00:00Colin Kaepernick says NFL blackballing was political and about power on The View.
00:07Colin Kaepernick appeared on The View to promote his memoir, The Perilous Fight,
00:11released 10 years after his 2016 National Anthem protest.
00:16Kaepernick was drafted by the San Francisco 49ers in 2011, played six seasons,
00:22and led the team to Super Bowl XLVII after the 2012 season.
00:26In 2016, he began kneeling during the National Anthem to protest police brutality,
00:33an action that became a national flashpoint.
00:37Asked what led to his decision, Kaepernick said it was a lifetime of experiences.
00:42He grew up as an adopted child in a white middle-class family in Turlock, California,
00:47where the community was 1-3% black and encountered racism from a young age.
00:52He cited reading the autobiography of Malcolm X as a turning point in understanding the historical
00:59black experience.
01:00He listed a sequence of high-profile police killings including Michael Brown, Eric Garner,
01:06Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Mario Woods, Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile.
01:12He said the broader conversation had reached a point of,
01:17After conversations with teammate Eric Reid and former Green Beret and NFL player Nate Boyer,
01:23Kaepernick switched from sitting to kneeling as a more respectful form of protest.
01:28Six months after the protest began, he opted out of his 49ers contract,
01:33and no other team signed him.
01:34He later filed a collusion grievance against the NFL.
01:38The case ended in a confidential settlement in 2019.
01:42Asked why no team gave him a chance, Kaepernick said he believes it was political and about power.
01:48He emphasized that he had not protested the NFL itself,
01:52yet the league's response revealed its political stance.
01:56He noted that NFL owners had donated millions of dollars to President Donald Trump and his
02:02administration.
02:03He added that the NFL is approximately 70% black,
02:07and that players, as the product on the field, possess collective power.
02:12If they unified and refused to play for one weekend, he said,
02:16change would come quickly.
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