Trump called him a ‘son of a bitch’ for taking the knee, but he stood firm – at huge cost. Now, in Ava DuVernay’s illuminating new show about his life, the football star likens NFL recruitment to a 19th-century slave market
‘Let me tell you something,” says Colin Kaepernick in his new Netflix show Colin in Black and White. Dressed all in black, his afro resplendent, leaning against a wall casually tossing a baseball, he’s like the coolest history lecturer ever. “There’s an old saying in baseball,” he continues. “Play the game the right way. It’s something coaches tell players from tee-ball to the big leagues.” He recounts the tale of Romare Bearden, who was on the verge of becoming the first Black player in the Major League in the 1930s, 15 years before Jackie Robinson. There was one problem: Bearden’s contract demanded the light-skinned pitcher pass as a white athlete. Bearden refused. What “playing the right way” really means, says Kaepernick, is “playing ball the white way.”
Nobody is more qualified to weigh in on these matters than Kaepernick. His decision to kneel during the national anthem in 2016, in protest against racial inequality and police brutality, was also not considered “the right way”. Kaepernick was widely condemned, not least by the then-president Donald Trump. Trump’s advice to NFL managers whose players took the knee was, “get that son of a bitch off the field right now. He’s fired.” In effect, Kaepernick was fired. Many more have since kneeled in solidarity with Kaepernick but, as with Bearden, his defiance looks to have cost him his career. He has not played a professional game since the end of the 2016 season.
Part 00s teen drama, part biography, part race history primer, Colin in Black and White is less earnest and more illuminating than viewers might expect. A collaboration between Kaepernick and renowned film-maker Ava DuVernay, it is at heart a chronicle of Kaepernick’s youth, at home and at school as well as on the field. Or rather, fields: young Kaepernick (played by Jaden Michael) was as promising a baseball pitcher as he was a quarterback, and torn between the two sports.
The real-life, black-clad Kaepernick also appears before the camera, commentating on his younger self, and branching off into mini-lectures on Black history. As well as Bearden, we learn about everything from Black conceptions of beauty to DJ Kool Herc inventing hip-hop. In the opening episode, Kaepernick provocatively likens the NFL Scouting Combine (where college players are evaluated on their physical characteristics and abilities by professional teams) to the sale of young Black men at 19th-century slave markets. “What they don’t want you to understand is what’s being established is a power dynamic,” Kaepernick tells us.
That scene was all Kaepernick’s idea, DuVernay tells me. She does not follow American football as a sport, she admits. In fact, she has publicly boycotted the Super Bowl in protest at the NFL’s racist treatment of Kaepernick. But she has always had an interest in football as a cultural institution with substantial African American representation. She and Kaepernick first met in 2017, at a Time magazine event where they were both being honoured. “It was a quick and warm connection,” DuVernay says. “We were immediately drawn to each other, and huddled in the corner talking and laughing and just being connected.”
Colin in Black and White.
‘Microaggressions may not be stab wounds, but they all hurt’ ... Colin in Black and White. Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix
Advertisement
A few months later, Kaepernick called DuVernay to say he was interested in telling his story on camera. “My mind immediately jumped to: ‘Whoa! OK, great! We’re going to do the kneel. We’re going to do Trump. We’re going to do the whole thing!’” But Kaepernick had other ideas. “He felt he could tell more of a story if he focused on a time in his life that wasn’t politicised, which I thought was interesting.”
Kaepernick was born in 1987 to a white mother and a Black father, and was adopted within weeks of his birth by a white couple. He grew up in predominantly white Turlock, California, and only gradually came to connect with his African American identity. In the show his adoptive parents, played by Mary-Louise Parker and Nick Offerman, are often oblivious to their own prejudices and those experienced by their son. They disapprove of young Colin’s cornrows, for example: “You look like a thug.” On multiple occasions, other white people assume Colin is a threat to his parents, not realising he is their son. We see Colin’s car being pulled over by the same police officer who gave the family a friendly wave the week before when his father was driving. For those who remain dismissive of the concept of the “micro-aggression”, the show lays it out in, well, black and white.
