Because of my 20+ years of battling Nike’s sweatshop abuses, I’ve been getting phone calls and texts about Nike’s latest move to feature Colin Kaepernick in their reboot of the “Just Do It” campaign.

I have supported Colin’s brave acts of civil disobedience as well as the #BlackLivesMatter movement from the start and will continue to do so. Black men are still disproportionately the victims of brutal police brutality and this must stop. (FYI, this is why Colin is kneeling, to bring attention to that fact, despite what Fox News may have told you. Oh, and his kneeling has nothing to do with “the troops.”)



I also have spent a good portion of my adult life raising awareness about Nike’s exploitative labor practices and I know what it is like to take a difficult stand of conscience. The irony of the Nike ad featuring Colin using the line, “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” is not lost on me.

I was forced from my coaching job at St. John’s University with the NCAA Division I National Champion Red Storm Men’s Soccer program when I refused to take part in a $3.5M endorsement deal with Nike. I took this stand because Nike was (and still is) paying poverty wages and physically, verbally, and sexually abusing workers in their sweatshops around the world.

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That stand made big news as I was, and still am, the only athlete in the world to publicly refuse to take part in a Nike endorsement deal because of their sweatshop abuses. I took my passion and my commitment to labor rights to another level in July 2000 when I moved to Indonesia. There, in solidarity with Nike workers, I lived in a slum on the outskirts of Jakarta, attempting to survive on the Nike workers wage at the time — $1.25 a day. I lost 25lbs in a month and heard the heart-wrenching stories of the human beings whose dignity is ground down as they grind out millions of pairs of Nikes a month. I documented my experiences in the award-winning short film “Behind the Swoosh.”