The Episodic Kneel: Racial Neoliberalism, Civility, and the Media Circulation of Colin Kaepernick, 2017–2020

Abstract

Despite his absence from National Football League (NFL) fields, Colin Kaepernick has exerted an ongoing resonance in American sport-media discourse over the last few years. This article addresses such resonance through three “flashpoints”: President Donald Trump’s inflammatory comments on Kaepernick at a 2017 rally, Nike’s Kaepernick advertising campaign in 2018, and the 2020 resurgence of Black Lives Matter within which Kaepernick, and the act of kneeling, remained central. It is argued that these flashpoints indicate, in varied ways, the hegemony of racial neoliberalism and civility as structuring ideologies in the twenty-first-century United States. Kaepernick amplified his voice through the endorsement of racial-neoliberal discourse (Nike ad), while Trump’s comments and the recent wave of high-profile killings of Black Americans generated condemnation largely focused on acts of (in)civility rather than deeper roots of systemic inequality. Yet recent events also point to signs of the cracking, if not fundamentally de-hegemonizing, of racial neoliberalism, particularly through a turn (if only temporary) away from colorblind “antiracialism” in sport.