Chapter 7 — When a Gesture Becomes Another Message

When a Gesture Becomes Another Message

The photograph contains almost no movement.

Players stand in a row along the sideline while the national anthem plays. Some face the field with their hands over their hearts. Near the end of the line, one player remains lower than the others, resting on one knee.

There is no raised fist. No sign. No interruption. The game has not yet begun.

A camera freezes the arrangement.

Once the photograph leaves the stadium, the gesture begins moving.

It enters a headline, then a television segment, then an argument about the flag. It becomes a test of patriotism, a challenge to the league, an insult to military service, a protest against police violence, an act of courage, an act of betrayal, and evidence of nearly everything people already believe about athletes who enter public disputes.

The player remains in the same position in every copy.

The meaning around him does not.

The Gesture Before the Gesture

Colin Kaepernick’s protest did not begin with the photograph most people remember.

During the San Francisco 49ers’ 2016 preseason, he sat on the bench during the national anthem. The action attracted little attention at first. It became a national story only after a reporter noticed him sitting before an August 26 game against Green Bay and asked about it afterward.¹

The first form of the protest was therefore visible without yet becoming meaningful to the wider audience. Thousands of people had been present. Cameras had been operating. The anthem had played. Kaepernick had remained seated. But an event does not become a public signal merely because it can be seen.

Someone must notice the difference, ask what it means, and carry the answer elsewhere.

Before the question, Kaepernick’s posture was one body among many on a sideline. After the question, the same posture became a statement about the country.

The movement from event to message began with attention.

What He Said It Meant

When asked why he had not stood, Kaepernick did not describe the action as a general expression of dissatisfaction or a protest against football.

He said he could not show pride in a flag while Black people and other people of color were being oppressed. He connected the decision specifically to racial injustice, police violence, deaths in the street, and the absence of accountability. He also said the concern was “bigger than football” and that he understood the protest could cost him his career or endorsements.²

That explanation does not settle whether the protest was wise, fair, proportionate, or likely to succeed.

It does establish what concern the speaker said he was trying to place before the audience.

This distinction matters because public arguments often move quickly from rejecting a message to replacing it.

A person may hear Kaepernick’s explanation and conclude that the anthem was the wrong setting, that his account of policing was incomplete, or that his action unfairly associated a national symbol with injustice. Those are disagreements with the protest.

To say that he was protesting the military is a different kind of claim. It substitutes another message for the one he gave.

The setting helps explain why that substitution occurred. The anthem carries meanings larger than the song itself. It is connected in public ceremonies to the flag, military service, national memory, sacrifice, and belonging. To act differently during it is to enter a field of associations the speaker did not create and cannot simply dismiss.

The audience was not looking at a neutral surface on which Kaepernick could place any meaning he wished.

But inherited associations do not erase stated purpose.

A gesture can activate meanings the speaker did not intend without making intention irrelevant.

The Signal Changes Shape

The criticism began before the gesture reached its most familiar form.

Sitting during the anthem was interpreted by many observers as dismissive or disrespectful. Nate Boyer, a former Green Beret who had briefly played in the NFL, entered the conversation and met with Kaepernick and safety Eric Reid. After their discussion, Kaepernick changed the protest from sitting to kneeling; Reid joined him before the 49ers’ final preseason game in San Diego on September 1. Reid later explained that kneeling was chosen as a more respectful gesture while preserving the protest, and described the decision as the product of extended discussion and consultation with Boyer.³

The change is important because it complicates two simple stories.

The first says the speaker alone controls meaning. Under that view, Kaepernick’s explanation should have been sufficient. Whatever he intended was what the gesture meant, and every other response was a failure to listen.

But he did listen.

He learned that the form of the signal was carrying a meaning he did not want to communicate. He did not abandon the concern. He altered the posture.

The second simple story says the protest was designed to insult the military and the flag. That account has difficulty explaining why Kaepernick consulted a veteran and changed his position in an effort to show greater respect.

