Former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick was adopted as a baby into a white family, in a town that was almost entirely white. He was 8 when a group of older boys called him the n-word and tried to tie him to a tree — an incident he never mentioned to his parents.

“Instinctively, as a Black boy, I didn’t think they would believe me,” Kaepernick says. “I went [home] and got cleaned up, came downstairs, and went about the day like nothing had happened. But it was a moment that also shaped and defined me.”

For Kaepernick, football became a space for him to understand his Blackness. He found support in his fellow teammates and their mothers, who shared their own experiences with racism and advised him on how to navigate situations involving the police. He went on to play college football for the University of Nevada, Reno.

“One of the things that I always appreciated about sports is it became much more difficult for people to approach things from a subjective lens. Sports is very — you won or you lost, you did your job or you didn’t, you scored a touchdown or you did it, you completed the pass or you didn’t,” he says.

The San Francisco 49ers drafted Kaepernick as quarterback in 2011. He played in the NFC championship games in 2013 and 2014 and in the 2013 Super Bowl. But he also became increasingly concerned by incidents of police violence against Black people, including the fatal shootings of Mario Woods in San Francisco, Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in a suburb of Saint Paul, Minn. At the beginning of the 2016 season, he took a knee during the national anthem in protest.

“The treatment of Black people and the systems that have been built to continue to oppress Black people and people of color more broadly — that’s not something I was OK with,” he says. “And I wasn’t gonna show pride in those systems that are continuing to kill us, continuing to target us and hold us back and discriminate against us.”

Kaepernick’s protest sparked a firestorm of criticism and commentary. After the 2016 season, he never played another NFL game. Kaepernick would go on to file a grievance accusing NFL owners of colluding to keep him out of the league; they reached a settlement in 2019. In his new memoir, The Perilous Fight, retraces his journey to joining the NFL — and explains why he’s still hoping to make it back to the league.