The Right Time with Bomani Jones - Why Kaepernicks protest failed to spark a movement | Bomani Jones & Jason England

Episode Date: August 27, 2026

Bomani Jones is joined by Jason England for the fourth and final episode of a historical retrospective series looking back at Colin Kaepernick, a decade after his initial protest. In this episode, Bo and Jason wrap up the discussion by exploring whether Kaepernick's action sparked a lasting movement or was simply a moment in time. They reflect on the public silence Kaepernick maintained after 2017 and question how it impacted his role as a public figure and a symbol of resistance. The duo delves into the role of social media in modern activism, detailing how corporate co-optation, hollow platitudes, and performative "slacktivism" diluted the energy of the post-George Floyd and post-Kaepernick era. They trace how sports media shifted back to a narrow focus on the games, effectively squeezing out the general sports columnists and voices trying to enforce moral clarity. Ultimately, Bo and Jason evaluate the fading public interest in Kaepernick, the rise of a reactionary societal backlash, and the complex, ongoing struggle defining athlete activism a decade later . . . Subscribe to Supercast for Ad-Free Episodes: https://righttime.supercast.com/ Buy 'The Right Time' merch: http://therighttimebomani.com/ Subscribe to The Right Time with Bomani Jones on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts and follow the show on Instagram, Twitter, and Tik Tok for all the best moments from the show. Download Full Podcast Here: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6N7fDvgNz2EPDIOm49aj7M?si=FCb5EzTyTYuIy9-fWs4rQA&nd=1&utm_source=hoobe&utm_medium=social Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-right-time-with-bomani-jones/id982639043?utm_source=hoobe&utm_medium=social Follow The Right Time with Bomani Jones on Social Media: http://lnk.to/therighttime Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Wave. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the right time, a Wave Original. My name is Beaumani Jones. Thanks for listening wherever you get your podcast. Thanks for watching us on YouTube. Subscribe, like, rate us, review us, give us five stars.

You only give us four stars. I'm inclined to believe you are a hater. We are wrapping up our four-part series on 10 years since Colin Kaepernick protest. Check out our episode one with Charles MacDonald, episode two with Jason Golf, episode three with Howard Bryant. And now we are wrapping up our fourth episode with our guest who is testing our theories on sunglasses indoors. Also, he's got a lot of things coming up soon.

Look out for the name, Jason England. What's going on, man? Hey, please to join you. Jason England, I'm outspoken. My language is broken into a slang, but it's just the dialect that I select when I hang. Man, I wanted to talk to you about this part of the Kaepernick discussion, which is, it's interesting because I think that this part is in a lot of ways, partially about the absence of Kaepernick,

but also about the impact of the protest. And the question that I've always had is that was it a movement or was it a moment? And I think that applies generally to what happened with Kaepernick. It also applies to when we get to the year 2020. But I wanted to talk to you about after 2017, right, when it became clear that they were not going to let him back. And he did his workout. I think it was in 2018.

And that all went to hell. And it was clear, him as an NFL player was over. But if there was going to be a persistence for him, it was going to be either as a leader or as a martyr. And I think you would have to say martyr because he made a decision that I would not have recommended. And I'm curious what you think of this, which is I'm just going to stop speaking in public. Like I had a story I was working on 2017, maybe 2018, I'm not sure.

and I asked him to help me out with some fact check on some things that I had there and me make sure that, you know, things he had right. And he said he didn't want to talk about it. I said, okay. I went ahead and I wrote it and then he hit me after to tell me how good it was. And I'm like, huh, that's an interesting way to go about this. So it's not even simply in a lot of these cases about not being a public face. In some cases, it was just flatly, I'm not talking. He was obviously talking to some people,

but it could be difficult at times even to get a fact check. You talked about the difference between a moment and the movement, the difference between real activism and spectacle. And I will say that when he first started, I found him inspiring. That was real sacrifice, right? What he did was absolutely radical. Anything radical is disquieting. It's unsettling. And he made people feel very unsettled. And so I think one thing I want to recognize and give grace to him about is that there was no playbook for what he was doing. And certainly we don't have a centralized leadership. And part of that is due to an increasingly hypercapitalistic society and another part of that, you know, is due to the fact that historically we live in a society has murdered our

outspoken radicals, you know. And the outspoken radicals had a sense that they were going to be killed. But they hadn't seen it, right? We've all seen it. So it's like, hey, if you want to do something radical, you might meet a bullet. I feel like it's a sense that people have.

