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平凡人做大事錄：開欄文
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歷史書記載的人物絕大多數是王、侯、將、相、學者等等；平凡人不與焉。這當然和事功的影響性以及人類命運的轉折有關；加上史冊承載量有限；倒也未可厚非。
但「豐功偉績」之外，普通人在各自崗位上的辛勤奮鬥，對自己信念的大聲疾呼，也是社會運轉和前行不可或缺的一環。一些小人物的努力或執著也常常導致移風易俗的效應；她/她們更是我們這些小市民有能力效法的楷模和追求理想信心的來源。故開此欄。
原來登載於此處的《第2波女權運動領袖史黛能過世》一文，將另行刊出。
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史黛能軼事--Susan Brearley
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一位平凡人能成為開創社會風氣的民間英雄或英雌；自有他/她們過人之處。轉載此文，寓效法於追思。
Gloria Steinem, Dead at 92
She spent fifty years telling people they had her story wrong
Susan Brearley, 09/03/26
In the fall of 2000, Time magazine ran a short note about her marriage. She was sixty-six, she had just married David Bale, and the magazine decorated the item the way magazines do, with her most famous line. A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
She wrote back to correct them. Not about the marriage. About the joke.
The line was not hers. It belonged to Irina Dunn, an Australian student who had written it on a couple of bathroom doors in Sydney in 1970, spinning it off a sentence she had read in a philosophy text about a man needing God. Steinem said so in a letter Time published on September 16, 2000. She named Dunn, called her a distinguished Australian educator, journalist and politician, and said the credit belonged to her. Dunn confirmed the account two years later and added that part of her inspiration had been being “a bit of a smart-arse.”
Gloria Steinem died Wednesday, September 2, at her home in New York City. She was ninety-two. Her foundation announced it Thursday and gave no cause, saying she died surrounded by people who loved her and had kept working until the end.
The obituaries running today will call her the face of a movement, and they are right. Most of them will miss what she actually did with that face for fifty years, which was to keep turning it toward somebody else.
She did not want the stage to herself
Here is a fact that sits beside the aviator glasses and the magazine covers. She was afraid of public speaking. Terrified of it, by her own account, at exactly the moment the invitations started arriving.
Her solution was to bring someone with her. From 1969 to 1973 she toured the country with Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a Black child care organizer she had met while reporting a story for New York magazine, and who had worked as a nightclub singer and was entirely comfortable on a stage. When Pitman Hughes was not available, the partner was Florynce Kennedy, a civil rights lawyer nearly twenty years her senior, or Margaret Sloan-Hunter. Steinem usually spoke first. Pitman Hughes followed, and her subject was frequently the racism of the white women’s movement standing right there next to her.
The press photographed Steinem. Her biographer Laura Lovett has argued that this asymmetry did lasting damage, that by keeping the camera on one white woman the coverage helped write Black feminists out of the founding story and turned an argument that started inside the movement into a sequel about it. Steinem did not create that lens. She did try repeatedly to widen it, and she lost.
One more detail the obituaries will not carry. Everyone remembers the first cover of Ms. as Wonder Woman striding over a city, and it was, in July 1972. The trial run seven months earlier, tucked inside the December 1971 New York magazine, was a pregnant Hindu goddess with eight arms holding a clock, a skillet, a typewriter, a rake, a mirror, a telephone, a steering wheel and an iron. Three hundred thousand copies sold out in a matter of days.
A Closer Look: The First Cover of Ms. Magazine
Maggie Doherty annotates the inaugural cover of the feminist magazine.
yalereview.org
The method came from a village in India
She graduated from Smith in 1956 and spent two years in India on a Chester Bowles Fellowship. That much appears in every biography. What happened partway through is the part that explains her entire working life.
Caste riots had broken out around Ramnad in the southeast. The Gandhian group she had attached herself to was sending teams under the police cordons into the villages, on foot, to hold meetings at night where people could say out loud what had been done to them. She went with one of the teams for about a week.
She wrote later that it was the first time she had seen what happens in a group where anyone can speak in turn, everyone has to listen, and reaching agreement matters more than finishing on time. She also noted, without softening it, that Gandhi had learned the method from village women.
Fifty-eight years later she was still doing it. The talking circles she hosted for hundreds of people in her own living room, the ones her foundation mentioned this week, were not a late-life eccentricity. They were the thing she picked up walking between villages in 1958 and never put down.
The one credit she never handed back
And then there is the part nobody handed her, which she took anyway.
