ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the intersection of professional sports celebrity, civil rights activism, and contemporary race relations. The discussion takes up the controversy around Colin Kaepernick, a once-popular National Football League (NFL) player for the San Francisco 49ers, who helped initiate a movement where he and other NFL peers began kneeling during the playing of the U.S. national anthem prior to games as an occasion to draw attention to widespread instances of aggressive policing and brutal encounters between African Americans and law enforcement. The practice created a firestorm of media and popular response fanned, in part, by the then candidate and later president Donald Trump, who framed the protests as a performance of disrespect to nationalist identity. Situated in the larger history of African American protest that is always already regulated by dominant society and a broader context of activism viewed as threatening social order and norms around the rhetoric of protest, the chapter argues that the popular response teaches Black men that their identities must always be muted and nonconfrontational in the face of white supremacy and domination. This literacy of African American masculinity makes possible accommodationist and oppositional forms, but suggests this body and its performanity must always, in practice, be subversive in order to navigate the sensibilities of white fragility and never challenge its power.
