Colin Kaepernick’s Shadow Still Looms Over the NFL
On Monday afternoon, Colin Kaepernick tweeted his new Nike advertisement. The simple image—which over the coming hours had people celebrating Nike’s support for the embattled quarterback, questioning the motives of profit-minded corporations, and cutting the swooshes off their tube socks—features Kaepernick’s face filling the frame in grayscale, his eyes aimed at the lens. The words running along his cheekbones read, “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”
Whatever the ad does or doesn’t accomplish, in advancing the cause of social justice or , it seems to take for granted the ever-increasing likelihood that Kaepernick’s NFL career, not , is the word chosen). It also endorses the belief that Kaepernick’s unemployment is a result of his kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial inequality in the U.S. These opinions are hardly new, of course, 20 months after Kaepernick took his last snap; that the NFL’s official outfitter is willing to put them at the center of a campaign perhaps speaks to how widely they are held. But as the 2018 season begins Thursday night, against the still-conspicuous backdrop of his absence, the league continues to struggle with explaining why the most talked-about player in football isn’t on the field.
