Kaepernick calls NFL’s social justice makeover ‘laughable’ 10 years after taking a knee

BS BULLETIN:

Ten years after his national anthem protest became a cultural firestorm, Colin Kaepernick says he still doesn’t watch the NFL and believes the league “actively” blackballed him.
Kaepernick dismissed Commissioner Roger Goodell’s 2020 admission that the NFL should have listened earlier to protesting players as “laughable” and “performative.”
He also took aim at the NFL’s “End Racism” and other social-justice messaging, calling it “a great marketing campaign” while questioning the actions behind the slogans.

Ten years after Colin Kaepernick took a knee and helped ignite one of the biggest cultural battles in American sports, he’s still not ready to forgive the NFL.

In fact, he says he doesn’t even watch it.

Kaepernick, now 38, gave a rare interview to NBC News marking a decade since the protest that transformed him from San Francisco 49ers quarterback into one of the most polarizing athletes in America.

And he hasn’t softened his opinion of his former employer.

“I’m not gonna support an organization that one, is actively blackballing me, but two, has targeted my brothers who have been protesting as part of this as well,” Kaepernick said.

“I watch college football.”

Kaepernick has not played an NFL game since the 2016 season.

He filed a grievance against the NFL in 2017 alleging team owners colluded to keep him out of the league because of his protests. The NFL denied collusion, and Kaepernick and former teammate Eric Reid reached a confidential settlement with the league in 2019.

But Kaepernick’s sharpest criticism now is directed at what happened after he was gone.

Following the death of George Floyd in 2020, NFL players publicly demanded that the league condemn racism and acknowledge that it had been wrong not to listen to players protesting racial injustice.

Commissioner Roger Goodell responded.

“We, the National Football League, admit we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier,” Goodell said at the time.

Kaepernick isn’t buying it.

He said Goodell’s response came because players pressured the league, “not because it was altruistic.”

The NFL saying it should have listened earlier, Kaepernick said, was “so laughable in my mind, and so disingenuous.”

His reasoning?

Kaepernick says he was still trying to get back into the NFL while the league was publicly embracing the causes associated with the protests that made him radioactive in the first place.

“To come out and say we should have listened on the back of that — while I’m still actively trying to play in the NFL — it’s so performative,” he said.

The NFL didn’t stop with Goodell’s statement.

Beginning in 2020, the league put messages including “End Racism,” “Choose Love,” “Stop Hate” and “Inspire Change” on fields and helmets.

Those messages are returning for a seventh consecutive season in 2026.

The NFL has also poured hundreds of millions of dollars into its Inspire Change social-justice initiative and expanded diversity programs such as the Rooney Rule.

Kaepernick has a rather cynical description for the field decorations.

“‘End Racism’ in the back of the end zone is a great marketing campaign,” he said.

Then he asked the question that really sums up his argument:

“What are the actions behind it?”

Kaepernick also pointed to the NFL’s former use of “race norming” in evaluating some dementia claims stemming from its concussion settlement. The controversial practice used assumptions about Black players’ baseline cognitive function and was eliminated in 2021 after criticism and legal challenges.

A decade later, there isn’t much indication that either side of the original Kaepernick debate is preparing to surrender.

His supporters still see an athlete whose career was sacrificed for speaking out against racial injustice.

His critics still see a quarterback whose decision to kneel during the national anthem disrespected the flag and unnecessarily dragged politics onto the football field.

And Kaepernick?

He’s still watching college football.

DBS WIRE SOURCES