Late in Tommy Walker and Ross Hockrow’s timely documentary Kaepernick & America, BLM activist DeRay Mckesson remarks that “the past is where whiteness has its power.” The stark statement in many ways acts as the documentary’s thesis: that Kaepernick’s apparently simple act of kneeling during the national anthem solidified the terror that white supremacists have of the contemporary moment and the fact that whiteness is no longer dominant.
Through a series of talking head interviews juxtaposed against 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s career, the recent history of the BLM movement, and the increasing radicalization of white supremacists from 2011 onward, Kaepernick and America examines the influence that a simple act of protest had not just on the man who did it, but on the country outraged by it.
The film is not really about Kaepernick himself, though it very clearly establishes the complex relationship of race, sports, and contemporary America within his life as an adopted biracial child raised by a white family. But the larger picture is a sociological and cultural one, of America, of its inherent racism and vile obsession with the trappings of patriotism.
Kaepernick’s great crime was first to sit and then to kneel for the national anthem, an image now indelibly connected to the BLM movement and the public backlash against a beloved athlete. The film depicts how Kaepernick’s decision came about, via a conversation with Nate Boyer, a former Green Beret and long snapper, who suggested kneeling as a way to protest America without disrespecting its military. Yet the kneeling itself has now become, and remains, the focal point of outrage, and the white interpretation of Kaepernick as a disrespectful Black man not “doing his job” by remaining silent and just playing football.
Kaepernick’s stand is about the reality of race in America, not just of the overt racism of cops shooting unarmed Black people, but of white people insisting that those Black people “acceptable” to the mainstream (athletes, musicians, and actors) should remember to “keep in their place.” Kaepernick’s protest enraged so many because he was not performing the way that the white majority wanted him to. Sportswriter Steve Wyche remarks on the valence of the objections and demands made on Kaepernick by white football fans, that they are, in effect, telling him “boy, you better stand up.” Kaepernick’s refusal to bow to the patriotic past is an act of rebellion that indicates a broader refusal of Black people to obey.
There’s also an issue of respectability politics at play, even in the way that Black commentators discuss Kaepernick’s stand. A current of condescension runs through this portion of the documentary, in commentators questioning an obviously intelligent, thoughtful man about whether he really “knows what he’s doing.” This is further complicated by the fact that Kaepernick himself doesn’t appear in the documentary as an interview subject, thus making the film seem more about the mystique surrounding him than his reasons for protest. This also gives a valence, again, of others taking over Kaepernick’s narrative and speaking for him.
The film juxtaposes the development of Kaepernick’s protests with the higher profile events of police brutality, including the murders of Michael Brown and Philando Castile, the rise of the BLM movement, the election of Donald Trump, the violence in Charlottesville, the rise of the MAGA movement, the murder of George Floyd, and the increasing split in America to this day. By the end, Kaepernick becomes a symbol, not a person, one in a long line of Black thinkers, artists, and athletes who took a stand and in doing so became symbolic of a movement.
It seems amazing that such an apparently small act as a Black quarterback sitting or kneeling during the national anthem should create such a powerful image and generate such an intense backlash, but Kaepernick & America does a good job of placing the protest in context of America’s long racist history and the increasing hysterics of whiteness. Kaepernick became a central figure because he declined to play the “respectable” Black athlete performing for whites and did so not with slogans or rhetoric but with a simple, silent gesture. That it so infuriated millions speaks volumes.
Kaepernick & America is currently showing at the Tribeca Film Festival.
