*Colin Kaepernick says a dating suggestion from his mother involving Taylor Swift became part of a much bigger realization about race, identity, and growing up Black in a white adoptive family.
The former San Francisco 49ers quarterback revisits the episode in his memoir, “The Perilous Fight,” released Sept. 15. During a recent conversation with Jemele Hill at the National Black Footwear Forum in Detroit, Hill raised the passage about Kaepernick’s mother suggesting that he ask Swift out while he was playing in the NFL.
Kaepernick makes clear in the book that his objection wasn’t about Swift personally. “No slight to Taylor, but she was not my type,” he writes, per OutKick.
The Swift suggestion carried more meaning for Kaepernick because of an experience he’d had as a teenager.
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He recalls dating a Black girl named Crystal and feeling comfortable with her family in a way he hadn’t experienced at home. After the pair attended a formal dance, Kaepernick says his mother put their official photograph in a drawer.
Later, his mother encouraged him to attend another dance with Lindsay, a white girl and the daughter of one of her friends. Kaepernick says that photo received very different treatment: His mother displayed it on the wall.
“In her mind, Crystal was just a phase,” he writes. “Lindsay was the kind of girl I should want.”
Years later, when Kaepernick was in the NFL, his mother suggested Swift. Kaepernick viewed the recommendation through the lens of those earlier experiences and his belief that his parents didn’t fully understand his Black identity.
OutKick, which obtained a copy of the memoir and attended Kaepernick’s Detroit conversation with Hill, framed the exchange critically. Kaepernick’s own account, however, places the dating stories within his broader reflections on growing up in a transracial adoptive family.
“The Perilous Fight” examines Kaepernick’s childhood, football career, and activism, including the events that led to his 2016 national anthem protest against racial injustice and police brutality.
The Swift anecdote may be the celebrity hook, but Kaepernick’s point is more personal: He remembers those dating experiences as moments when he felt his mother had a different idea of who he should be.
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