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5 min readColin Kaepernick: The NFL Tried to Buy My Silence
In August 2016, Colin Kaepernick sat on a Gatorade cooler during the national anthem before a preseason game. He did not interrupt the song, curse, or confront anyone. He just sat quietly. For three games, nobody noticed. Then the NFL's PR team came to him with a nervous request: the team owner wanted to talk. That conversation, and everything that followed, became the defining battle of Kaepernick's career — and the subject of his new book, which he discussed with Trevor Noah on What Now?.
The psychology of being "the only one"
Kaepernick grew up in Turlock, California, a small agricultural town where the arrival of an In-N-Out Burger was a major event. He was adopted at five weeks old by a white family and raised in a community with almost no Black people. His parents loved him deeply, he says, but they had little understanding of Blackness — and that created a tension that shaped his entire life.
When he grew out his afro in middle school, inspired by Allen Iverson and Randy Moss, his parents saw it as a phase. When he got cornrows, they told him it looked unprofessional. "You love me as your son, but you don't love my Blackness as your son," Kaepernick recalls realizing. "But that's part of me and who I am."
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What you'll learn
- 1 Colin Kaepernick: The NFL Tried to Buy My Silence — Timestamped Outline
- 2 (00:02) **The NFL's Offer to Buy Silence** - Kaepernick reveals the league offered him and Eric Reid money to become the face of their social justice initiatives while continuing to blackball them
- 3 (03:39) **The Misinformation Problem** - Kaepernick explains how the public thinks they know his story but only knows a small, often inaccurate piece
- 4 (08:03) **Growing Up Black in a White Family** - Kaepernick's journey of self-discovery through hair, identity, and the complexity of being a black boy raised by white parents in a predominantly white community
- 5 (17:11) **The Adoption Story and Early Racism** - Kaepernick's parents adopted him after losing two children to congenital heart defects; his first encounter with racism came at age three
- 6 (23:58) **Choosing to Be Unapologetically Black** - Kaepernick explains his early decision to embrace his blackness rather than assimilate, and the tension this created with his parents
- 7 (33:28) **The Hair Journey** - The story of getting his first cornrows in Turlock, California, involving two black brothers, a high school girl braider, an impromptu mall trip, and a Krispy Kreme detour
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Colin Kaepernick tells the parts he's never told: what NFL owners said in the room, the offer made while he was being blackballed — and the Jay-Z call that never happened.
In this episode of What Now?, Colin sits with Trevor and Eugene for the full story: adopted into a white family in Turlock, the hair that became an identity, the backup who took a team to the Super Bowl in his 10th start — and the protest that cost him everything.
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