And so you don't have that sort of radical action anymore. And you don't have a leadership that can take Kaepernick's hand and stand behind them and say, here's how we do it and here's what we're going to do to support you. So I felt great sympathy for him. once this moved past the initial stages of his kneeling and he was a figure rather than a football player. But looking back on it, yikes, where'd you go?

There was real energy behind you. There were people waiting for you, you know, to speak and maybe not lead, but to say something. And there's something about this era, I think. We've talked personally and privately about the need to do a post-mortem, a sort of autopsy of what happened post-cust. Kaepernick post George Floyd's murder and the energy behind it. How did we fumble that so badly?

And it's something that I think about with Cap. Where did he go wrong and where did the rest of us fail him as well? Well, I think something that is interesting about him. And in terms of like what place in leadership he should have taken or whatever, the place that I'm always willing to give him grace is we didn't ask Rosa Parks to also be Martin Luther King, right? Like, I felt like there was a large push from a lot of people to ask him to do things that many of us could have done ourselves, right? Like, growing-ass people, being like, well, Colin, where we go now, Colin? Collin, Colin what you think we should do.

Colin, and Colin clearly didn't have a strategy with this. He just sat next to the water cooler one day, right? And then we kept coming back like, hey, man, what else do you have for us? It's like Neil from the Matrix, right? like this unlikely messianic sort of figure. And so in a lot of ways, to me, the expectation that he then have the plan was a touch unfair, but it also consistently felt like he wanted to be seen as the face of that movement. And it felt like you can't really have both at the same time.

But something I felt like happened to him after 2016 that I don't think we talked nearly enough about is that, he was repeatedly vindicated, right? Like in ways that even those toward the median of the spectrum of opinions had to acknowledge, he was vindicated in 2017 when Donald Trump said to fire all the sons of bitches, right? Suddenly everybody was like, hey, this calling guy, you know, maybe he's onto something here.

I would argue that George Floyd is the big one, but even something like Laquois McDonald or any of these other cases that were along the way that came up, ultimately wound up being a validation. but it was really George Floyd, which to me, and I don't know if you know I've talked about this, the moment of George Floyd really begins with Trayvon Martin in 2012, and it goes along the way.

And so it's not like Kaepernick popped up out of nowhere and said, hey, the police are killing us. This was part of something much larger than it happened. Mike Brown had happened in between. Like there was a huge groundsweller movement. And now it was one thing when LeBron James is like taking a picture with the hoodie on with the squad, which was a really big deal at the time, right?

the idea that that man would take what amounted to a 21st century stand was a huge thing. Then what Kaepernick did, as you said, was a truly radical act because what LeBron did was not radical. That's not an insult to him. But like those t-shirts and things, that stuff was not radical. This right here was actual factual radical and he did it. And then we got to 2020 where as a nation, everyone was so vulnerable that the majority opinion at one point, summer was that Black Lives Matter was a positive statement. And shit ain't last for long, but it happened.

In that moment, it happened. And this dude was vindicated. And it felt like we only saw him on like the occasional photograph picking up an award. Yeah. Well, you know, the idea of him being vindicated is a comical one to me too. You know, I just got invited to a private screening of a baski-out film that's going to come out in 2027. and it brought back to mind Michael Stewart, because that was a part of the movie

and a very influential moment on Baccio's life. Michael Stewart, the dancer and graffiti artist and model who was killed by the police in 1983. You know, we have all known. And I'm using the collective we of me and Bomania and the people like us what has been going on. There needed to be no vindication. The difference, of course, is that we're in a modern world

where everything's captured on camera. And that was what was vindicated, that there was no way you could deny this or so we thought, right? But I think that is also on the flip side, what hindered the movement is that the camera is so involved. And so you talked about LeBron taking a photo with a hoodie. I mean, everything becomes a moment, a spectacle, something to be captured to be digested and commodified, right?

And I think that hurt him and hurt us. Post Kaepernick and post-George Floyd, you're right. everyone was acquiescent to some extent, at least on the superficial level, like places that you would never have believed were releasing statements about police brutality and the importance of black life. And sure, we knew in real time, we suspected that it was superficial. But it felt like there was a moment of vulnerability in society where we could get in and grab a little bit of leverage. And what we did instead, I think, is we settled for photo ops. We settled for commercials with Cadillacs. And we settled for creating what I think in some ways is a black managerial

class that, for a brief period, sucked up very small sums of money. And in that way, we rendered activism in the spirit of it, very impotent. And what we did is we asked people to take their social capital and their real energy. If you remember that moment, the energy was real. On college campuses, in the streets, just casually, people had a real energy for change. They were fed up. They were angry. And this was a multiracial thing as well.

