Key Takeaways
- Colin Kaepernick said he wished more NFL players had joined his 2016 protest against police brutality, recalling one player who claimed his team owner barred him from participating.
- Charlamagne Tha God questioned Kaepernick’s consistency, arguing that he could have led a broader strike at the time and saying, "We only hear from you when you out here selling us something."
- The criticism comes as Kaepernick promotes his memoir, The Perilous Fight, through appearances on major podcasts and radio shows.
Charlamagne Tha God has called out Colin Kaepernick for only speaking out about social justice when it benefits him.
During a recent broadcast of The Breakfast Club, which featured an interview with Deante Kyle, the Grits & Eggs podcast host spoke about celebrities using their voices to highlight important social causes, and suggested that he is willing to offer people some "grace" when they can’t be as politically outspoken as they might want to be.
"I do also think, you know, let’s not do it when it’s convenient for us," Kyle said around the 49-minute mark of the episode, which can be heard in full below. "Let’s not try to be 'fight the power' and be like, 'Yeah, and I got this book coming out, too.' You can’t just do it when it’s convenient or opportunistic."
Kaepernick recently released his new memoir, The Perilous Fight, and has been in the public eye once again talking about the NFL protests that cost him his football career in 2016. Upon hearing Kyle's comments, Charlamagne suggested that Kaepernick was guilty of speaking about important issues to benefit himself.
"We were just having that conversation about Colin Kaepernick," Charlamagne said. "He said that he felt like everybody in the league should have protested, right? And everybody should have went on strike. Sure, but you also went on the Higher Learning podcast and said you never called for a boycott or a protest. So, my thing was, you could have been the leader that could have sparked that off back then. We only hear from you when you out here selling us something."
In recent weeks, Kaepernick has been promoting his new book with appearances on several high-profile podcasts and radio shows.
During an appearance on The New Yorker Radio Hour, he admitted that he was disappointed that more NFL players didn’t join him in a non-violent protest against police brutality.
"I remember one, which — playing this back is a little bit of a mind-blowing conversation," he said. "I had one player that came back and was like, 'My owner told me that I can’t protest.' And that was an unfathomable sentence to me."