The movement from sitting to kneeling demonstrates that interpretation is not merely noise surrounding a pure message.

The audience can reveal something about the signal to the speaker. The speaker can then refine the signal without surrendering the concern.

Communication is not complete when intention leaves the body. Meaning forms through the interaction between what someone is trying to say, the form selected to say it, and the histories other people bring to that form.

Kaepernick could choose the posture. He could not choose everything the posture would evoke.

The Meaning Already Waiting

A kneeling body does not carry one permanent meaning.

People kneel to pray, mourn, submit, propose marriage, receive honors, tend to an injured person, or show respect before someone they regard as sacred. The position can express humility or defiance depending on what surrounds it.

On a football field during the national anthem, the posture entered a more constrained scene.

The anthem asked for standing. Kaepernick’s kneeling became meaningful through contrast. The protest was quiet precisely because the surrounding ritual made quiet deviation visible.

This created an unavoidable tension.

Had he protested at another time, fewer people might have interpreted the act as disrespect toward the anthem. Fewer people might also have noticed it.

The setting was not incidental to the signal’s power. The protest interrupted a ceremony designed to gather people into shared national identification. It used the moment of unity to draw attention to people who, in Kaepernick’s account, were not receiving equal protection within the country being honored.

For supporters, that contrast was the argument. For critics, the contrast was the offense.

Both interpretations arose from something genuinely present in the scene. The gesture concerned racial injustice, and it occurred during a national ritual. Neither fact can be removed without changing the event.

But the existence of multiple relevant meanings does not make every description equally accurate.

An interpretation becomes weaker when it requires ignoring the speaker’s repeated explanation, the consultation that changed the gesture, and the concern the protest continued to name.

Meaning is not owned entirely by the speaker. It is still constrained by evidence.

When the Protest Becomes the Subject

A protest attempts to redirect attention.

The ordinary ceremony places attention on one object. The protest interrupts the ceremony so that something excluded from it becomes visible.

But interruption creates its own event.

Soon the argument may concern the interruption more than the condition that produced it.

This happened rapidly with Kaepernick.

The original concern involved police violence, racial inequality, and accountability. Much of the public dispute instead became organized around whether an athlete should stand, what the flag deserved, whether wealthy players had standing to protest, and whether political expression belonged in sports.

These were not invented questions. The protest had created them.

But they changed the center of the conversation.

The more people argued over the propriety of kneeling, the less they had to argue about the conditions Kaepernick said had led him to kneel. The signal became so controversial that the controversy displaced its referent.

The protest was no longer pointing away from itself. It was pointing at itself.

This is one of the risks carried by every symbolic gesture. A signal must become visible enough to interrupt ordinary attention. Once visible, it may absorb the attention it was created to redirect.

The stronger the symbol becomes, the easier it is to discuss the symbol instead of what it signifies.

The Institution’s First Answer

The 49ers’ initial response held two meanings together.

The organization described the national anthem as an important opportunity to honor the country and its liberties. It also recognized an individual’s right to choose whether to participate. The NFL similarly said that players were encouraged, but not required, to stand during the anthem.⁴

This was a narrow procedural answer. The team did not endorse Kaepernick’s argument. It did not punish him for expressing it. The league preserved the ceremony while acknowledging that participation was not compulsory.

For a time, that ambiguity allowed the protest to remain attached to the player.

Kaepernick knelt. Other athletes made their own decisions. Teams responded differently. The league did not yet need one unified institutional meaning for the gesture.

But as the protest spread, ambiguity became more expensive.

The league was not only hosting a disagreement among players. It was managing the expectations of owners, sponsors, broadcasters, fans, veterans, and political figures. Each group had the power to turn the meaning of the gesture into a judgment about the NFL itself.

The question gradually changed.

It was no longer only: What is this player saying? It became: What does the league permit? And then: What does permitting it say about the league?

The institution could not remain merely the surface on which meaning moved. Its rules, silences, and responses became part of the message.

