In his new Netflix series, Colin Kaepernick shows Kunta Kinte what actual suffering is. With all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, each 30-minute episode of Colin in Black and White makes the case that America is a racist country, unworthy of his respect.
Whereas Kinte lost his right foot for sticking to his beliefs in the iconic ’70s series, Roots, Kaepernick says he and other black athletes were “poked and prodded” and left with “no dignity” intact. In Kaepernick’s mind, the horrors of the NFL scouting combine in Indianapolis, Indiana, were as bad as the Middle Passage of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Never mind that Kaepernick earned $42 million in his six seasons with the San Francisco 49ers or that he voluntarily chose to walk away from another guaranteed $19 million to play a seventh season because he did not want to be a backup quarterback. Never mind also that black players make up just 58% of NFL players, with a quarter of the rest being white. Are these white players, who were poked and prodded every bit as much as Kaepernick, slaves too?
Unfortunately, Kaepernick is not the first person to make this awful comparison. In 2018, NBA superstar Lebron James referred to NFL owners as “old white men owning teams, and they got that slave mentality.”
When no NFL franchise wanted to build their team around an often-injured 30-year-old run-option quarterback, Kaepernick turned to Nike, who paid him a reported $40 million to endorse shoes made by Uyghur slave labor in China.
That Kaepernick can cry “victim” after being paid $40 million to play a game and then another $40 million to sell shoes is beyond ridiculous. May we all be so lucky to find ourselves oppressed in this way.
