Colin Kaepernick on Taking a Knee and Wanting to Return to the NFL

Ten years after former NFL player Colin Kaepernick took a knee to fight racial injustice and police brutality, he wants to use the facts of his story to continue community-building and coalition-building to effect meaningful change — and he’s also ready to return to the football field.

The activist and athlete joined sports journalist Jemele Hill at the 2026 Black Footwear Forum in Detroit earlier this month for the first stop on his book tour for “The Perilous Fight,” which was released Sept. 15.

The conversation, held during a forum centered on Black leadership, community and opportunity in the footwear industry, moved between Kaepernick’s NFL career, the protest that changed it and the collective action he still believes is necessary to create structural change.

Kaepernick shared on stage the two narratives that frustrate him the most: that he’s bad at football, and that his activism efforts were an attempt to make money. He explained, “I think the reason that one bothers me is because it was trying to attack the intention and sincerity around what I was trying to do and what I was trying to accomplish, and that just isn’t the case.”

Kaepernick famously sat and later knelt during the 2016 NFL preseason and regular season while serving as a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, amid widespread outrage over rampant police killings of Black people in the U.S. His NFL career ended with that season, after which he became a free agent and no team signed him. Kaepernick alleged that team owners colluded to keep him out of the league because of his protest and filed a grievance against the NFL in 2017, which ultimately ended in a settlement.

Kaepernick, who first signed a deal with Nike in 2011, continued working with the athletic giant after his NFL career ended. He starred in the company’s 2018 “Dream Crazy” ad, which featured the line “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” The polarizing commercial, which launched ahead of that year’s NFL season kickoff, led to a boost in Nike’s stock and went on to win an Emmy. Kaepernick also collaborated with Nike on an Air Force 1 release, which sold out in less than two hours in 2019. He repped the brand with a Swoosh shirt on stage at the Black Footwear Forum.

Kaepernick hasn’t played an NFL game since Jan. 1, 2017, but he still trains every morning to ensure he’s ready to step on the field. Why is that?

Hill said to Kaepernick on stage, “You’ve pointed out the culture of obedience with the NFL, their racism, all these things, so why would you still play in the NFL knowing all of that? Why do you still think it’s important for you to fight to get back in?”

Kaepernick said, “I don’t think anyone should ever have their career taken from them for fighting for us, first and foremost.”

“Second,” he continued, “I know the message that the NFL was trying to send. They were trying to send very explicitly, ‘Hey, if you try to fight for Black folks, we’ll take your career from you.’ And that message has traveled. I had a young man in one of our Know Your Rights Camps in Vegas come up to me and ask, ‘I love playing football and I want to go professional there. I also want to fight for my community. Which one do you think I should choose?’”

Making a choice like that shouldn’t be the reality for young people or anyone, Kaepernick believes, so combating that is another reason he wants to get back in the NFL.

Kaepernick also believes that just because he critiques the NFL doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be able to play in the league.

“I worked my ass off to get to this place,” Kaepernick said. “I put in the work and the hours, I want the same shot that everybody else gets. You say you’re a meritocracy, regardless of my critiques of you, I should have the right to go out and show you that I’m the best. And by denying that, you’re also telling on yourself in relation to what you actually value and what they’re actually looking for. They aren’t looking for the best players, they’re looking for obedient players who can put on a great show.”

Kaepernick said that amid his collusion grievance, the NFL approached him and teammate Eric Reid, who knelt with him, about becoming faces of a new social justice campaign. Despite what Kaepernick described as a multimillion-dollar offer, he said he did not want to support “or give cover to people that are doing work that is counter to the benefit of our communities.”

Before that offer, NFL players and owners held a meeting in 2017 that included some of the league’s most powerful figures. Kaepernick said of the gathering, “You have people like [Robert] Kraft saying we need to address the elephant in the room, which is the protest. We have Terry Pegula, who is the owner of the Bills, who says, ‘You know what, we need a Black face to help us end the protest.’ And that becomes a space where the Players Coalition is spun up, they do a deal with the Players Coalition, all those players stop protesting because there was a check attached to that.”

But “our goal,” he said, was never about a check — “it was actually to effect structural and institutional change. So if it wasn’t accomplishing that goal, then why are we stopping and why are we ending?”

In 2019, the NFL entered into a multiyear deal with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, with the focuses of the partnership being live entertainment and amplifying social justice initiatives. The rapper and businessman has caught flak for this as well as his more recent Target partnership, which he addressed in a freestyle rap at Yankee Stadium in July that name-dropped Kaepernick and mentioned the athlete taking a check from the NFL.

But Kaepernick doesn’t get the comparison.

“Me going through a grievance process because the NFL blackballed me and that’s a process that’s laid out in advance, is drastically different than coming in on the back of the NFL saying ‘We need a Black face to stop the protest.’ They tried it with the Players Coalition, they tried to offer me the deal. And then coming in and saying ‘I’ll take that. I’ll take the check there, I’ll help you end it. I’ll help redirect everyone’s energy to a halftime show. We’ll make sure they’re entertained.’”

He said of the rapper, “It’s a position that he has been comfortable stepping into to the detriment of our communities. And I think this, to me, goes to that space of ‘Are we individually trying to come up or are we trying to collectively come up?’”

The emphasis on collective action also fit the setting. At a forum built around expanding Black representation and power within the footwear industry and beyond, Kaepernick’s question of individual advancement versus collective process had a clear resonance.

It wasn’t one moment that led Kaepernick to start protesting, but rather “a lifetime of experiences” and his now-wife Nessa Diab giving him “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” which launched a wave of learning in which he read the work of Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, Steve Biko and Marcus Garvey.

“Now I have a better understanding of structures, of systems and institutions that have been built intentionally to oppress us and keep us in our place,” he said of that educational journey. “And on the back of that, now having that knowledge and understanding, I see Mario Woods get killed in San Francisco. I see Alton Sterling get killed in Baton Rouge. I see Philando Castile get killed in Minnesota.”

With the knowledge that he had, he was left with the option of understanding what was happening and doing nothing, or being who he said he was and taking action. He had a moment of realization when asked to stand for “The Star-Spangled Banner” during the first preseason game of 2016, and he wondered why he would have pride in “a country that has oppressed and denigrated us.” This led to his first moment of sitting during the anthem, which started the protest that would draw national attention.

The reason he decided to later kneel alongside the team and not sit separately was that his teammate Eric Reid approached him with the idea — the reasoning behind it being that it would address critiques about disrespect and isolation from the team while bringing attention to the issue at hand. Kaepernick also disputed the long-standing narrative that military veteran Nate Boyer was the one who suggested kneeling, saying the idea came from Reid.

Kaepernick noted that most of his fellow players in the league that he spoke to were supportive of him, but the vast majority was unwilling to take action themselves out of fear of the consequences. He said, “I think that is part of the environment that the NFL has created as well, is if you speak up, we have control over your career, we have the control over the dollars that are going to go into your pocket.”

He said he has empathy for that fear considering the work that goes into getting to the NFL and the life-changing generational wealth at stake. “At the same time, we’re seeing our brothers and sisters being killed. And at a certain point, you have to make that decision. Are you just looking out for yourself, or are you going to look out for each other collectively?”