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Colin Kaepernick is back in the news after the former NFL quarterback responded to being name-checked by Jay-Z
during the rapper’s concert at Yankee Stadiumearlier this summer.
Tensions between the two have simmered with years, after Jay-Z — formerly a big supporter of Kaepernick’s — suddenly began working with the NFL, with the rapper’s Roc Nation company now helping to program the Super Bowl Halftime Show. The rapper also recently released a 30th anniversary edition of his album, Reasonable Doubt, exclusively at Target, a store that many people in the Black community have boycotted over their DEI rollbacks.
Still, things stayed quiet until Jay-Z’s July show in the Bronx, where he delivered a freestyle verse that referenced Kaepernick’s settlement with the NFL over a collusion lawsuit tied to the quarterback’s blackballing from the league. “Buddy took a check, I ain’t even mad at him, but along with that check you have to sign a non-disparagement,” the rapper said. “I’m the one [the NFL] can’t control.”
As Kaepernick told NBC News this week, he believes Jay-Z’s recent comments show that the rapper has a “guilty conscience” about his NFL and Target deals.
“Why are you so comfortable stepping into these positions that are counter to the positions that people on the ground actually want?” Kaepernick said. “And to me, I view that as speaking to a guilty conscience and trying to reposition or reframe the conversation.”
Kaepernick writes more about his fallout with the NFL in his new memoir, The Perilous Fight, due out Sept 15. Billed as a “defining and uncompromising memoir,” the book arrives ten years after the Super Bowl quarterback made the controversial decision to kneel during the National Anthem before NFL games as a sign of protest against Black injustice. As the book title alludes, it’s an issue he’s still fighting today.
SIGNED EDITION
The Perilous Fight
Barnes & Noble is selling a limited-edition hardcover copy of the book signed by Kaepernick himself. Copies are moving fast so you’ll want to add to cart while they are still in stock.
You can also pick up a regular version of the NFL star’s memoir on hardcover or paperback on Amazon.
Though Kaepernick is now a role model for many African-Americans, the football star writes in the book about feeling a sense of displacement early in his life, as a Black kid adopted into a white family in California. As a book description explains, “Sports became his refuge and his proving ground. On the field, his talent could not be questioned, minimized, or taken from him.”
Football not only made him a star, it was also the place where he learned about the harsh realities of being Black in America. As the athlete writes, he “began to see the NFL not just as a league, but as a mirror of American capitalism, of racial exploitation, of a country that celebrated Black entertainment and criminalized Black lives in the same breath.” Eventually, he decided he had to speak up for his fellow athletes on the field and the millions just like him watching from home.
From Grand Central Publishing, the 256-page hardcover details the fateful day the NFL star became a civil rights icon, and the way his actions continue to reverberate across the end zone and the country today.
“When Kaepernick knelt, he was not acting on impulse. He was acting on years of becoming, of absorbing, reckoning, and refusing to look away,” the publisher notes state. “In response, the NFL blackballed him, the country revealed its true self, and the man who had spent his whole life earning his place chose, deliberately, to risk all of it for something larger than himself.”
NARRATED BY KAEPERNICK
The Perilous Fight [Audiobook Edition]
You can also listen to The Perilous Fight on audiobook, with the memoir narrated by the quarterback himself. The audiobook is streaming exclusively on Audible, and you can listen to it for free right now with a free trial to Audible here.
Though this is Kaepernick’s first official memoir, this isn’t the first book he’s written. The athlete-turned-activist also penned a children’s book titled, I Color Myself Different, in 2022.
CHILDREN'S BOOK
I Color Myself Different
The 40-page picture book is available now on Amazon. Kaepernick released a second book, We Are Free, You and Me, in 2024. You can purchase that book here.
Kaepernick was the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers for six seasons, leading the team to the Super Bowl in 2013. However, he has not played since becoming a free agent at the end of the 2016 season.
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