In March 1967, Ramparts magazine exposed the CIA’s covert funding of the National Student Association and a network of American civic groups. One of those groups was the Independent Research Service, which had sent several hundred young Americans to Soviet-sponsored World Youth Festivals in Vienna in 1959 and Helsinki in 1962 to argue with the Communists on their own floor. Its founder and director was Gloria Steinem, then in her twenties, and she had gone looking for the money herself when private funders would not touch a Communist youth festival.
She could have said nothing. Instead she sat for interviews with the New York Times and the Washington Post and confirmed it. She praised the agency officers she had worked with as “liberal and farsighted,” said she had never felt dictated to, and volunteered that almost none of the students on those trips knew where the money came from and that nobody in her delegations had reported to the agency. She did not apologize then and she did not apologize later. When the radical feminist collective Redstockings put the whole thing back in print in 1975 and argued it had shaped Ms. magazine, she disputed their reading and moved on. It never dented her.
Take the two episodes together and the pattern is not modesty. It is a reporter’s discomfort with an inaccurate story, running in both directions. She gave back credit people insisted on assigning her, and she claimed responsibility for something people would have let her deny.
The two records she spent her life correcting
Her paternal grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, was elected to the Toledo Board of Education in 1904, the first woman to hold any public office in that city and very likely the first Jewish woman elected to public office anywhere in the United States. She chaired the education committee of the National Woman Suffrage Association, went to Switzerland as a delegate to the 1908 International Council of Women, and organized newly enfranchised women to go to the polls in groups so they would not be harassed alone. In the last years of her life she spent her widow’s money getting relatives out of Nazi Germany at roughly five hundred dollars a head. She died in January 1940, when Gloria was five. Gloria knew her as Mama Einie and did not learn the scale of any of it until much later.
Her father, Leo, was a three hundred pound optimist who ran a lakeside dance pavilion in the summer and drove the family down back roads the rest of the year in a house trailer, selling antiques for whatever the next tank of gas cost. Her mother had forbidden swearing in front of the children, so Leo named the family dog Dammit. Gloria did not attend school with any regularity until seventh grade.
Her mother is the harder story, and it is the one Steinem chose to write. Ruth Steinem had been a newspaper journalist in Toledo, and she was good at it. She left the work, and something in her came apart. In “Ruth’s Song (Because She Could Not Sing It),” published in Ms. in 1983, her daughter described a woman who went from energetic and book loving to someone who could not be alone, could not hold a job, and could not stay with a page long enough to read it. From the age of eleven Gloria was the one taking care of her, in the upstairs of a decaying house, in a neighborhood where a rat bit her one summer night and her mother found enough of herself to get her to a hospital.
That essay is the key to everything above. It is an obituary written to overturn the obituary, a daughter going back into the file to argue that the record on her mother was wrong.
The name she kept for fifty-eight years
In 1957, twenty-two years old, engaged to a man she did not want to marry and on her way to India, she went to a doctor in London named John Sharpe. Elective abortion was a decade away from legal in England. He referred her anyway, at real risk to himself, and asked her for two promises. Never say his name. And, second, “you will do what you want to do with your life.”
She kept the first promise for fifty-eight years. She did not speak publicly about the abortion at all until her thirties. Then, in 2015, she dedicated her memoir “My Life on the Road” to Sharpe by name, writing that a man who knew the law was unjust would not mind her saying so long after his death, and reporting back that she had done the best she could.
Read it as a correction and it snaps into focus. She broke a confidence she had honored for most of a lifetime in order to put an unjust law, and a doctor who defied it, into the permanent record.
The last one, filed on time
On her ninety-second birthday in March, Random House announced that Steinem had finished another memoir. It is called “An Unexpected Life.” It is scheduled for September 22, twenty days after she died.
She was asked for years who would carry the torch, and she disliked the question. Her answer was that there was no single torch to pass, that there were many, and that she was using hers to light others.
Which is the last correction, and she filed it early.
The dichotomies women experience are nothing new. Come explore them and how they affect women’s narratives in January, when I coach and lead a new cohort, The Queen’s Path. It’s a free 12-week book read and generative writing experience that promises transformative writing and thinking.
Support writers. All our non-profit’s offerings here.
Brand art by Gael MacLean
Written by Susan Brearley
MSc, EIC, HSDP, 2024 Top NGO, Garden of Neuro Institute Exec Director/Founder. Developmental Editor. https://susan-brearley.com/ and gardenofneuro.com
Published in Contemplate
Reflections of the Mindful — A publication designed for the writer to reflect, the reader to be inspired, the creatives to find their muses.