A Gesture Becomes a Side

By the following season, Kaepernick was no longer on an NFL roster, but the protest had become larger than the player who began it.

In September 2017, President Donald Trump publicly urged NFL owners to remove players who refused to stand. During the games that followed, players across the league knelt, raised fists, linked arms, or remained away from the field during the anthem. Some of those actions continued the original protest against racial injustice. Others also responded to the president’s characterization of protesting players.⁵

The gesture had gained another meaning.

Kneeling could now indicate solidarity with Kaepernick’s concern, protest against police violence, opposition to the president’s comments, defense of player expression, loyalty to teammates, or some combination of them.

Standing changed too.

A player might stand because the anthem mattered, because the protest method seemed wrong, because the team had agreed on another form of unity, or because the cost of becoming a symbol felt too high.

The posture alone no longer supplied a reliable interpretation.

Yet public narration increasingly sorted the bodies into opposing sides. Kneeling meant one thing. Standing meant another.

The compression was useful because it made the dispute easier to describe. It was also inadequate to the people performing the actions.

A gesture that began by drawing attention to unequal policing had become a public test through which nearly anyone could be classified.

The message no longer belonged to one speaker because there was no longer one message.

What a Rule Says the Gesture Means

In May 2018, NFL owners approved a policy requiring players and league personnel on the sideline to stand during the anthem while allowing those who did not wish to stand to remain in the locker room. Teams could be fined for on-field violations. The policy was later placed on hold while the league and players’ association discussed it.⁶

The policy attempted to solve the controversy spatially. The field would remain a place of visible unity. Dissent could continue somewhere the camera was less likely to find it.

This did not eliminate the protest. It assigned different meanings to locations. Standing on the field would be part of the public ceremony. Remaining away could preserve individual refusal without disrupting the image the ceremony was designed to produce.

The institution had responded not by settling the underlying dispute but by managing where the dispute could be seen.

This is a common fate of signals that become institutionally costly. The institution may accept the concern in general while regulating the form through which the concern became difficult to ignore.

Racial inequality could be discussed through approved initiatives, charitable commitments, helmet decals, meetings, and public statements.

The kneeling body remained more difficult because it preserved the memory of conflict.

A program can be presented as shared work. A protest retains the fact that someone believed shared work had not been enough.

A Message with a Career Attached

In March 2017—before the anthem policy and before the later institutional language—Kaepernick opted out of his 49ers contract and became a free agent. He did not subsequently sign with another NFL team.⁷

Those facts created another contest over meaning.

One explanation treated his unemployment as an ordinary football judgment. Quarterbacks are evaluated by age, performance, health, scheme, salary, roster fit, and the role they are willing to accept. Kaepernick had played on a struggling team and was no longer the ascending player who had led San Francisco to a Super Bowl.

Another explanation treated his absence as punishment for the protest. Teams, under this account, judged the controversy surrounding him as more costly than whatever value he might provide on the field.

The available evidence did not permit the public to isolate one cause cleanly. A team could have football reasons not to sign him. The same team could also know that signing him would turn every press conference, anthem, and roster decision into a national story. A judgment described as football-only could still be made within conditions the protest had transformed.

In October 2017, Kaepernick filed a grievance alleging that NFL owners had colluded to deny him employment because of his advocacy.⁸

The speaker had lost not only control over the message, but control over how the message’s cost would be explained.

The Problem with Vindication

In September 2018, while the grievance was still pending, Nike made Kaepernick the central figure in a major advertising campaign built around the idea of believing in something despite sacrifice. The image translated him again: from quarterback, to protester, to commercial symbol of conviction.⁹

The campaign restored a form of institutional legitimacy that football had withheld. But it also compressed him. The specificity of police violence and racial inequality could be gathered into a broader story about courage, belief, and personal sacrifice. The message became easier to admire because it had been translated into the familiar moral language of sport.

Believe. Risk. Sacrifice. Persevere.