And we said, why don't you reinvest that social capital and product? And this is where I'm not going to say it's unforgivable. but this is where I really hope for more from Colin Kaepernick because he was a very specific sort of face of what we thought could be a movement. And sometimes when you're being distracted by 100 people pitching product at you, you need someone to stand up and remind you of what the mission is.

And I thought even if he wasn't totally equipped for that, there had to be people around him and maybe, you know, as a football player, he would understand that you have to assemble a team to put you in the best position to lead. And I feel we missed out on that. You know, I think what you said there is so interesting because it gets us to, I think, a broader context

that I don't think I fully appreciated in the moment, but the kneeling and the things around it and what became the enduring symbols were ready made for the era of social media, right? Like the Neil Postman point about television that, or any technology really, that once you add it into a society, it is not that society plus the technology. The society grows around the technology, right? And so our perceptions of how social media could be used are much different now than they were then. Like now it feels like

it's kind of readily understood that it is a vehicle for sending shit out, right? We can get stuff out really fast. We acknowledge that it's manipulated by so many factors, but they got people so hooked on that dope that they still stay on it. In the beginning, when not only did it feel a bit more organic, I would also argue that it was a bit organic, right? Because the infrastructure around it had not built out. You have like 2009, 2010 around this time, and the world saw the Arab Spring situation happen online. And it reinforced the ultimate optimism that this would be a democratic space and good causes could now use these technologies to get together, to rally, so forth and so on, right? Like, this was going to be the way to make the world a better place

and it would make things so much cheaper. And again, with the idea that absolutely the sharing of information, both in quantity and quality, was a positive, right? There was no argument against that we wanted as much stuff out there as we could possibly have, and then it all goes. And so you progress and you also see the Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin, all of that, the movement around police is also a movement that grows around social media and this. They've always been

slogans. They've always been catchphrases. They've always been like visions and images. But these caught on so quickly, right? Like they were bouncing, they would go and they felt like something was really happening. And then it kind of crest with Kaepernick and the kneeling, as you as you talk about, almost became counterproducing. because then it got to a point where it almost became a purity test

that no matter what somebody thought, if they were not kneeling at some football game, then they clearly were not down with the cause, right? If they were now not doing something during the national anthem, then that came to mean something far more than it actually did because, in fact, we saw Jerry Jones take a knee. On one hand, I mean, Joel talk about this a lot, and I think he's correct. the fact that they got Jerry Jones

to do that in the first place is a sign of victory, right? But it also wasn't terribly different than when you get to school and the white boys start wearing the same shoes as you. Might be time for you to get a new pair of shoes, partner. Right? But nobody came to that next place. Nobody came to the point of being like,

okay, so where do we take this? Instead, I think it wound up getting lost in this swirl of social media that leads to what you talk about when we get to 2020. The face and the voice of the anger of 2020 was not, forget about just specifically Colin Kaepernick. It was not even someone like Colin Kaepernick.

It was not someone echoing Colin Kaepernick. It was somebody working at an office on a Slack account. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I can't think about kneeling without remembering Pelosi and crew and the Kempik. Oh, yeah. You know, like.

That happened. Yeah, the kneeling and, um, and many other things associated with Kaepnick and Floyd and what we thought was burgeoning movement became sort of like a Malcolm X hat and a medallion back in the day. It was something to wear, you know, and in that way, again, it was rendered impotent and symbolic, and that was frustrating.

I wrote something for the Chronicle of Higher Education with another professor named Rich Purcell about the fact that Ben and Jerry's had released a stronger statement condemning police brutality been almost all of the universities across America, right? And that was an interesting moment because on the one hand, the products were getting out in front of messaging, and they had some messaging that was somewhat strong, and that was encouraging. But on the other hand, it wasn't even that significant. And for them to outdo the universities, let us know what the game was, right?

