“You don’t present as black,” Carolla told his audience. “The reason you have a 26-foot Afro now is you’re trying to present as black.”
The remark quickly cut to a larger disagreement over identity, activism and Kaepernick’s evolution from professional athlete to political symbol.
Kaepernick Returns With a New Memoir
The Perilous Fight was released September 15 through Legacy Lit, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.
The publisher describes the book as both a memoir and an account of the experiences that eventually led Kaepernick to protest during the national anthem in 2016.
Kaepernick was adopted by white parents and raised in Turlock, California.
His book focuses heavily on growing up as a Black child in a white family and what he describes as the racial tensions surrounding that experience.
Kaepernick argues that those experiences helped shape his eventual views of American society, professional football and racial inequality.
Carolla sees the story very differently.
Carolla Questions Kaepernick’s Public Image
During his podcast remarks, Carolla focused on Kaepernick’s appearance and mixed-race background.
He joked that older photographs made Kaepernick look “like a Syrian cab driver,” before arguing that Kaepernick’s public image changed as racial activism became increasingly central to his career.
That led Carolla to his broader question.
“Why are you bending yourself into pretzels being black, if that’s the one we don’t like?” Carolla asked.
Carolla’s argument was essentially that Kaepernick’s prominence complicates claims that American society uniformly punishes Black identity.
That is Carolla’s interpretation, not an uncontested fact. Kaepernick has consistently described his Black identity as fundamental to his life rather than something constructed for commercial purposes.
And his new memoir makes that case explicitly.
According to Hachette, Kaepernick writes about being raised in what he considered “white spaces” while attempting to understand his own racial identity. The publisher presents that experience as one of the central themes behind his later activism.
Carolla Broadens His Criticism
Carolla didn’t stop with Kaepernick.
He brought former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Kamala Harris into the discussion while questioning how prominent mixed-race Americans describe themselves publicly.
“What about momma?” Carolla asked. “I thought we were empowering women here.”
The argument was deliberately confrontational, but it touched on a long-running American debate: whether racial identity is primarily determined by ancestry, upbringing, culture, personal identification or some combination of all four.
Kaepernick’s own story sits directly inside that debate.
His biological mother is white, while his biological father was Black. He was adopted as an infant by Rick and Teresa Kaepernick, who are white.
Kaepernick nevertheless identifies as Black and has made racial justice the defining cause of his public life.
Kaepernick Takes Another Shot at the NFL — and Jay-Z
The controversy comes as Kaepernick is making headlines for what he wrote about rapper and businessman Jay-Z.
Jay-Z’s Roc Nation entered a partnership with the NFL in 2019 involving entertainment and the league’s social-justice initiatives.
Kaepernick was sharply critical.
In The Perilous Fight, he recounts learning about African leaders who participated in selling other Africans into slavery and writes that he “couldn’t help but to think about Jay-Z and the NFL.”
That is a severe comparison, particularly given Kaepernick’s longstanding accusations that the NFL exploits Black athletes.
Kaepernick hasn’t played an NFL regular-season game since January 2017.
He later filed a grievance alleging that league owners colluded to keep him out because of his anthem protests. The NFL and Kaepernick eventually settled the dispute under a confidentiality agreement.
Contrary to some reports and commentary over the years, the official settlement amount has never been publicly disclosed.
Activism Became Kaepernick’s Second Career
Whatever one thinks of Kaepernick’s politics, his protest unquestionably produced a public career extending far beyond football.
He has worked with Nike, launched publishing and media ventures and continued speaking about racial inequality.
This summer, the ACLU honored Kaepernick and Bruce Springsteen with its Ralph Ellison Award for Defenders of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in the Arts, Business, Science, and Sports. The organization said the award recognized contributions to civil rights and American culture.
His supporters view that record as evidence that Kaepernick sacrificed an NFL career to advance a cause he believed in.
His critics, including Carolla, see something else: an activist brand that has remained commercially valuable long after Kaepernick threw his final NFL pass.
That disagreement is precisely why Carolla’s comments are likely to generate another round of controversy.
Kaepernick’s new book presents his transformation as a story of identity, conviction and sacrifice.
Carolla is challenging that framing at its foundation.
And he is doing it by asking a question few interviewers promoting Kaepernick’s memoir are likely to ask:
“Why are you bending yourself into pretzels being black, if that’s the one we don’t like?”
