Football

Colin Kaepernick

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By the time the ex-Green Beret met with the anti-oppression solider, Nate Boyer had already developed a feeling: Colin Kaepernick had no idea how loud his silent protest would become.

The San Francisco 49ers quarterback had, before three preseason games, kept his seat during the national anthem in a silent protest of the rising number of African Americans being shot and killed by police. Kaepernick was a famous face and a franchise player in a league that emphasizes the avoidance of individualism. And yet he was applying a demonstrative jolt to a pregame ceremony seen as precious and, by many, untouchable.

“It's something that can unify this team. It's something that can unify this country,” Kaepernick told reporters in late August, though for better or worse it did no such thing.

In fact, Kaepernick initiated a national debate, a man who stood up by sitting down, and in the months since — in early September Kaepernick began kneeling, rather than sitting, and he has done so for every game since — it has made us think and made us angry. It has forced NFL fans to think critically about the acts that make for an effective protest (and an effective messenger) and, in some cases, whether it’s even worth following a league that would tolerate what many see as disrespect.

So inspired by Kaepernick’s bold action were some fellow athletes, ranging from those in youth, high school and college, both inside and outside of football, that they followed his lead. So repulsed were some observers that they blamed an early-season television ratings dip on Kaepernick’s audacity. A lanky and athletic quarterback with a fascinating personal story, Kaepernick had become a superstar four years ago while leading the 49ers to the Super Bowl; now he had sparked a fierce, polarizing discussion that transcended sport and industry, politics and age.

President Obama said the 29-year-old quarterback was “exercising his constitutional right” to protest; Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg called Kaepernick “dumb and disrespectful”; Navy Adm. Harris Harris, speaking at a ceremony this month honoring the Pearl Harbor dead, said that those killed 75 years prior “never took a knee” when the “Star-Spangled Banner” was played. Kaepernick appeared on an October cover of Time magazine; he said he also received death threats.

Boyer was there near the beginning. An Army veteran who later suited up as a long snapper at the University of Texas and, for one preseason game in 2015, as a 34-year-old rookie for the Seattle Seahawks, Boyer wrote an open letter to Kaepernick in late August. The Army Times published it.

“Even though my initial reaction to your protest was one of anger,” Boyer wrote, “I’m trying to listen to what you’re saying and why you’re doing it.”

Kaepernick’s representatives invited Boyer to meet in September before the 49ers’ final preseason game. They spoke, Boyer said, but, more than that, they listened. The men emerged, and, side-by-side on the San Francisco sideline, Kaepernick knelt and Boyer stood as the anthem was performed. They vowed to stay in touch, to maintain open minds and begin building a bridge that could, in time, span a gulf that divided the nation.

“It was heading,” Boyer said in a recent interview, “in the right direction.”

Then months passed. Kaepernick kept kneeling. A few peers joined him; others, including some entire teams, adopted other symbolic gestures to come together in the name of racial unity. Observers took sides: Was this a spoiled celebrity exploiting his platform? Or was he proving, like trailblazers before him, that the most effective demonstrations are the ones that make the community uncomfortable or enraged enough to act? Kaepernick and Boyer nevertheless texted occasionally, exchanging ideas and thoughts.

Then, the gulf seemed to widen. Photographs emerged of Kaepernick wearing socks depicting police officers as pigs, and though he would say he wore them before beginning his public stance, it nonetheless undermined his readiness to carry such a mantle. He appeared at a news conference, ostensibly to talk about an anti-oppression message, wearing a T-shirt showing Malcolm X in a meeting with the former Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro — a shirt that led a Cuban-born columnist for the Miami Herald to refer in print to Kaepernick as an “unrepentant hypocrite.”

In Kaepernick’s response, according to comments quoted by the Herald, he clumsily defended a few of Castro’s policies; he therefore showed a limited understanding of — or, maybe more revealing, a refusal to educate himself fully on — the kinds of human-rights issues he had come to represent. Was he a football player or an activist, a little of both but committed to neither, a permanent resident of the in-between?

Kaepernick, whom the 49ers did not make available for an interview for this article, had at least gotten people talking. It inspired others to take their own stands. Which, he has indicated, was part of the point. One of the perhaps unintended topics has become how these past few months will affect — or endanger — his NFL career. Kaepernick’s middling play, massive contract and the fact that, more than any other sports league, the NFL avoids distractions and the players who cause them, combine to make him a radioactive figure.

Boyer, who communicated with Kaepernick throughout most of the autumn, paid attention. He winced at Kaepernick’s missteps and questioned whether the quarterback remained as open-minded as he had been during their meeting. Boyer wondered whether, in fact, their discussion had been nothing more than a political stunt.

“At the time I didn't feel like that,” Boyer said. “I felt like that was real.”

But now?

“I haven’t seen a bridge built,” he said. “And the only way we're going to get anywhere, we have to build bridges. You can't just shout and complain and expect everyone else to fix the problem. That doesn't fix the problem. It hasn't ever.”

Still, Boyer said, he kept reaching out to Kaepernick and trying to reach across the gulf. Boyer said that before this November, he had never voted in any election. But in the weeks prior, Boyer came to believe there was symbolism in his appearance at the polls, that, if he sat out the election, he wouldn’t seem committed to this or any other cause.

And so he did, taking a political stand for the first time in his life, not because of a proclivity to a particular candidate but because of what the act itself represented. Not long after, Boyer learned Kaepernick hadn’t voted. The quarterback explained that participating in a broken system would’ve been hypocritical.

A flimsy reason, Boyer said, and a disappointing conclusion to this.

“If policy is what you want to see changed,” Boyer said, “the first way to be a part of that is to vote on them.”

It made Boyer question whether Kaepernick himself was truly committed to the movement he started, or whether, as Boyer suspected months ago, the quarterback had no idea what he had gotten himself into.

Months after Kaepernick started a national conversation, it goes on — sides taken, lines drawn, positions defended. But another conversation has ended. Boyer said he and Kaepernick, for all the promises and efforts, haven’t spoken in months.

–Kent Babb