And this is what you said. You said that the strongest activism and the, the, the, the posturing was coming from some brother on slack or some white boy on slack, right? And at that point, I think we both knew and many of us knew that we were transitioning into an era where blood had been reduced to ink and slogan airing and we were in a lot of trouble. And people have really truly come to believe that like social media was the place for a stand. And if you did not take a stand, as someone who used to be on social media a lot and then gradually retreated, it was just like, no, I don't think this is, this ain't, this isn't really doing the thing, right? It's just not. And I don't want to pretend as though there weren't like some people in the street and

there weren't other people, you know, people that were doing things. Like, but Kaepernick had become the rare mainstream radical figure. And that was the thing about him having the platform of the NFL. One of the points I've always made is that other cats did not stand their national anthem. Marshall Lynch, for example, out here selling everything. known to man. That's its own. The documentary I would love to watch is that one right there. But he never put words to what he

was doing. And as a result of not doing that, he could still exist. Kaepernick is the one guy who did not ask for permission, right? But at the same time, Magu and Abdul Abdul-Rahou didn't ask for permission and he never got that famous. He never had everybody have his back in his calls because

there was no social media machine to go out there, to push it for him. Right? I always say about social media, And I say this, I can talk to you about this. And like a lot of other people who are guests on this show will talk about this. We talk on the telephone. And the reason is I had just come to this conclusion about friendship that so many of us were using social media and text to make friendship easy and not making an actual investment

in the relationship. How hard is it to call somebody to hear that hard is to call somebody on happy birthday when you just go send them a text, right? I realized at a point that we were, social media was stripping us of some of the essence of the gestures that we engaged it, right? And it became too easy. And so anybody can do it. It becomes more performative. It becomes more superficial.

I say that to say that the existence of these platforms and the fact that people can see them so often stripped away the importance of the gesture itself because it just fell in line with all the other stuff that we dump out into this space and all the things. these other ways that we choose and we decide that we're going to make it easy, right? And so it's disappointing that Colin retreated. But hey, man, you almost got to wonder if you're him and you look around and be like, shit, wasn't nobody else coming out here. Yeah. You said a couple of things that resonate with me. One is, you know, I never really thought of Marshaun Lynch as the modern George Foreman,

but he really, like, he's been transformed. Although he doesn't look at safe, like George seemed to physically. transformed. He became an entirely different person. Yeah, he looked cuddly. He even looked lighter. I don't even know how to happen. He started looking more light-skinned and safe to me. But Marchion Lynch still looks the same. But you're right, he's become a lovable pitchman. You know, the thing that social media did too is that it makes things move so quickly and it makes you want to participate. And thinking and having an opinion is something you have to earn. And it takes process and it takes patience. And so social media gave you access suddenly to these scripts.

You didn't have to think about what you felt. You learned what the correct opinion was by processing all these posts very quickly. And so there are a lot of people who leaned into saying the right thing. And let me clarify what I mean by that. Your home, Coates, has been on a bit of a media run. Something that I really appreciate about him is that he's so plain spoken. And sometimes people take that to mean that someone isn't especially articulate or eloquent. But it's actually with Coates, he's clearly hyper-intelligent and analytical. But his arguments lean on moral clarity. And that's what I love when I hear him speak.

I think to some extent, I will attribute this to the success of Barack Obama, but also this sort of downloading of scripts from the internet that you repeat ad nauseum because they sound good. Most people came to lean on how ornate their arguments were. And so they said nothing. These were empty statements, right? But they sounded good and they made people feel good. Kaepernick didn't sound good. He made people feel uncomfortable. Coates sounds good, and he makes people feel uncomfortable.

That's how you were supposed to feel. When I saw universities and we talk about Rangler jeans and the audience brands, borrowing the rhetoric of what people were claiming was a revolutionary moment, when I saw them eagerly leaning into pronouns and bi-pop and whatever, other phrases and catch phrases were coming out of this movement. I knew we were in trouble because these places don't ever eagerly lean into anything unless they know that these are safe things to lean into. And maybe Colin looked around and said, this isn't going to work.

Or maybe, and I think we can forgive him if this is the case. Maybe his spirit was in the right place, but he didn't have the intellectual heft. and the leadership skills socially to take it anywhere else. But I wish, because he did do things, right? He did do a documentary. And that suggests to me a willingness to broadcast his message and to stand behind it publicly for longer than the moment that he was in. So I do wish, again, that he had found the right advisors

so we could hear his voice and the clarity of his call. because now it's left to interpretation. And once your message is left to interpretation and you're not speaking anymore, it can go in so many different directions. And this is where we, I have no idea what he's doing at all. No, that is, I think the biggest thing for me is,