These themes did not contradict Kaepernick’s action. They made it available to an audience that might respond more comfortably to individual conviction than to the structural concern that conviction had tried to name.

Commercial recognition is not the same as understanding. A society can reward the courage of a protester while leaving the protest unresolved. It can celebrate the willingness to sacrifice without agreeing about what the sacrifice was for.

The gesture becomes inspirational after its demand has been softened.

In February 2019, Kaepernick and Eric Reid reached a confidential settlement with the league ending the grievance. The settlement produced no public finding that could settle the competing accounts of his unsigned years. Supporters treated confidentiality as evidence of concealment; critics noted that settlement is not an admission of collusion. Both readings could fit the known facts. Operational finality returned. Interpretation continued.¹⁰

The Message the League Later Heard

In June 2020, after the killing of George Floyd and amid widespread protests, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said the league had been wrong not to listen to players earlier. He condemned racism and systemic oppression, affirmed that Black lives matter, and encouraged peaceful protest. The initial statement did not name Kaepernick, though Goodell later said he wished the league had listened earlier to what Kaepernick was trying to communicate.¹¹

The league’s language had moved closer to the message first attached to the kneeling gesture. But the movement in meaning was uneven. The institution could now say that the players’ concern deserved to be heard. It could invest in racial-justice initiatives and place social messages within the presentation of games. The league also remained an institution in which Kaepernick had not played since 2016.

This created a peculiar form of retrospective recognition. The message gained legitimacy after the messenger had become absent. The institution could incorporate parts of the protest into its language without restoring the original conflict in the form through which it had arrived.

That does not mean the league’s later commitments were insincere or meaningless. Institutions can learn slowly. Public events can clarify what earlier structures failed to recognize. A changed response need not be dismissed merely because it came late.

But lateness changes what recognition can repair. An institution may eventually accept the concern. It cannot return the years during which the concern was interpreted as disqualifying.

The Sentence That Replaced the Press Conference

Not every sporting message becomes politically historic. Sometimes compression occurs on a smaller scale.

After the Philadelphia 76ers’ 2002 season ended, Allen Iverson appeared at a press conference and repeatedly used the word practice while responding to questions about his relationship with coach Larry Brown and his approach to team preparation. Detached from the surrounding exchange, the repetition became one of the most familiar clips in sports media—a shorthand for selfishness, indifference, or the belief that talent made preparation unnecessary.

The larger press conference was more complicated. Iverson was discussing the pain of losing, conflict with his coach, and the recent death of a close friend. His repeated disbelief was directed partly at the contrast between those losses and the question being asked.¹²

The shorter version traveled because it was better shaped for travel. It had rhythm. It could be imitated. It required no knowledge of the season or the person speaking. The clip was not fabricated—Iverson said the word repeatedly—but repetition was converted into a complete explanation of why he said it.

This is the ordinary machinery through which a message becomes another message. The most portable fragment survives. Context becomes optional. The record remains accurate. The meaning becomes smaller.

The Gesture History Learns to Keep

Sports history often remembers protest more generously than sport receives it in the moment.

Muhammad Ali’s refusal of military induction in 1967 led to a draft-evasion conviction, the loss of his heavyweight title, and years away from boxing during his athletic prime. His conviction was later overturned, and the athlete once treated by many as disloyal or dangerous eventually became one of the most celebrated figures in global sport.¹³

At the 1968 Olympics, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised black-gloved fists during the medal ceremony after winning gold and bronze in the 200 meters. They were suspended from the U.S. team and sent home from the Olympic Village. Decades later, the photograph became one of the most honored images of athlete protest.¹⁴

Later admiration can look like proof that the athlete was right and the institution was wrong. Sometimes it is evidence of moral change. But historical honor performs its own compression. It can turn a disputed person into a symbol of courage while smoothing away the specific demands, affiliations, imperfect judgments, and discomfort that made the protest costly in the first place. The athlete becomes easier to celebrate once the audience no longer has to decide how to respond now.

