Colin Kaepernick Says He Warned Jay-Z That His NFL Deal Was “Serving the Culture Up to a Bunch of Racists”
· Thought Catalog
Updated 3 minutes ago, September 14, 2026
Colin Kaepernick is revisiting his fractured relationship with Jay-Z in a new memoir, claiming he privately cautioned the rapper about Roc Nation’s partnership with the NFL. The account, and the public back-and-forth surrounding it, has reopened a years-long dispute between the two men.
Kaepernick says the private call happened only after Roc Nation’s NFL contracts were already signed in 2019. According to his upcoming memoir, he told Jay, “You’re the music guy to them. They quite literally need a Black face.”
He also connects that warning to an alleged 2017 owners meeting where the league discussed needing “a Black face to help us get rid of the protests.” The NFL has denied blackballing Kaepernick, and Roc Nation declined to comment to NBC News.
Jay’s relationship with Kaepernick had looked very different in 2017. He dedicated “The Story of O.J.” to him, wore a “Colin K” jersey on SNL and rapped that he’d turned down the Super Bowl. After Roc Nation partnered with the NFL in 2019, Jay said they’d “moved past kneeling” and contrasted helping millions of people with getting “stuck on Colin not having a job.”
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This round started in July at Yankee Stadium. While defending an exclusive Reasonable Doubt vinyl release with Target amid a civil rights boycott over the retailer’s DEI rollback, Jay rapped, “They run out of characters, had to bring back up Kap again. Buddy took a check, I ain’t even mad at him, but along with that check you gotta sign a non-disparagement.”
Kaepernick says that accusation is false. He told Lester Holt he settled his NFL collusion case in 2019 but didn’t sign an NDA.
In the Dateline interview that aired Sept. 7, Kaepernick called Jay’s latest shot “reputational recovery” and tied it to the backlash over the NFL partnership. “The backlash that [Jay-Z] received for partnering with the NFL and going counter to people’s interests in 2019 was a major problem for him, so much so that he’s still bringing it up in 2026,” he told Holt.
Jay’s counter has stayed consistent: results inside the system matter more to him than symbolic protest. In the freestyle, he hit “Twitter activists,” cited Amazon, Meta and Google, and pointed to REFORM Alliance-backed laws and “half a billion back to the community.”
Kaepernick’s memoir, The Perilous Fight, comes out Sept. 15. It won’t be sold at Target, and Kaepernick is touring with the National Association of Black Bookstores.
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