I am assuming, like he still does to know your rights camps and things like that. I am assuming I know what Colin Kaepernick thinks about the world right now. The internet has told me, I cannot assume that I, that where somebody started is going to be where they end. Right? I don't know. And I am reticent to assume or ascribe any belief to him because we have not been put in a position. What I do see is I look up and he's working with a company that wants to use AI to help, kind of like revolutionary moments, I suppose. And it's like, huh, ain't that something. I have questions. But there's not, there are a minimum.

minimal circumstances and situations where you get to ask him the questions, right? And I think that leads right exactly what you said in terms of leaving things open to interpretation. I want to go right back to something you said just a second ago, though, like talking about Wrangler jeans. For people who don't know the Wrangler jeans story, I tell this one just to let you know what a interesting time it was in 2020. Drew Brees had got himself in trouble because he hit the quarterback button with somebody asked him about standing before the National Anthem. and he was like, I believe we respect America, die, da, da, da. But it was while shit was popping. Malcolm Jenkins actually got on and said,

fuck you to Drew Brees, which was a wild thing to do. But he got on and said that because everybody was so mad and you had to say something on social media at that point, anything like that. And I got on my show. And I can't remember, or wherever I said it on the show or I said it on Twitter, I probably said it on Twitter. Back when I used to tweet store.

And I was making the point that you got to understand, not everybody's money is tied up. in saying Black Lives Matter. Not everybody's money is tied up and telling us that they're there for us in this time. I remember when my boss at ESPN called me to tell me, thank you for being there, what I was doing for the company, right?

Didn't stop that pay cut I took a couple months before. You know what I'm saying? I was doing that shit back then too. But anyway, that was what the time was. And I was like, look, man, you got to remember about Drew Brees. Drew Brees don't get his money. Off of it is he, him, she, him. that's not where his bread come from right his bread come from real tight jeans that's where he

get his money from i looked up the wrangling twitter account i said no tweeting how many days they sent one the next day letting us know that the 15 brothers that was wearing wranglers they had their backs they let us know and that's what i was like guys do you see what's going on here right now This told me nothing no more. It is out of control. Say what you want about Kaepernick. There was never a time that what he said didn't matter. Yeah.

You know, have you ever seen Cheers? Yes. There was an episode of Cheers that has stuck with me throughout the years where all of the bartenders and I guess Carla's old waitress. They wanted a raise in each one after the other went into the office to Rebecca, the request of raise.

And she said, sure, I'll give you a raise. I thought you wanted a title. Wait a minute, what's this title thing? Walked out of there and said, but I didn't get a raise, but now I am the senior executive bargender one by one. They got talked into titles rather than getting the bottom line up, right? And there's something about that era, about this era that just passed that, you know, mirrors that.

They taught us in the titles. They taught us into platitudes and statements from Rangler jeans. And as we were collecting the titles and in the commercials, is on the TV shows and running these bizarre almost S&M sort of sessions at universities, self-help sessions where we tell people how to be not a racist or maybe a better racist who knows how to articulate their racism, right? While that was happening, I think a lot of these people who felt in corporations, who felt browbeaten, they were loading up for the backlash and we're seeing that now. And I think about this in two ways. This Jason Ardei situation, rest his soul, you felt a real bloodlust when they found out that he was a fabulous, a bloodlust in how bloodlust.

and how vicious the condemnations and endless they were. Because people have been sick of placating black people in their minds. And now we're seeing the backlash of it. On the other hand, the other thing is he's not here to say anything and he ever got to say anything in his defense in that brief window when he was. And this is where I bring him back to Kaepernick. When you don't speak and when you can't speak, you're not a person anymore.

or you become an ideological weapon for either side to wield for its purposes. And that, I think, is one of the grand tragedies of Kaepernick. Once you speak, you take away everyone else's ability to manipulate who you are as a figure. You can't see that. Coming up next, we're going to talk about what is the state of athlete protest now, 10 years after Kaepernick. Look, if your supplement shelf needs a reset, now's the time. semi-annual live well sale is happening August 13th through August 26 with Bogo 50% off almost

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All right, back with my man, Jason England. And one thing I think about going back to 2020, the place where we really saw, like, protests with in sport, honestly was with the college players when they, you know, we're pushing back against, you know, why are we playing during COVID, given the little that we know at this moment. We, you know, we saw a push toward,

unionization and the likes that we hadn't seen. Like they, it showed an influence of the time, at least to me in that moment, what we had. That was also when them boys put Ty Roger Goodell up in the basement. Remember when he had to make that hostage video? They had them. It was a wild time, man. It was the one time where it felt like we had a chance. And I think that people misunderstood that he was going to stay on their next forever.

