NFL fans expect Michael Bennett to be dominating. With 24 sacks over the past two seasons, opposing quarterbacks have come to expect that mere seconds after they snap the ball, they’ll soon find Bennett—donning his now-iconic microscopic shoulder pads—charging at them unimpeded. As Bennett careens into his frantic opponent and pummels them into turf, the audience typically goes wild. After the whistle is blown, he rises, puts his hands behind his head, and gyrates his hips in small circles. Pandemonium. This is the Michael Bennett they know. This is who they came to see.

But when Bennett enters Columbia University’s Faculty House Friday evening for the “Building Critical Sport Communities: New Directions in Sports Scholarship, Journalism, and Activism”, he presents himself slightly differently. He enters the room in a houndstooth coat over a pristine suit and black turtleneck as he makes his way to his seat in front of the audience. He is gregarious, funny, and fascinating. As he discusses his book, “Things That Make White People Uncomfortable,” activism, or intersectional feminism, one almost forgets he is an NFL player. That is, until he mentions his trade to the New England Patriots which happened earlier that day.

In recent years, Bennett’s career as a Pro Bowler and Super Bowl-winner defensive end has yielded some of its prominence to his work advocating against inequality and injustice. His career as a professional athlete provided Bennett with a platform to both speak and give power to the voices of others, while complicating his own identity in the public sphere.

Michael Bennett said that one day he would like to be introduced without his “football player” prefix, or any prefix. He’d simply like to be himself: thoughtful, articulate, and engaged with his community. His activism, like his athleticism, should speak for itself.

The Change-Up sat down with Michael Bennett on Friday to discuss his recent book, his thoughts on Colin Kaepernick and activism within the NFL, and what’s next after football.

Since your time starting in the NFL and obviously over the last few years, there's been this rise of activists like yourself. How do you feel like the league has changed as you have done the work that you've done?

I think everything is perfect timing. I feel like the climate of America and the racial tension, it's at this point—like a climax—and I think Kaepernick was right on that timing where things were just changing and shifting in the culture. And now, with Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, all these things that were happening and it was really piling up. It was time for somebody to be able to step up and speak. LeBron and the rest of us had been doing stuff but we weren't heard on the national level yet. We were still saying stuff and people were kind of like, "Okay, skip over it."

But now, with that stuff and when things started happening with Kaepernick, the platform started to like, slowly, it became an American story. It wasn't just like an athletics story. We weren't being covered just by ESPN, we weren't just being covered on NFL Network. We started to gain interest from the Times magazine, New York Times, CNN. Stuff like that where it was becoming a real issue.

So I think the NFL had to take a step back like, "Okay, this is a serious issue because, our players are saying this and our players are feeling this way and this is the reality of who they are as human beings and who they are as citizens of America.

They had to start listening to us. And that changed everything. They had to start to respect our opinions because our voice was started to be magnified. And it wasn't just our voice and how we were speaking, it was the young kids who started taking knees in all these different ways. I think it was all just the timing of everything.

What do you think about Kaepernick settling with the NFL recently? How do you think that impacts things?