Five years and a few months after Colin Kaepernick first took a knee and changed the course of America’s discourse on race, he tells his story. In the Netflix series Colin in Black & White, out Friday, Kaepernick and co-creator Ava DuVernay meticulously present a recreation of the exiled quarterback’s formative high school years interspersed with documentary-style snippets about America’s formative years — and the racism underpinning them.
It’s impossible to not see this limited series biopic as a direct answer to many of the questions that arose after Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem. What is he so mad about? How can a pro athlete making millions really believe he’s been subjected to racism? Sports are the ultimate meritocracy, and he made it to where everyone wants to be so how, exactly, could he have the audacity to complain?
Though Kaepernick’s experiences — and how he’s been able to process them in these subsequent years by understanding the history of Black people here — are diligently presented, it is also impossible to believe that any of the people asking those questions will bother to watch, let alone be swayed, because it is impossible to believe that they ever asked those questions in earnest. That may be a cynical view but also an unavoidable one, as politicians across the country attempt to erase whatever they’ve decided Critical Race Theory is.
Well, it is this. Or at least this is a palatable version of it, in micro, packaged with a side of sports and teen drama. The six episodes, each about 30 minutes long, are narrated by present-day Kaepernick. He has been elusive over the years, avoiding cameras and interviews and never appearing to truly desire to be the voice of a movement for which he was already the face.
Now, he’s ready.
There are scenes from Colin in Black & White that might jar some white people, particularly the opening of the series when football players lining up to be measured at the NFL combine are transformed into slaves being sold at market. But Kaepernick shows little rage over the need to explain what he shouldn’t have to. He is patient, sincere.
His high school journey is undertaken by the actor Jaden Michael, who manages to capture Kaepernick’s bewilderment over going from the adopted son of white parents to a Black man in a conservative part of California, while also delivering the burgeoning confidence that would later manifest in bicep-kiss celebrations that so irked certain fans once Kaepernick reached the NFL.
His parents are portrayed by Mary-Louise Parker and Nick Offerman. They aren’t always rounded characters, but they serve a purpose; though mostly well-meaning, Parker is consistently startled by the idea that having a Black child could be so different from having a white one, while Offerman seems largely doubtful than anything of the like might be the case because America and freedom and God and what not. In other words, they represent the white people who cannot fathom the idea that they could be racist — we have a Black son! — because they have the privilege of not even having to considering their own privilege. They try new recipes and set up dates for Colin with acceptable girls and feel good about the troops and do everything except consider how a country that flourished through slavery later refined that racism into something less overt but almost as effective.
Colin figures all that out on his own. We see him getting cornrows for the first time, an homage to Allen Iverson, and also see how his white coaches recoil to the point that he opts instead to assimilate. We see those white coaches deploy age-old stereotypes as Kaepernick pushes to play quarterback and is beaten out by an inferior white player: “I need to know my quarterback has full command of the offense,” one says, “And Johnson? He’s the prototype I’m looking for.”
Young Colin experiences microaggressions — is surrounded by them — but also begins to meet other Black people and learn about a culture that had been not only hidden from him but dubbed unseemly, unsophisticated.
Colin in Black & White also tells the story of Kaepernick’s quest to become a quarterback, showing his inability to secure a Division I scholarship offer until after his senior season had ended. In the face of intense pressure to play baseball — the show offers a broad indictment of that sport’s culture — he never relents from his dream. “Being a quarterback isn’t an option for me, it’s in my blood,” he says at one point.
The series ends with Colin on his way to play football at Nevada, with a narrative trick showing an elder Colin writing a letter to him in which he repeats over and over, “Trust your power.”
“You will earn the title of quarterback at the highest level,” Kaepernick narrates as he writes. “You will be a trailblazer.
“But while you focus on becoming a quarterback, something else will be happening. Something extraordinary. Something that you can feel, but don’t have the words or wisdom to articulate. You will learn to love who you are and not give a damn that who you are makes some people uncomfortable. You will know that no matter how much people try to control you, that they cannot break you. You will learn to find beauty in places where the world tells you there is none. And, because of these things, you will know when people try to tell you when and where to be a quarterback, it doesn’t matter. Because you will see, you are more than a quarterback. Much more.”
DuVernay has been doing this work for years now, with Selma and 13th and When They See Us, and she was the right choice to help Kaepernick tell this part of his story. He’s only just beginning; his publishing house has release a chidlren’s book and, earlier this month, Abolition for the People: The Movement for a Future with Policing & Prisons.
But now he has explained this part of his life, divulging the source of his pain — at one point his parents hide a picture of him because his Black date is so dark-skinned — while trying to explain how much playing quarterback, a job he would later give up to make a point, actually meant to him.
For many people, Kaepernick came into existence the moment they saw him kneeling, or heard a presidential candidate rail against him or TV pundits exclaim he was attacking the country and the people who love and protect it.
Now, for the record, there is more to the story.
Even the most obvious questions have been answered.
To those who gasped at a man dropping to one knee at the moment they thought he should have stood in unity, here is further explanation.
If only they bother to watch and listen, this time.
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