Colin Kaepernick Says Jay-Z Became the “Black Face” NFL Owners Wanted to End Player Protests

Colin Kaepernick has spent nearly a decade insisting that his protest was never about a flag, a song or even football. It was about police brutality, racial inequality and whether powerful institutions could silence Black athletes once their protest became too disruptive.

Now he is making one of his most direct claims yet about how the NFL tried to bring that protest movement under control.

In a new interview promoting his memoir The Perilous Fight, Kaepernick said NFL owners were openly looking for a prominent Black figure who could help move the league away from the player-led demonstrations that followed his decision to kneel during the national anthem.

He pointed to a 2017 meeting between players and owners where, according to Kaepernick, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft described the protests as “the elephant in the room.” Kaepernick says Buffalo Bills owner Terry Pegula then said: “We need a Black face to help us end this.”

Kaepernick’s interpretation is even more striking. He says league owners wanted someone who could help them “subvert the protests” and redirect the movement away from the demands that had made the NFL so uncomfortable. And according to Kaepernick, the league first tried him.

Kaepernick Says He Refused the Deal

Kaepernick says NFL officials approached him about leading the league’s social justice initiatives, an offer he rejected. He argues that accepting would have required him to work within the very institution he believed was trying to suppress the protest.  

Kaepernick had already paid a substantial professional price. He has not played an NFL game since the 2016 season despite repeatedly saying he wanted to return. He and Eric Reid later filed collusion grievances accusing NFL owners of working together to keep them out of the league because of their protests. The league settled those grievances in 2019 without admitting wrongdoing, and the financial terms remain confidential.

Kaepernick still maintains that coaches and general managers told his representatives teams wanted him, but owners blocked those opportunities. He continues to train and recently said all he needs is for “one of the owners to open the door.”   That makes what happened next particularly significant.

Then Jay-Z Partnered With the NFL

In 2019, Jay-Z’s Roc Nation announced a wide-ranging partnership with the NFL. Roc Nation would advise the league on entertainment, including the Super Bowl halftime show, while also participating in the NFL’s Inspire Change social justice initiative.   Kaepernick now argues that Jay-Z effectively stepped into the position the owners had been looking to fill.

He told NPR this month that he found the partnership “disappointing,” particularly because Jay-Z had publicly supported him, worn his jersey on Saturday Night Live and had previously tried to recruit him to Roc Nation. Kaepernick said Jay-Z then signed a deal with the NFL that he believes “deliberately undercut and undermine[d] the protest” while players were still demonstrating.  

That criticism has followed Jay-Z since the partnership began. At the 2019 announcement, Jay-Z said he believed society had “moved past kneeling” and needed to focus on “actionable items.” Critics immediately questioned how the movement could have moved beyond kneeling when the man most associated with that protest still could not get an NFL job.   That question has aged remarkably well.

The Problem With Turning Protest Into a Partnership

There is a reason this story has struck a nerve again. The criticism is not simply that Jay-Z became wealthy or worked with the NFL. It is that institutions under pressure have repeatedly turned to culturally influential Black figures when they need to repair relationships with Black consumers.

Jay-Z’s 2026 partnership with Target has revived exactly that debate. Target faced sustained criticism and boycott calls after rolling back parts of its diversity and inclusion programmes. Then, this summer, Jay-Z released an exclusive 30th-anniversary edition of Reasonable Doubt through the retailer. Some Black consumers saw the deal as another corporation using an enormously influential Black celebrity to rebuild cultural credibility without necessarily resolving the issues that triggered the boycott.  

Kaepernick himself has drawn the parallel. After Jay-Z criticised him during a July freestyle and referenced Kaepernick’s NFL settlement, Kaepernick told NBC News that he believed Jay-Z had a “guilty conscience” over both the NFL and Target deals. Kaepernick, meanwhile, chose not to sell his memoir through Target.

That does not prove Jay-Z entered either partnership intending to undermine Black activism, but it helps explain why some people see a pattern. When corporations face backlash, powerful celebrities can lend cultural credibility without changing the institution underneath.

That perception is not new. In a 2014 email to Jeffrey Epstein, Jes Staley wrote that the people who “should be in the streets” had been “bought off by Jay-Z,” using him as shorthand for how wealth and celebrity can absorb dissent.

The email proves nothing about Jay-Z’s intent, but its language sits uncomfortably beside the NFL and Target deals. The real question is not whether he had the right to make them, but who benefited most.

Kaepernick Chose the Costlier Road

Whatever anyone thinks of Kaepernick, his own choices make the contrast difficult to ignore. He lost his NFL career at 29 and says he still wants to play. He settled his collusion case but never abandoned the argument that owners punished him for challenging the league. Kaepernick continues to insist that the protests were about police killings, incarceration and conditions facing Black communities, not about creating a marketable social justice programme for the NFL.

Jay-Z chose a different route: partnership, access and influence from inside the institution. The NFL got Roc Nation, better halftime shows and a high-profile Black billionaire standing beside Commissioner Roger Goodell.

Kaepernick got no NFL contract. That does not automatically make every decision Jay-Z has made malicious. He and Beyoncé also have substantial philanthropic records, and reducing either of them to caricatures would be dishonest.

But solidarity means considerably less when it disappears the moment corporate access becomes more valuable. Kaepernick was offered a path back into the establishment and says he refused it. His argument now is that the NFL kept looking until someone else said yes. And in his telling, that person was Jay-Z.