sports as if everyone in and around it were idiots serves only to mask its ability to influence and impact culture at large. Conflating Kap’s protest with locker room problems like “attitude” and “ego” trivializes it by locating squarely within the supposedly deficient realm of sports. A version of “stick to sports” in the extreme, this is yet another maneuver meant to ghettoize athletes and silence their voices. But you can only “stick to sports” if you pretend it’s separate from the bigger picture. After Kaepernick, it’s increasingly hard to make that case.
