The views and opinions expressed by guest speakers and artists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the official position or opinions of The Ebell of Los Angeles.
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.
The views and opinions expressed by guest speakers and artists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the official position or opinions of The Ebell of Los Angeles.