The raised fist enters a museum. The kneeling photograph enters an anniversary retrospective. The signal becomes part of the institution’s moral memory after it has lost much of its ability to interrupt the institution.

Canonization is not the same as being heard. It may be the final transformation of the message into a form the audience can safely possess.

The Speaker Does Not Get the Last Word

It would be tempting to restore authority to the speaker and stop there.

Ask what Kaepernick meant. Recover the complete press conference. Read Ali’s explanation. Listen to Smith and Carlos rather than relying on the captions later attached to their photograph.

This is necessary. It is not sufficient.

A protest enters a shared world. It may affect people the speaker did not consider. It may invoke symbols with meanings the speaker cannot erase. It may communicate differently from what the speaker intended because form and context are part of communication.

The audience is not obligated to accept the speaker’s moral account merely because it is sincere. Kaepernick could explain why he knelt. He could not require every observer to believe that kneeling during the anthem was respectful, effective, or justified. Those remained matters of judgment.

But the audience does not gain unlimited freedom in return. It cannot responsibly describe the protest while excluding the repeatedly stated concern. It cannot treat an interpretation as equally grounded when that interpretation depends upon ignoring the chronology, the consultation, the change from sitting to kneeling, and the words of the people who performed the act.

Interpretation may exceed intention. It should still answer to evidence.

Meaning leaves the speaker, but it does not enter a world without evidence.

What the Photograph Cannot Decide

The photograph remains.

Kaepernick is on one knee. Eric Reid is beside him. Other players stand. The anthem is still being played somewhere outside the edge of the frame.

The image cannot tell us whether the protest was effective.

It cannot determine whether the setting strengthened the message or overwhelmed it. It cannot settle which team would have signed Kaepernick under another set of circumstances. It cannot reveal how much of his later absence belonged to football, controversy, ownership, risk, or time.

It shows a gesture. The explanations around it came later. Some were supplied by the people in the photograph. Some came from veterans, teammates, owners, fans, sponsors, politicians, journalists, and institutions trying to decide what the gesture required from them.

Each retelling selected something.

Police violence. The flag. Free expression. Military sacrifice. Racial inequality. Team unity. Commercial courage. Institutional regret.

The gesture grew larger as its original concern became harder to keep at the center.

That is the paradox of a public signal. To matter, it must leave the person who makes it. Once it leaves, it can become evidence in arguments the person never intended to enter.

The speaker cannot prevent this movement. The audience is still responsible for how it moves the message.

The anthem ends in the photograph’s unseen future. The players rise. The game begins. Seasons pass. Policies change. The league finds new language. The image becomes history.

Kaepernick remains kneeling in the frame.

The argument has moved far beyond the field.

Footnotes

1. Steve Wyche, “Colin Kaepernick Explains Why He Sat during National Anthem,” NFL.com, August 27, 2016, https://www.nfl.com/news/colin-kaepernick-explains-why-he-sat-during-national-anthem-0ap3000000691077. ↩

2. Wyche, “Colin Kaepernick Explains Why He Sat during National Anthem.” ↩

3. ESPN, “Colin Kaepernick Takes Knee for Anthem; Joined by Teammate Eric Reid,” September 1, 2016, https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/17444691/colin-kaepernick-san-francisco-49ers-sits-again-national-anthem; Nick Wagoner, “From a Seat to a Knee: How Colin Kaepernick and Nate Boyer Are Trying to Affect Change,” ESPN.com, September 2016, https://www.espn.com/blog/san-francisco-49ers/post/_/id/19253/from-a-seat-to-a-knee-how-colin-kaepernick-and-nate-boyer-are-trying-to-affect-change. ↩

4. Wyche, “Colin Kaepernick Explains Why He Sat during National Anthem.” The 49ers statement recognized an individual’s right to participate or not; the NFL said players were “encouraged but not required to stand during the playing of the National Anthem.” ↩

