Kaepernick says sports were never neutral and points to the NFL's own politics

Ten years ago, Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem before a preseason game with the San Francisco 49ers. He said he was protesting racial injustice and police brutality, a gesture that polarized the country, drew criticism from President Trump as unpatriotic and praise from former President Barack Obama as an exercise of a constitutional right, and was eventually taken up by other athletes.

Asked now about the familiar argument that games should remain neutral and separate from political debate to avoid division and to protect athletes, Kaepernick dismissed it. In his words, the objection rings hollow because politics is already there.

What he means, he argues, is visible in the business of football itself. He points to taxpayers funding NFL stadiums, to NFL owners supporting political candidates, and to football organizations supporting Supreme Court justices, political campaigns, and lobbyists. To describe sports as neutral, he believes, is laughable.

The real objection, he argues, is not to politics but to players having a voice in it. Fans want to celebrate athletic performance and to use games to disconnect, he says, and acknowledging an athlete's views beyond the field means acknowledging their full humanity in society.

Kaepernick says he knew the protest could cost him his career, and he placed that risk in a longer history in which the consequences for dissent have gone far beyond a job, noting the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. He also says he could not have predicted how those consequences would show up, both in the obstacles he would have to navigate and in who would stand with him and who would work against him.

He lost his career with the 49ers, and he says he would accept that price again. "If I had it all over to do again, knowing the outcome, I would absolutely do it again."