If Netflix’s ‘Colin in Black & White’ makes you squirm, Kaepernick has succeeded
Let’s face it: What Colin Kaepernick is really, really good at isn’t football. It’s making people uncomfortable.
That’s not a bad thing. In fact, it’s necessary in a society built on slavery, the vestiges of which we have yet to erase despite the civil rights era and Barack Obama and George Floyd and much more.
Kaepernick is best known throughout the United States as the quarterback who defied NFL protocol in 2016 and angered many Americans, including former President Donald Trump, by kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality against Black people. Three years earlier, he had achieved sudden rock star status in Northern California and beyond by leading the San Francisco 49ers to the Super Bowl.
His recently released Netflix series, “Colin in Black & White,” provides the backstory of both his career and his protest. It’s about context.
And that context is about us — meaning the people he was raised with and among, his community of Northern California generally and Turlock specifically.
“I was born in Wisconsin, a place known for dairy farming and a scarcity of Black people,” says Kaepernick, who narrates all six episodes. “But I grew up in Turlock, California, a place also known for dairy farming and — you guessed it — a scarcity of Black people.”
True enough. Dairy was Stanislaus County’s most lucrative agricultural product until almonds bumped dairy to No. 2 in 2013. And Blacks comprise only 3.5% of Stanislaus’ population, compared with 6.5% of California’s.
That Kaepernick has biracial parentage (his biological father was Black, his biological mother white) and was adopted as an infant by a white couple has been no secret. But “Colin in Black & White” fills in a lot of blanks about his upbringing in the San Joaquin Valley.
In the series, Kaepernick narrates scenes of his life portrayed by actors. Some viewers will be incensed by young Colin’s treatment at the hands of small-minded coaches, game officials, hotel clerks and a highway patrolman. Others, unwilling or unable to see through the lens of a person of color, will chafe at scene after scene showing white people who are ignorant, insensitive or outright racist.
For five years, I’ve heard varying versions of this white view on Kaepernick’s kneeling: “What’s he crying about? He didn’t grow up in the South, where Blacks are really mistreated. He was raised here by whites, among whites.”
“Colin in Black & White” answers his critics in every episode. He never was in danger of lynching at Pitman High in Turlock, and he didn’t face humiliating segregation. But he was constantly exposed to myriad microaggressions — seemingly small in comparison, but enough in accumulation over the years to help us understand just why he decided to take a stand, or a knee.
Two examples: A white man asking his parents if they’re OK riding in an elevator with a young, tall Black man, and a coach choosing a less talented white boy to lead the freshman team’s offense because the white athlete fits the coach’s preconceived “prototype” of a quarterback.
Some viewers will object to the portrayal of Kaepernick’s parents, Teresa and Rick. That’s not because Mary-Louise Parker and Nick Offerman aren’t good actors — they’re terrific — but because they come off as loving and clueless at the same time.
We shouldn’t get hung up on that, because both can be true.
In one scene, Teresa researches cornrows before taking her 14-year-old son to get the hairstyle. In others, Rick chauffeurs young Colin to scores of tournaments and training camps all over California and beyond, sacrificing untold weekends for Colin’s academic and athletic future.
It’s tempting to forget that track record when his parents don’t have Colin’s back in some situations, like his coaches’ demanding that the cornrows go. When young Colin pleads to know why, his mother says bluntly, “Because you look like a thug,” touching off a lengthy exploration of white fear.
Here’s the thing: His parents didn’t stick up for him every time because they didn’t know what it was to be him. They couldn’t know.
And neither will we until something happens that forces us to see things differently — like watching George Floyd’s murder under an officer’s knee, participating in efforts to reimagine policing or confronting our own subsurface biases when we see a Black athlete acting in a way we don’t expect.
“Colin in Black & White” isn’t a critique of parenting skills. It’s a larger statement about our culture, a statement that won’t sink in without making some people uncomfortable.
Which is exactly what Kaepernick hopes to accomplish.
This story was originally published November 12, 2021 at 6:00 AM with the headline "If Netflix’s ‘Colin in Black & White’ makes you squirm, Kaepernick has succeeded."