Ten years ago, DuVernay was working as a film publicist; now she is one of the United States’s foremost film-makers on matters of race, class and politics. Her work usually focuses on the big moments, though. The Oscar-nominated Selma captured Martin Luther King at the height of the civil rights struggle. Her documentary 13th forensically dissected America’s racially biased incarceration system. And 2019 miniseries When They See Us dramatised the infamous case of the Central Park Five, Black and Latino youths wrongly convicted of assault and rape in 1989. By comparison, Kaepernick’s childhood story is far more down to earth, but more relatable, too. “In this, I got to really think about the small things that happen every day to folks that are not in the dominant gaze,” she says. “They may not be a stab wound but they’re all paper cuts, and they still hurt, and they still stay, and they still change the trajectory of your life and your experience.”
While Kaepernick’s career is in limbo, DuVernay’s goes from strength to strength. As a producer and director, she has many irons in the fire. Her Louisiana-set drama Queen Sugar (on the Oprah Winfrey Network) is currently in its sixth season. Her family-swap reality show Home Sweet Home is on NBC. She has a documentary on rapper Nipsey Hussle, who was killed in 2019, in the works. A decade ago she also established Array, an independent distribution company championing Black film-makers. Not everything she touches turns to gold. Her big-budget Disney feature A Wrinkle in Time faltered at the box office in 2018, and New Gods, her DC superhero epic, was cancelled earlier this year after three years in development. Is there a dilemma for her between these big, mass-market projects and using her industry clout to highlight Black stories?
“It’s not a dilemma for me because it’s really saying the same thing,” she replies. “The stories I’m attracted to are basically part of an overall narrative. It’s just a different form.” She is currently working on two more shows adapted from DC graphic novels: DMZ, set in the aftermath of a future second American civil war, starring Rosario Dawson; and a teen superhero series called Naomi. “They may look on the surface to not be connected to the other work, but basically it’s telling the story I want to tell. It’s about tribalism, it’s about self-determination. It’s about resistance. It’s about identity.”
Sometimes, it is about biting the hand that feeds you, too. In this case Netflix, which has backed much of DuVernay’s work. The streamer’s recent airing of Dave Chappelle’s comedy special The Closer, which was widely criticised for transphobic content, was not exactly in line with Netflix’s oft-brandished progressive values, for which DuVernay is held up as an ambassador. DuVernay publicly supported Netflix employees’ walkout protest last week – “May your demands bloom as change,” she wrote on Twitter. Her take, essentially, is that nobody’s perfect. “If I examined and interrogated in a way that I walked away from my relationships with institutions and organisations that weren’t 100% aligned with my core values, I’d be sitting in a room by myself,” she says. “That’s the industry I’m in. That’s the world we’re in.”
Is it the world Kaepernick’s in now? In recent interviews he has spoken of how he still gets up at five every morning and trains five or six days a week, “making sure I’m prepared to take a team to a Super Bowl again … regardless of the actions of 32 teams and their partners to deny me employment”. “That’s tough to hear as a friend, just because I feel like that space isn’t good enough for him and doesn’t deserve him,” says DuVernay. Watching Colin in Black and White, it strikes you that Kaepernick has always been an outsider: in his school, in his sport, even in his own family.
After refusing to pretend he was white, Romare Bearden turned his back on baseball and became one of the most significant artists of the 20th century. Could Kaepernick do something similar? He has hinted he wants to do more acting and producing. He certainly felt at home in front of the camera, says DuVernay, who directed all of his scenes. “He has an intensity to him that’s gentle, which is weird,” she says. Then the film publicist in her stops herself: “Let me pull back from ‘weird’, I don’t want the headline in the Guardian to be ‘Ava DuVernay says Colin is weird’.” She tries again: “It’s … unusual. In that you would have an intensity that’s gentle. There’s a force behind it, and yet a curiosity … but in there as well there are very hard edges. He’s a fascinating man.”
Colin in Black and White is on Netflix now.
SOURCE : Theguardian