And maybe they was never going to allow it. But that was that was what it had to be, right? Like the story I tell about how we may have been sold, how people may have sold themselves short is when the NBA cats had all the things on the back of their shirts in the bubble. And people laughed at how corny some of them were and how they felt that they were kind of muted

and, you know, kind of fangless. And the league was very clear we didn't turn anything back. Like nobody tried to get burned, baby burn, past them, right? Nobody tried to sneak one back. Like there had been so much work done on athletes that honestly they had regulated themselves at that point. And they had the understanding of what it was that they could and could not get away with.

But it is interesting that like right now, things feel societally as tumultuous as they ever have. And let us remember the cops never stopped killing us, right? Like the numbers on that, if I'm not mistaken, have been fairly static, right? That part never change. But you don't hear about anybody or any of this, even like from the, the same people that we heard from. 2020, LeBron's in the bubble with a shirt that says leader to society. You don't hear that much from LeBron about these types of issues anymore.

You don't see the pushbacks against Trump that you saw in the first term. You don't see those things anymore from Trump. And it's part of why I guess I look at Kaepernick and I don't say nearly as much, you know, where you at as much as how were you the only one? That's a great question. You know, how did we, how was it one, how was he the only one and two? How has it been reduced from that time to what we have now, where you, instead of that minimal activity on behalf of professional NBA players, for instance, right? The shift now is that mostly when we hear from NBA players, we're hearing from them defending their investment in like drone companies, right?

Or we're hearing someone like Kyle Kuzma talk explicitly about the positive aspects of AI. or speaking out against Mom Donnie, right? Like that's such a sharp turn. And that's kind of shocking. And the WNBA where I wrote about this in the moment, I thought there was a moral clarity that marked that league in the players and what they were doing during that era, during Floyd and Kaepernick.

And now what you see mostly from them is this sort of infighting in this almost social media talking point battle over who represents and who gets more media attention, right? I don't know why that spirit died. I do think that when you use the internet, you get the illusion of having done something without actually having it cost you anything. And it could be possible that we got addicted to that.

And after a while, the one thing we did not want was for anything to cost us anything. And the one thing that we did like was the feeling that we did something rather than actually doing anything. And once that got addictive and normalized, there wasn't really any other place to go. It felt like, and I think this is where cameras and media come into play, it felt like almost like a movie. We had done that part.

We saw that part and we closed that chapter and now we're moving forward. As you're saying, the statistics tell a different story. Our reality tells a different story. Certainly politically, our reality tells a different story. Who said anything about what happened in Minneapolis? outside like anything really strong outside of Wimby. And even Wembe seemed to be on the leash. But it took a man from France to speak out against a citizen being shot by, you know,

what some people might even call a Gestapo-style police force, right? I think Anthony Edwards, who I love, one of my favorite players in the NBA, he was very careful to generalize in his statements about that. And so I think that people saw, hey, they're still handing out checks. we moved on from that, and there's no need to go back there spiritually. That doesn't bring anything good into my life. And Kaepernick there is a shining example. His silence actually turns him into not just a martyr, but someone who's been cut off.

He has no real presence. So what's the reward for taking his route? Yeah, and I can, I raise the question also of the role a changing media plays in this because we made Colin Kaepernick front page news from 26 through 2016 season through the 2017 season right like we put Trump in all those things at the front this these were important things that you should pay attention to and by the way things that absolutely got traction and attention and ratings because people are addicted to the rage right I don't know what somebody would have to do to make that to lead on any of the ESPN or Fox shows anymore.

They just talking bald. Like the stick to sports people won. I've said this many times. And I'm not saying it like it's good, bad, or anything else. I'm just telling you, they won out on this. The media does more than ever to try to just talk about the games themselves, the people that are being hired. We went from 10 or 15 years ago when there was a real push to hire people.

I would argue that I was probably one of them, not simply about their ability to talk about sports, but to also talk about a larger world. And sports coverage has become very, very, very narrow subsequent to that. And I wonder in some ways how much of that is truly a response to Kaepernick because of how truly effective. It was proven that he had been. Like for those NFL guys, they were those owners, man, they were like, all right, so what do we do here? Okay, this is, keep in mind. These people couldn't wait to give Michael think a job. And even no matter how man Kaepernick made people. He ain't make him as mad as Michael. Vic did.

