America is on fire, and Colin Kaepernick tried to warn us. He saw what many white people did not want to see four years ago, and he said what many prominent white coaches and athletes are saying today. Some truths make people uncomfortable until we hear them enough, and that is really all Kaepernick did: He told the truth and made people uncomfortable. He didn’t even really raise his voice. Contrast our current national civil unrest with Kaepernick in his last NFL season: a man, before a football game, kneeling during the national anthem. It seems so quaint.
Mainstream white America is going to reconsider Kaepernick at some point—the way it reconsidered Muhammad Ali years after he refused to go to Vietnam, the way it reconsidered Jackie Robinson and Jack Johnson.