The Deafening Silence of Colin Kaepernick – The New York Times

A tall, unemployed man took his niece to see Serena and Venus Williams play each other at the United States Open on Friday of last week. The man, a free-agent football player clad in a simple black T-shirt, was briefly shown on the video board at Arthur Ashe Stadium to thunderous applause from the crowd. His response was little more than a smile, enough to light up social media with messages of support.

On Monday, the same player shared on Twitter a new advertisement by Nike featuring a close-up of his face and nine words of type that, while drawing acclaim from many, also drove other people to social media to post photos of themselves destroying their Nike gear.

Such is life for Colin Kaepernick, a hero to some and a pariah to others, who has become one of the most influential athletes in the current sports landscape, all while rarely saying a word.

It was Kaepernick who, as a quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, sat then, after consulting a military veteran, started kneeling during the national anthem before N.F.L. games in 2016. He said he wanted to raise awareness of racism, social injustice and police brutality against “black people and people of color.”

[Related: Nike’s Deal With Kaepernick Draws Cheers and Pictures of Burning Shoes]

He was soon joined in that protest by Eric Reid, a former teammate who was also by his side the other night at the Open. Their protest, which other players have continued even as Kaepernick and Reid have not been signed by any teams, continues to stir debate online, divide fans and the league owners, captivate celebrities and athletes and motivate President Trump to persistently tweet his anger over it.

For her part, Serena Williams — who invited Kaepernick and his niece to meet with her after the match last week — described herself on Twitter as “especially proud” of Nike for the campaign, in which she is also a featured athlete. After her win over Karolina Pliskova on Tuesday she expanded on that thought, saying it was sad that Kaepernick had paid such a high price for his protest and that she hoped the backing by a huge industry force like Nike could be a step in the right direction.

“I feel like that was a really powerful statement to a lot of other companies,” she said.

But Kaepernick, through it all, has kept his own voice largely out of those debates. As he works his way through a grievance against the N.F.L., accusing it of colluding to keep him out of a job, he has employed a savvy use of Twitter and other social media platforms, along with the occasional carefully staged public appearance, to make his points. And by all indicators most people are getting the message loud and clear.

The Declaration of Silence

In November 2017, with the reality setting in that teams were not going to sign him despite his having led the 49ers to a Super Bowl appearance after the 2012 season, GQ named Kaepernick the magazine’s Citizen of the Year. The issue was executed with Kaepernick’s permission and assistance, and he posed for photographs, but he declined to be interviewed.

In an article titled “Colin Kaepernick Will Not Be Silenced,” GQ’s editors said “he has grown wise to the power of his silence” and that Kaepernick was hoping to reclaim the driving force of the protest movement from President Trump, who the editors said had distorted it into something entirely different.

The Amnesty International Speech

Kaepernick stayed true to that public silence as he filed a grievance against the league. Over the course of the 2017 season, Kaepernick let others point out the fact that, statistically, he was a superior option to nearly every team’s backup, and several teams’ starters. It wasn’t until April, when he accepted Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience award, that he publicly discussed, in any meaningful way, the protest, what it means to him and what life is like without a team.

The speech, delivered in the Netherlands, lasted just over seven minutes.

He expressed concern that Reid had paid the same price he had for the protest and he sought to emphasize the original rationale of his protest: “As police officers continue to terrorize black and brown communities, abusing their power, and then hiding behind their blue wall of silence, and laws that allow for them to kill us with virtual impunity, I have realized that our love, that sometimes manifests as black rage, is a beautiful form of defiance against a system that seeks to suppress our humanity. A system that wants us to hate ourselves.”

Speaking Without Speaking

Kaepernick’s ability to remain in the public spotlight — and at the heart of the N.F.L.’s protests — stems largely from his use of social media, where an audience in the millions follows him on multiple platforms and tracks his public appearances.

His use of social media is especially intriguing because it is often lost just how rarely the words are actually coming from Kaepernick himself. Kaepernick has posted to Twitter more than 11,000 times , but since his declaration of silence to GQ, the overwhelming majority of the posts are retweets or posts under his name where he is simply sharing the words of others.

Who he follows

The 119 Twitter accounts he follows tell a story by, for the most part, fitting into four tidy categories: political accounts, celebrities, athletes and his family members. He follows the activists DeRay Mckesson and Shaun King, the filmmaker Ava DuVernay and politically-vocal athletes like Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, Marshawn Lynch and Stephen Curry. He notably does not follow Malcolm Jenkins, the Philadelphia Eagles player who is the active player most associated with protesting during the anthem. Kaepernick and Reid were reported to have had a falling out with Jenkins last year over Jenkins’ willingness to compromise with the N.F.L. in a deal that provided $89 million for various social causes.

(Kaepernick’s following list is not all on message, however, as the lone entry that cannot seemingly fit into one of his four categories is the viral video account @ThingsWork. Staying focused is important, but finding out how to fold a Chinese dumpling is also cool.)

What he posts

Rather than posting his own thoughts, Kaepernick mostly retweets other accounts. His selection includes messages of support for protesting players, relevant news, posts by Reid and other athletes, and frequently the thoughts of his girlfriend, the radio and television host Nessa Diab, and his close friend Ameer Hasan Loggins, a doctoral candidate at the University of California at Berkeley who posts under the name @LeftSentThis. On Instagram and Facebook, where the ability to recirculate posts from others can be tricky, he still rarely posts in his own voice.

That so much of his message is delivered through the words of others only served to amplify Kaepernick’s personal posts of support to the Miami Dolphins players Kenny Stills and Albert Wilson, both of whom knelt during the anthem before a preseason game last month. He did not post, or even retweet, in support of Miami’s Robert Quinn or Philadelphia’s Jenkins, both of whom raised a fist during the anthem.

In an interesting twist, Kaepernick got a taste of his own social media medicine on Tuesday when Tom Brady, the biggest star in the N.F.L. and a player with a somewhat complicated relationship with President Trump, liked an Instagram post from GQ’s account that shared Kaepernick’s Nike ad. The wordless gesture, interpreted by many as support for Kaepernick, sent people on social media scurrying to figure out what the click could mean.

Where does he go from here?

Last week, an arbitrator denied the N.F.L.’s request to have Kaepernick’s collusion complaint dismissed. The news of the decision was announced on social media by Kaepernick’s lawyer, Mark Geragos, and it was declared by many to be a significant step in Kaepernick’s ability to remain a thorn in the N.F.L.’s side, even if the bar for winning his case is fairly high.

Kaepernick, as was to be expected, kept his voice out of the mix. His personal account retweeted Geragos’s announcement along with a post by Russell Okung, a politically minded player, expanding on the decision. But Kaepernick wasted little time on his personal victory before moving on by retweeting further messages of support for the protests of Stills and Wilson, both of whom knelt again during the anthem before that night’s preseason game.

Kaepernick’s message is focused. His voice remains silent.

Ken Belson and Ben Rothenberg contributed reporting.