David Remnick’s conversation with Colin Kaepernick, ahead of the memoir “The Perilous Fight,” is less a football interview than an account of how a league disciplines its labor. Kaepernick walks through the combine, the blackballing, and the politics he declines to disown.

  • On the combine: prospects walk onstage in compression shorts to be photographed. “There’s an understanding that this has parallels to slave-auction blocks. There’s no reason for us to walk onstage.” No other sport does it, and it has no bearing on the job.
  • The interviews were worse — questions about players’ sexuality and their mothers, and after 2016, “What do you think about Colin Kaepernick?” Illegal questions in any labor engagement, which he reads as obedience screening: “Is this player obedient? Are they going to conform?”
  • He sat during the anthem for three preseason games alone in 2016. Eric Reid, a safety from Baton Rouge, proposed kneeling so the protest could not be framed as distancing himself from the team.
  • He was not protesting the league. The league made it about itself anyway: owners who raised millions for Trump, a reported call saying “this is a winning issue for me,” and, from one teammate, “My owner told me that I can’t protest.” Kaepernick: “an unfathomable sentence.”
  • Seattle brought him in but ran no workout — “we already know you’re a starter” — and asked only about his politics.
  • The business case for punishing him was false: his jersey was the No. 1 seller, and Nike’s 2018 “Dream Crazy” campaign added roughly six billion dollars to the company’s stock.
  • On the C.T.E. finding that one in four players will develop it: “I think that’s very generous framing at twenty-five per cent.” He describes each collision as a thirty-five-mile-an-hour car crash, sixty to seventy plays a game, seventeen weeks.
  • Asked about A.O.C.’s “Woke 1 was crazy” remark, he refuses the frame: it did not come from the communities doing the work, and years of that work created the conditions that let a Mamdani win. He will not denounce it.

His political education reads like a syllabus — Malcolm X, Baldwin, Fanon, Huey Newton, Angela Davis, and a decolonization class he audited at Berkeley, all before he ever took a knee. That is why he can say the policing he grew up with was never a run of bad individual moments but a system with an origin in slave patrols.

Ten years on, he still says he would suit up tomorrow if a team called. The mechanism that ended his career did not go anywhere.