Washingtonpost is baffled nobody is talking about Colin Kaepernick during Super Bowl week

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The Super Bowl is being played in his former home stadium, at a societal moment that echoes the issues he forced football fans to confront. So why is he out of mind?

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The most relevant figure to Super Bowl LX is absent from it. The game will be played in his former home stadium, in the place where his protest made him a national lightning rod and a global symbol. The social issues swirling around America’s largest sporting spectacle carry distinct echoes of what prompted his actions and what led to his exile. And yet he remains outside the conversation and invisible within the confines of the NFL

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Colin Kaepernick might as well be a ghost. “Colin Kaepernick?” Seattle Seahawks safety Julian Love said this week, as if hearing a name he had not considered in a long time. “Oh, wow.”

This summer will bring the 10-year anniversary of the first time Kaepernick sat as the national anthem played before a San Francisco 49ers preseason game. He soon switched to a kneeling position out of respect for military members. The image of Kaepernick on a knee became a worldwide emblem of outrage over police violence and racial injustice — and a tempest that led to unwanted political entanglement for the NFL, fierce ire from the political right and Kaepernick’s ostracism from professional football.

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The current moment and the Super Bowl’s location provide a platform to examine the legacies of Kaepernick’s protest. He served as a flash point, and even as he semi-receded from public life, his influence hovers over the league as an example of both courage and consequences. “He made a decision to talk about something other than football that ultimately resulted in every player in the National Football League kneeling when the president of the United States called all of their mothers a b----,” said DeMaurice Smith, who was the NFL Players Association executive director during Kaepernick’s protest. “For a guy that literally begged for players to engage in collective action, Colin was more successful than I ever was.”

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“Nobody called me when I was the [executive director] and said, ‘Hey man, we’ve come to grips with our White male fragility and are now understanding the whole system is rigged and gosh darn it, we’re going to do something about it,’” Smith said. “Nobody gave me that call. When they do put it in, why would I be so naive to believe they had come to some sort of self-awakening? And if they decide to take it out, why would I ever believe they are reneging on said awakening?”

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The uncomfortable truth is that Kaepernick’s impact on the NFL was ultimately contained,” Graves said. “The protest was absorbed, metabolized and excreted as corporate social responsibility.” Kaepernick resonated differently in 2017 than he does today, just as he will resonate differently 50 years from now. At the moment, his aims appear just as far from being met — if not further — than when he knelt. But that, to many supporters, is wholly beside the point.

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