The Perilous Fight

“A candid, observant, generous chronicle of his development as an elite, suddenly dispensable NFL quarterback and also of the relentless, high-profile civil rights warrior he's become.” —Booklist Starred Review

On September 1, 2016, Colin Kaepernick took a knee during “The Star Spangled Banner,” but the world never fully understood the whole story. Not the “why” or the cost of his courage. That story begins in Turlock, California, where Kaepernick, a Black kid adopted into a white family, navigated constant resistance to His Blackness and sense of self. Sports became his refuge and his proving ground, where his talent could not be questioned. The extraordinary result? A quarterback whose arm and instincts would carry him to the Super Bowl and into history books. But with success came an education he hadn’t anticipated.

In the fraught world of sports politics, he saw the hidden powerhouses pulling the strings. Steeled with the readings of Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Huey P. Newton, and Angela Davis, he saw in the NFL, in Turlock, in the repeated, unpunished police killings of Black and Brown Americans, an undeniable truth revealed: this was not someone else’s fight. It was his. It is ours.

When Kaepernick knelt, the NFL blackballed him. But in the ten years since, the questions his protest raise have not gone away. In The Perilous Fight, Kaepernick delivers his story with the same unflinching conviction that defined his most-watched moment, a single act of protest that changed American sports and culture forever. And ultimately, it is a story about the future we are all still fighting to build.