Colin Kaepernick Reveals How His “Disappointing” Tension With Jaÿ-Z Began

After the backlash to his NFL anthem protests cost him his career, Colin Kaepernick stayed quiet for a long time. But now that his memoir The Perilous Fight is out, he’s silent no more. In his book, he details what happened to him after the headlines slowed down and why he thought the protest was necessary in the first place.

Kaepernick, who was 28 back in 2016, had his NFL career effectively ended by his stance, which he says was to protest police and other racist killings of Black people. At the time, he played for the San Francisco 49ers and was two seasons removed from a Super Bowl XLVII start in 2013.

He played his last down of football on Jan. 1, 2017.

Now, Kaepernick says that NFL owners, including New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and Buffalo Bills owner Terry Pegula, tried to make a deal with him to stop the protest, which became a flashpoint during a time when high-profile cases like the police shootings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling divided the public.

In an appearance on the independent news site Meidas Touch, Kaepernick says that Jaÿ-Z basically agreed to be the “Black face” of the league after he refused to cut a deal with the NFL to end the protests.

In 2019, Roc Nation and the NFL agreed to a partnership that allowed Jaÿ’s company to curate the Super Bowl halftime show and work with the league on the Inspire Change initiative, which has given over $500M to non-profit organizations around the country.

“We see the NFL owners explicitly call this out in their players-owners meeting that happened in 2017,” he tells Ben Meiseles, one of the co-founders of the site. Meiseles, a lawyer, also represented Kaepernick in his successful grievance against the league. “Coming out of that meeting, we have reports of Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, saying, ‘The elephant in the room is this kneeling and the protests. We need to address it.’” 

He continued, “Then you have Terry Pagula, who is the owner of the Buffalo Bills, on the back of that, coming out and saying, ‘We need a Black face to help us end this.’ We’re hearing very explicitly from the NFL owners and that oligarch class that, ‘We need a Black face to help us subvert the protest, work counter to the people’s interests, and we’re in search of that.’”

Kaepernick ultimately settled his grievance with the NFL for an undisclosed amount. He says he rejected attempts to cut a deal to lead the league’s social justice initiatives. Jaÿ-Z accepted that deal, according to Kaepernick, saying in an infamous press conference that “we’ve moved past kneeling.”

“I think we forget that Colin’s whole thing was to bring attention to social justice,” Jaÿ said at the 2019 press conference where he and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell announced the partnership with Roc Nation. “In that case, this is a success. Because they’re two parts of protesting. You go outside, and you protest, and then the company and the individual say, ‘I hear you. What do we do next?”

But in The Perilous Fight, Kaepernick says that in a private phone call before the press conference, he asked the rap mogul to keep him out of any comments he was going to make. He told NPR’s Michel Martin that he thought Jay was supporting him after he wore Kaepernick’s jersey on Saturday Night Live.

He also shared that he turned down Roc Nation Sports when they tried to recruit him. But his next revelation may be his most surprising, as he said he was told that after the press conference, he believes Jay was behind ‘hit pieces’ that said Kaepernick no longer wanted to play football.

“I find it disappointing,” Kaepernick told Martin. “I had seen him come out publicly [to] support me, wear my jersey on Saturday Night Live. I had reached out prior to try to connect with him just to say thank you.”

He continued, “His organization, Roc Nation, tried to recruit me as an athlete previously, which I had turned down at that point. And then to see him come out and sign a deal with the NFL to deliberately undercut and undermine the protest is disappointing, to say the least.”

Keapernick says media outlets contacted him to fact-check stories about his desire to play football and told him Jay was behind them.

“I’d say the part that was even more disappointing was after the fact — because of the backlash that he got for doing the deal to undermine the protests — was [him] trying to go out and place hit pieces against me and say that I didn’t want to play football anymore,” Kaepernick said.

“We got the calls from reporters. We got the calls from journalists trying to validate are these things true. Ultimately, some of those stories got pulled. But some of [the stories] organizations ran with.”

Jay has not yet responded to Kaepernick’s book or his many media appearances. After performances and activations in New York City, Paris, and London on his Jay-Z 30 tour, he’s finishing up at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles on Oct. 23 and 24th.

See the reaction to the ongoing tension below.