Kaepernick’s Message Goes Corporate

The NFL season is officially under way, allowing Americans to resume some of our favorite hobbies: Sunday day drinking, praying for fantasy opponents’ studs to suffer devastating injuries, and diving into Colin Kaepernick trutherism. Any hope that we might have been spared that last one evaporated Sunday afternoon, when the new-and-improved San Francisco 49ers lost an ugly road opener to the still-pretty-good Minnesota Vikings. San Fran golden boy Jimmy Garoppolo, upon whom the 49ers brass have pinned franchise QB hopes, struggled mightily, inspiring a fresh round of grouching from a slew of folks who are still carrying a torch for the last signal caller to provide a spark to the Niners.

Even without a roster spot, Kaepernick has been enjoying a renaissance this summer. The NFL anthem protests he kicked off in the 2016 preseason show no signs of abating, egged on by an increasingly irate President Trump. And this month, he inked an endorsement deal with Nike, which has made him the face of their 30th anniversary “Just Do It” campaign. Giant billboards of Kaepernick’s unsmiling face are popping up like daisies in metropolitan areas, festooned with the zen slogan “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”

The jury is still out on how much Kaepernick is actually sacrificing—landing a potentially multimillion endorsement isn’t a bad shake for any athlete, let alone one who hasn’t donned pads in in nearly two years. But whether Kaepernick has come out ahead by means of his protest is ultimately a boring question. What’s more interesting to contemplate is what developments like the Nike deal mean for the protest itself.

In the summer of 2016, Kaepernick’s kneeling protest was sharp, specific, and unnerving: America’s black people, he insisted, were under siege from a corrupt and bigoted law enforcement system that threw them in cells to rot and gunned them down in the streets. Less than a month after the high-profile police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, Kaepernick was pulling stunts that were impossible to ignore, wearing “cops are pigs” socks to practices, sounding off about police brutality to any network that would listen, and, of course, kneeling.

“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” Kaepernick told NFL Media then. “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.”

By contrast, the Nike spots are deliberately vague and abstract—no bodies in the street here! The thing being lionized isn’t the object of the protests—victims of police brutality—but their subject, Kaepernick himself. Nike’s Kaepernick isn’t an icon of solidarity against a specific structure of institutional oppression. Nike’s Kaepernick is a state of mind, infinitely malleable and totally universal. Wear Nike, and you too can be a Kaepernick in the face of adversity, whatever your adversity may be. Trying to get your schlubby self down to a six-minute mile? Believe in something. Working yourself to death at a job you hate to claw another rung up the corporate ladder? Even if it means sacrificing everything.

President Trump and his allies have worked overtime to squelch Kaepernick’s NFL protest, channeling an inexhaustible torrent of rage and nationalist fervor against the ingrates who would dare disrespect an American icon like the national anthem. But there’s more than one way to kill a protest. Far easier to go the traditional corporate-values route: stripping Kaepernick’s narrative of all its uncomfortable specifics and canonizing an abstract ideation of the man himself, then going home happy that we live in a society that has such strivers in it. After all, it’s nice to know he’s out there somewhere, believing in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.