Yeah. And they were still like, no, brother, we'll find a place for you to lay low on the roster for a year, but you come back. We'll find something to do with you. They got Kaepernick out of there and made it clear. Think it can't happen to you? Well, then it do.

Yeah. Yeah. I think we mistook visibility for progress. And the cynical part me wants to say, strategically, there were several people in power and institutions at TV networks, politically, et cetera, who understood, hey, we need to get a handle on this and we are not sure what to do. And we need a temporary delay while we figure out how to make sure this

never happens again. That's a very cynical view because some of this is organic and evolves naturally and it's not really planned. There's no grand conspiracy oftentimes. But that's how it feels because suddenly we went from, as you said, hypervisibility. But if you look beyond and beneath the visibility, there wasn't a great investment. I think about this in literature too.

Suddenly they were giving prizes out to every Negro who could write his name on a page in my industry. People were going from bloggers to award-winning writers with multiple-year book deals and over six figures. What people don't understand, as it was a minimal investment. They don't understand how much money is actually in these industries, right?

That was easy to pass off to people. Wow, everyone regrouped and strategized, and I hate to say this, I don't want to sound like a total conspiracy nut, but it seemed like they were figuring out how to make sure nobody would be around in the aftermath, because I look at ESPN where you were. I look in the industry where I work in literature, and I see how many people lost their jobs as top editors and heads of publishing companies. And I see how the book deals have dried up and all those people who had all the tweet

storms who were visible in our lives every day. The algorithm on Twitter took care of them. And none of these people are around. So that temporary visibility didn't really add to their bottom line the way they thought it would. That fast money slowed up. and now there are none of us to discuss these very real issues on air or in any other public forums. That's been minimized.

And you look at it and it feels like we lost something major. That's not coming back. But maybe I'm wrong because these things do swing like a pendulum. I'm curious. You've been in media, obviously. Do you see this? Reemerging? I'm trying to figure out what it would take

or if you'd ever put a person in position. who would allow such a thing to happen. Like, it's, it's impossible to feel like it was, it feels top down intentional, right? Like, I operate of the general belief the audience is never wrong. They're not always right, but the audience,

but it didn't feel to me like the audience, like there was those people who were talking that stick to sports shit, they didn't mean it. Because the people who said that the loudest love it when you don't stick to sports, you just talk about stuff on the other side. You know, like they don't, they don't get that.

what in the world would have to transpire for things to push back? I think there's another part of it that's interesting about media. One thing that has gone away is the general sports columnist. The idea that there was someone whose job it was to write on opinions and writing is still more substantial than putting things up on video, right? Like writing it down, whittles out how many people can do it. It becomes its own credibility check just because there requires a certain level of effort and craft that turn it on the camera,

turn it on the mic is just never going to have, right? Well, who does that now? Whose gig is that? Whose position is it in sports to enforce any sort of moral clarity, right? Like, I see people, I get confused, and what people at this point in sports think is and is not a cause, right? People think that enforcing the NBA salary cap right now is a cause, a true matter of morality.

I happen to disagree. with that fact. On the other side, I see with NFL coaching and race and people say they need to get rid of the Rooney Rule as if that's the moral issue and not the actual paucity of black and brown hiring. Like within our world, I think our compass has been lost about what matters and why. Well, there's been a degradation of discourse and it's been reduced to these sort of clapbacks and, you know, antagonistic communication. There is no nuance. And if you remove the people who are supposed to be patient and clarify for people what it is that's at the heart of this issue, which is to say people who understand the forces of history, who understand critical thinking and who deliver the people a sort of distillation of the major issues of the day. With them removed, what we just have are people yelling at each other while everything is being looted.

right and I guess my question for you and it's a question I ask myself who are our leaders because to some extent we were looking to Colin Kaepernick to be one right and then we're questioning why didn't he link up with some but who are our leaders yeah and he had the potential to be one and I think he looked around and was like hey man that's a that's a lot more of a job than I thought it was yeah but you know is, by the way. Like, that's the thing. Somebody be like, no, man, I'm good on that. That shit don't even pay. Well, so many people got placements and platforms without doing hard work, right? And I mean this, I'm not talking about this from a capitalistic pocket watching standpoint. I mean, what are your credentials and your bona fides? What movements have you led? What organizations have you belonged to a led that I think a lot of people started to feel like, hey, man, this person got that the easy way. Why would I do all this hard work and be a fool?