5. CNN Politics, “Trump: NFL Owners Should Fire Players Who Protest the National Anthem,” September 22, 2017, https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/22/politics/donald-trump-alabama-nfl; Associated Press, “Trump Says NFL Should Fire Players Who Kneel during Anthem,” September 23, 2017, https://apnews.com/article/7e3fcc1d5c2446098652affae9e6322a. ↩

6. ESPN, “New Policy Requires On-Field Players, Personnel to Stand for Anthem,” May 23, 2018, https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/23582533/nfl-owners-approve-new-national-anthem-policy; NFL.com, “NFL Owners Approve National Anthem Policy for 2018,” May 23, 2018, https://www.nfl.com/news/nfl-owners-approve-national-anthem-policy-for-2018-0ap3000000933971; NFL.com, “NFL Anthem Policy on Hold under Standstill Agreement,” July 19, 2018, https://www.nfl.com/news/nfl-anthem-policy-on-hold-under-standstill-agreement-0ap3000000941064. ↩

7. San Francisco 49ers, “Colin Kaepernick Opts Out of Contract, Becomes a Free Agent,” March 3, 2017, https://www.49ers.com/news/colin-kaepernick-opts-out-of-contract-becomes-a-free-agent-18611631. ↩

8. Associated Press, “Kaepernick Files Grievance against NFL, Alleging Collusion,” October 15, 2017, https://apnews.com/article/9b26065018a042738ac8a9702f74e929; ESPN, “QB Colin Kaepernick Files Grievance for Collusion against NFL Owners,” October 15, 2017, https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/21035352/colin-kaepernick-files-grievance-nfl-owners-collusion. ↩

9. Associated Press, “Nike Unveils Kaepernick Ad to Air during NFL Season Opener,” September 5, 2018, https://apnews.com/article/61430b9383044896a9038ae09cf34d7e. ↩

10. Associated Press, “Kaepernick, Eric Reid Settle Collusion Grievances with NFL,” February 15, 2019, https://apnews.com/article/29731483b46647c596fc9a6de0e3ef48; Reuters, “U.S. Quarterback Kaepernick Settles Grievance Case with NFL,” February 16, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/sports/us-quarterback-kaepernick-settles-grievance-case-with-nfl-idUSKCN1Q42HM/. ↩

11. NFL.com, “Roger Goodell: NFL ‘Wrong’ for Not Listening to Protesting Players Earlier,” June 5, 2020, https://www.nfl.com/news/roger-goodell-nfl-wrong-for-not-listening-to-protesting-players-earlier; ESPN, “NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell Says NFL Was ‘Wrong’ Not to Listen to Its Players about Racism,” June 5, 2020, https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/29272780/nfl-commissioner-roger-goodell-says-nfl-was-wrong-not-listen-players-racism; ESPN, “Roger Goodell: ‘Wish We Had Listened Earlier’ to What Colin Kaepernick Was Protesting,” August 23, 2020, https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/29727180/wished-listened-earlier-colin-kaepernick-was-protesting. ↩

12. Jackie MacMullan, “The Little-Known Story behind Allen Iverson’s ‘Practice’ Rant,” ESPN, May 7, 2016, https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/29143112/the-little-known-story-allen-iverson-practice-rant; Andscape, “For Allen Iverson, It Was Never Just about ‘Practice,’” May 7, 2022, https://andscape.com/features/for-allen-iverson-it-was-never-just-about-practice/. ↩

13. Clay v. United States, 403 U.S. 698 (1971), https://www.oyez.org/cases/1970/783. ↩

14. Associated Press, “AP Was There: Smith and Carlos Protest during 1968 Olympics,” https://apnews.com/television-general-news-e1bbc830d7424e0392066cf16c25be72; World Athletics, “Iconic Mexico City Olympic Podium Protest Turns 50,” October 16, 2018, https://worldathletics.org/heritage/news/mexico-city-1968-olympic-games-protest-50th-a. ↩