Colin Kaepernick Calls Out NFL Hypocrisy Amid Jay-Z Partnership

Colin Kaepernick tells NBC News the NFL is actively blackballing him while Jay-Z profits from the league’s social justice partnership.

Jay-Z said, “We’ve moved past kneeling,” but Colin Kaepernick just made it clear the NFL still won’t let him play ball.

In a rare sit-down with NBC News, the former 49ers quarterback laid out exactly why he’s done with the league, and it’s not about moving forward as some people claim.

Kaepernick told the network that the organization is “actively blackballing me” and has targeted other players who stood with him during the protests.

“I’m not going to support an organization that one is actively blackballing me, but two has targeted my brothers who’ve been protesting as part of this as well. I watch college football,” Kaepernick told NBC News reporter Rohan Nadkarni.

The contrast here is wild.

Jay-Z walked into an NFL boardroom in 2019 and announced his Roc Nation partnership, talking about how we needed to shift from symbolic gestures to real action.

He said we’re “past kneeling” and that it was time for something more concrete. The league ate that up.

They made him their entertainment and social justice strategist, gave him a seat at the table, and suddenly the narrative flipped from “the NFL is racist” to “the NFL is evolving.”

But Kaepernick’s still locked out, and that’s the part nobody wants to talk about.

When Kaepernick broke down what happened, he pointed to coaches like John Harbaugh who wanted to bring him in but got “shut down from above.”

He went to a Super Bowl, set records, and not a single team would even give him a workout. That’s not a coincidence. That’s coordination.

According to NBC News, Kaepernick said the league’s response to the George Floyd movement was “laughable” and “disingenuous.”

They threw money at causes, made statements, and then went back to business as usual. The NFL responded by saying the issues “remain important” and deserve “continued attention,” which is corporate speak for “we’re not actually changing anything.”

Kaepernick’s activism has evolved too, but not in the way Jay-Z meant it.

He’s become more strategic about when he speaks, more intentional about which causes he supports. He voted in the last two presidential elections after saying he wouldn’t vote back in 2016.

He credits fatherhood with shifting his perspective.

But none of that means he’s moved past the core issue: the NFL colluded to keep him out, and the league’s partnership with Jay-Z was designed to make people forget that ever happened.

His memoir drops later this month, and you can bet it’s going to address exactly how the system works to silence people who refuse to play along.

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