But that's because we reduce the idea of activism and leadership, again, to something capitalistic, not something that's, you know, blood, sweat, and tears. That means your fellow man is important and there's a concept of community and society. And I think social media hasn't helped. It's given an illusion of community people that you don't know. But we're less connected than ever to the people. around us. And so it's harder to conceive of what it means to be a leader. All we see is the platform. And that's what we want. We don't see what it takes to create one, to empower people

to be on one. What are responsibilities that come with the platform? Yeah. Like this is this is a time and I wonder this, given how much things has changed, direction media, everything else. What we have historically found is that figures like Kaepernick, Kurt Flood, name any others, they wind up taking on a different life down the line and then they start getting these lifetime achievement awards from the same organizations that have ostracized them at various points or the publications that ostracized them, so forth and so on. Call it 10, 15 years from now, 25 years from that with Kaepernick. Are we even going to be a society that takes the time to look back and think about these

things in the first place or does he just get lost in the wash? man you know I would have I would have said when it was happening in real time I would have said yeah this is the person who 20 30 years from now and they're going to be inviting the universities and you know remember him quite fondly I don't even know if that's a place that we're at in we've shifted as a society right I thought about this when it was happening because the foil to Colin Kaepernick was Pat Tillman for some people like here's a football player who really sacrificed for this country and that's what it looked like But, of course, Pat Tillman's family didn't want that. And Pat Tillman, you know, was killed by friendly fire, right? Well, unfriendly fire. And so we have a way of repackaging people we like, don't like,

who died in circumstances that are inconceivable, into something that can be on the front of a hallmark card. And I imagined, Colin, with the neat Afro, would get there. But I don't think that we're even the old America, where we were nostalgic. and we liked history without moral reckoning, I don't think we care anymore. Again, our day situation,

the anger, the contempt that people have for a man who most likely killed himself, let me know that we're not interested in any sort of moral reckoning, not even a superficial one. And so I think Colin Kaepernick to a lot of people is just an irrelevant, annoying figure, and I don't see them trying to reclaim him. And then that raises the question of it then becomes our job, right? Because I think part of the Kaepernick story is all of us asking somebody else to do it.

Well, isn't he coming out? Back to the stage soon to be in conversation. The book is coming to be in conversation and tells his side of the story, which to me seems strange in 2026. We've been waiting for that a long time. So I'll be hanging on every word. That also feels like a decision that's made by a publisher. And what I mean by that is the same reason I'm doing this podcast. It's been 10 years.

I don't know if that's the calculation. I don't like that. Right. Like there was lots of time to do this when it probably could have been more beneficial. But I also know that boy was under siege, man. Like when it was bad, he was under siege and didn't ask for it in the first place, didn't think it was going to play out so I could understand. the desire to step back, like a very human part.

But I am curious to see when this book comes. Like, I think people are going to care enough to listen to these podcasts, obviously. I'm not sure anybody else is going to do them. And I'm curious what kind of coverage the book itself could get. What are the nuggets that are like, you know, the pull quotes that come out, right? They're like, oh, in this book, such and such said da-da-da, that's intended to sell it. What are those stories going to be and will they be enough to kind of rekindle? because I agree with you, I don't think there's nostalgia about this.

No. No, the momentum died very quickly. And I have obviously a lot of black friends and I have a lot of smart black friends and a lot of people who I would say, you know, so to speak, are tapped in, right? I don't know who watched that documentary that he made with Ava DuBinnett. Right. So this isn't new. Like the interest in him waned a long time ago and the silence didn't help.

The silence made a lot of people think he had nothing to say. Someone who did something that significant is what he did. That documentary shouldn't have died on the vibe. No matter what you think about it, whether you think it was great or whether you think it was disappointed, I was very confused by how few people had any interest in watching. All this, by the way, while we're seeing a rise in leftist politics, nothing is intended to make sense. Jason England, man, check him out, check out.

his work, Chronicle of Higher Education, Defector, other places you're going to see a lot more coming from him very, very soon. My brother, I appreciate you. Thank you. Always a pleasure to rock with you both. Appreciate you, too. Yes, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us here on the right time. We've done this a couple

times a week during the summer. Mike McQuay handles everything behind the scenes. Thank you, sir. Also, thank you to the good folks at Wave. This is the end of our third year with them and thank them so much for everything that we've had in these three years. Remember, follow the right time. Subscribe, like, rate us, review us, give us five stars.

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