Colin Kaepernick shares his truth on Netflix in a way you haven’t heard before

Really think about this for a minute: How much have you heard Colin Kaepernick speak?

Plenty of us have heard from the former NFL pro-turned-racial justice activist by way of his actions, and the business decisions he’s made to get his message out to a wider audience. Maybe it’s not the case for you, but even after all that’s happened and all that he’s been through, I can’t say that I, an avid online media consumer, really know Kaepernick.

Netflix’s Colin in Black & White feels like it was crafted as a direct response to that line of thinking. The six-episode limited series created by Kaepernick and Ava DuVernay details how a prodigious young athlete’s journey through high school led him to professional sports in a way that inseparably linked his career choice to the unjust reality of life in the United States as a non-white person.

Most importantly: Kaepernick is our narrator. He’s telling us his own story, and he’s also contextualizing that very personal look back against the history of the Black experience in the United States.

In an exceptionally well-executed framing device for the series, Kaepernick delivers all this extra context along with snippets of personal insight from the inside of a small, multipurpose room. It’s a space that is equal parts movie theater, speech stage, and blank canvas for forays into a grounded sort of magical realism that mixes past and present together.

In this space, prospects attending the annual NFL Combine, where young up-and-comers show off their physical talents and attributes to the league’s scouts, transform into the human chattel of the early American slave trade. The sickening parallel Kaepernick draws between a buzzy, modern pro sports entry point for young athletes, which he himself experienced, and the painful dehumanization of people who were — and still are, he contends — treated like products to be auctioned is plain to see.

How much have you heard Colin Kaepernick speak?

From this space, too, Kaepernick is able to physically step into the 1920s as he sits down at the back of a bus while recounting the story of Romare Bearden. The famed Black artist started his career as a Negro League baseball player who had the chance to join a Major League Baseball team more than a decade before Jackie Robinson became the first Black player to do so.

Bearden didn’t go for it in the end because of the terrible and deeply insulting price he was reportedly asked to pay: that he pose in public as a white man. And here again, the visual of Kaepernick, who was effectively banished from the sport he loved and committed himself to — at great personal cost, as we learn from Colin in Black & White — inside this historical recreation establishes an unmistakably stark parallel between then and now.

Even when he’s not actively speaking, the real Kaepernick’s presence hangs over every frame of this Netflix series. He’s a passive viewer when his featureless box transforms into a theater, just a silhouette identifiable by his “perfectly shaped afro” watching silently while Jaden Michael, who delivers a superb performance as the young Colin, relives Kaep’s high school years.

It’s the moments when the man himself opens his mouth, though, that Colin in Black & White really springs to life. It’s not because Kaepernick is any kind of a gifted performer. He may be that, but here he’s mostly a narrator speaking in neutral, measured tones even as he delves into incredibly personal life events. He’s reciting a script more than acting from it.

Even still, and especially as a co-creator of the series, he’s speaking for himself. So much of Colin Kaepernick’s public life since he first knelt during the 2016 NFL pre-season has been recounted by secondhand (and beyond) sources. People reporting his quotes, or reacting to reports of his quotes, or simply reading the whole protest movement and responding to that, and often at a remove from the actual soundbites.

Not here, though. Here we see Colin Kaepernick, the now-33-year-old ex-NFL quarterback who had his dream job taken away because a deeply held desire to play professional football isn’t the only thing that high school handed him. He also learned, by inches and degrees as the adopted son of a white Midwestern family, that there’s a whole spectrum of racism and the way it manifests in America.

In one of the more stirring examples of ‘Colin in Black & White’ leaning toward magical realism, Kaepernick draws a cutting parallel between the NFL Combine and the early American slave trade.
Credit: COURTESY OF NETFLIX

Kaepernick’s narration isn’t emotive because it doesn’t have to be. The grown man doing the talking lived through the often embarrassing public spectacle of overt bigotry, as well as the more private spectacle of personally targeted microaggressions. We see it come to life in Michael’s performance — as well as that of Mary Louise Parker and Nick Offerman, who play mom and dad Kaepernick as well as frequently oblivious observers of offensive behavior — in every episode.

Those performances, and the four-year slice of life they capture, are the propulsive energy driving Colin in Black & White. It’s a dramatized version of a real person’s life and there’s no question about that, but the human drama is extremely well put together and tightly paced. The fact that there’s tension at all in Young Colin’s deliberation over which sport to pursue — he was a baseball phenom as well — speaks volumes. This is great TV.

But the heartbeat of it all is the man himself. Kaepernick is our viewing companion and our teacher through every episode of Colin in Black & White. Even his somewhat wooden delivery as a narrator serves its purpose. He never overshadows his own story as it unfolds; instead, he enhances it.

Colin in Black & White is streaming now on Netflix.