Scorecard

FOR MOST OF his time on Twitter, from his first tweet (“breakfast wit mom then off to church . . . finally a day wit no rain”) on June 7, 2009, until about three months ago, most of Colin Kaepernick’s tweets were about the things that athletes usually tweet about.

Photos from charity events; shout-outs to corporate sponsors; RT’s to help support ill children, etc. It was noble and dull. But on July 6 that changed. In his first tweet in more than a week, the 49ers’ quarterback shared a link to his Instagram page, where he had posted a video showing the shooting of Alton Sterling, a black man who was killed by police in the parking lot of a Baton Rouge convenience store. Kaepernick wrote, “This is what lynchings look like in 2016!” From then, Kaepernick became a Twitter activist, constantly sending links to stories about police brutality and shootings, and regularly re-tweeting Black Lives Matter activists Shaun King and DeRay McKesson. If you were following Kaepernick— and nearly a million people were—you couldn’t have missed it: He was screaming to be heard.

And no one in the world of the NFL seemed to pay a lick of attention. No one said a damn thing until NFL.com reporter Steve Wyche noticed that Kaepernick, during an otherwise dull preseason game against the Packers on Aug. 26, was sitting during the national anthem. When Wyche asked about it, Kaepernick had an answer ready: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.” A month later the conversation Kaepernick started shows no signs of abating.