Two years. That’s the gap Colin Kaepernick wants you to sit with, between a private meeting in an NFL conference room and a press release with Jay-Z’s name on it.
In his new memoir, The Perilous Fight, out Sept. 15, Kaepernick writes that at a 2017 players-owners meeting, the league said it needed “a Black face” to help kill the anthem protests. His exact words, via NBC News: “The same NFL that, in a players-owners meeting in 2017, said we need a Black face to help us get rid of the protests.” This isn’t the 2016 grievance loop Kaepernick has been stuck in for a decade. It’s a specific, checkable sequence, and the second date on it belongs to Jay-Z.
Roc Nation’s multiyear NFL partnership — the entertainment deal that birthed Inspire Change — was announced Aug. 13, 2019, according to CBS News. Two years, almost to the season, after the meeting Kaepernick describes. He isn’t asking you to take his word for what the owners said behind closed doors. He’s asking you to look at what happened next and decide for yourself whether it lines up.
Kaepernick says he saw this coming before the ink dried. Per NPR, he writes that he told Jay-Z directly, before the deal went public: “I just want you to know, one, you’re serving the culture up to a bunch of racists and, two, they don’t care about you.” Then, sharper: “You’re the music guy to them. They quite literally need a Black face — and have said as much.”
That’s Kaepernick’s own characterization of a private conversation, not a confirmed transcript, and Roc Nation has declined to comment on any of it. The NFL, for its part, has spent years denying it blackballed Kaepernick at all.
None of that has stopped Kaepernick from pushing the theory further. On Sept. 2, after Jay-Z name-checked him during a run of Yankee Stadium shows in July, Kaepernick told TheGrio the callbacks read as “a guilty conscience trying to reposition or reframe the conversation.” That’s Kaepernick’s read of Jay-Z’s motives, worth separating from anything Jay-Z has actually said about himself. Jay-Z’s own line from that freestyle was a lot more combative than guilty: “Buddy took a check, I ain’t even mad at him, but along with that check you have to sign a non-disparagement. I’m the one [the NFL] can’t control.”
The clip is already circulating with its own headline attached.
https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/2100287394318868865
Whether “blackballing” is the precise legal word for what happened to Kaepernick’s career is a fight that’s gone nowhere for a decade. What’s different now is that he’s stopped describing a vague villain and started drawing a line between two dated events, then letting the reader do the arithmetic. I spend a lot of my non-sports reading time on political journalism, and the instinct that builds is simple: people can spin a quote, but they can’t spin a calendar. Kaepernick has said before that he stopped watching the league that blackballed him, and the memoir tour that’s already stirred up plenty of discourse isn’t walking that back.
Kaepernick’s publisher has also confirmed the book won’t be sold at Target, a separate dispute entirely, which tells you the man isn’t in a conciliatory mood on any front this month.
Kaepernick says the NFL cast the part. Jay-Z just picked up the check.
