Former NFL player Colin Kaepernick said black people can never be free under capitalism.
"Black liberation simply isn't possible under capitalism," Kaepernick said in an interview with the New Republic published Monday. The former quarterback gained notoriety in 2016 when he began kneeling while the national anthem was played before games, in a protest against racial injustice.
In the interview, Kaepernick discussed a book on black history he co-edited with prominent Marxists.
"I think the anthology makes this argument quite well, and I hope it challenges readers to see that racism is not white supremacy’s only ingredient," Kaepernick said. "White supremacy persists in part because of its relationship with capitalism, heteropatriarchy, ableism, and so on."
Kaepernick left his football career in 2017 and now is lucratively compensated for his activist work, including editing books. His current project is a book titled Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies, which he edited with Marxists Robin D.G. Kelley and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. The former is a UCLA professor who has called himself a "Marxist surrealist feminist" and the latter an editorial board member of the International Socialist Review.
"I’ve long admired Keeanga and Robin’s work as well as their uncompromising political analysis and understanding that Black liberation simply isn’t possible under capitalism," Kaepernick said after he was asked about working with "two of the most prominent black Marxists in the country."
Kaepernick has made millions from sponsors since leaving the NFL. He also lives in a mansion reportedly worth more than $5 million. His business dealings have included a multimillion-dollar endorsement deal with Nike, an autobiographical Netflix series called Colin in Black & White that compared the NFL Draft to slavery, and a children's book, I Color Myself Different, about a brown crayon that changed his life by teaching him to celebrate his "Black identity through the power of radical self-love."