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第2波女權運動領袖史黛能過世 -- Stuart Henderson
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** 下文在2026/09/04刊載於本版面；因另立此欄，補增《開欄文》；不得不重登一次。造成不便；敬請見諒。
請參考：
* ‘I’m amazed a human being could do so much’: Gloria Steinem celebrated by Margaret Atwood, Dua Lipa, Lynda Carter and more (09/05)
我1967到美國。在費城天普大學唸研究所時，不怎麼看報；也就不怎麼熟悉史黛能女士。72年在加州開始工作後，從《聖荷西水星報》、《時代週刊》、和《新聞週刊》上，經常看到她的大名跟民權運動與女權運動聯在一起。在鬥志如虹之外，印象最深刻的是：她總帶著一副淺茶色太陽眼鏡。在此向這位長我10歲的女勇士致敬。
Gloria Steinem, pioneering feminist icon, writer and civil rights activist, dies at 92
Stuart Henderson, 09/03/26
Gloria Steinem, the journalist and feminist trailblazer, died Wednesday at 92, a post on her official Instagram page said.
Steinem was one of the most high-profile figures in the fight for women's equality on the national stage over many decades. She died peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by loved ones, the post said.
"Gloria's near-century on earth were years well-lived, and she continued working for equality until the very end," the post read. "Gloria's greatest gift was her ability to listen to others, to make others feel seen and heard. Her words, actions, and example gave people permission to be their truest selves. Gloria lived true to her independent spirit, always with curiosity and a great sense of humor.
"Gloria loved the tradition of lighting signal fires on hills to light the way to the other side of the mountain. Lighting your own candle for Gloria makes you part of this global and celestial community circle."
The post requested that those wishing to honor her with a gift instead donate to Gloria's Foundation.
Born in Toledo, Ohio in 1934, Steinem's roots in civil rights and political activism began in the 1960s.
She was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, signing a pledge vowing to refuse tax payments while the government was at war.
She worked closely with Black civil rights activists in the '60s and '70s, later acknowledging that Black women had been key influences on her feminism. Her 1969 essay, "After Black Power, Women's Liberation," and established her as a feminist icon.
In 1971 she co-founded Ms. magazine to help give a platform to feminist voices. Reflecting on the magazine in 2020, she said, "Even before I began to think about anything that might be called feminism or to question the structures that women encountered, I and lots of women could not write about political subjects for the existing magazines. We were thought to be the experts on, you know, food, makeup, babies and celebrities. But that was pretty much it.
"It became more and more clear to lots of us that we could not either write what we wanted to or read or edit what we wanted to in the existing magazines. So we started to meet and discuss whether or not, you know, a magazine might be possible."
Later, in 1984, Steinem was arrested during an anti-apartheid protest outside the South African Embassy in Washington.
Steinem received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's top civilian honor, in 2013, as well as dozens of other awards over the course of her career.
She remained an active voice for women's rights until her death.
Paying tribute, Roxane Gay, the author of "Bad Feminist", said: "Gloria was one of a kind. Genuine, generous, curious, thoughtful. She lived a staggering life and her passing is a staggering loss tempered only by the ferocity of her legacy."
Comedian, actor and director Amy Schumer posted: "Gloria — forever with us everyday," while actor Jameela Jamil said, "My mentor is gone. What a gift she was."
Journalist Ann Curry said, "Thank you Gloria. You once told me in an interview that it was your mother's suffering that first moved you to take action for the rights of women. May you now be in her embrace. How the lives of so many shine a little brighter because you were in the world."
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黛安娜王妃的哀怨與苦中逗笑 - Alex Besson
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黛安娜王妃以致力慈善事業留名；也以作風率直清新深受民眾愛戴；雖然天妒紅顏，值得記上一筆。
10 of the Funniest Princess Diana Quotes
And the dark reality behind the humour
Alex Besson, 09/04/26
Diana, Princess of Wales was one of the most famous, influential and intensely scrutinized global figures of the twentieth century.
Dubbed the People’s Princess, she captured the world’s imagination through her blend of glamour, vulnerability, pioneering humanitarianism and complex relationship with the British royal family.
Diana had a sharp, honest and often self deprecating sense of humour that both disarmed people and helped her navigate the absurd and sometimes sad reality of royal life.
She wasn’t afraid to make irreverent jokes about the royal family and often subverted what people expected from a princess.
“The trouble with being a Princess is that it is so hard to have a pee.”
Diana had to endure the suffocating lack of personal space and autonomy that came with her position. Royals are almost constantly surrounded by security details, handlers, photographers and the public.
Even the most basic and mundane bodily needs were complicated by protocol and constant surveillance.
“Imagine having to go to a wedding every day of your life — as the bride. Well, that’s a bit what it’s like.”
Diana was constantly forced to be the centre of attention, expected to look flawless, smile continuously, remain gracious and manage the intense weight of everyone’s eyes on her.
She had to carry that level of performance every single time she stepped out for a public appearance, ribbon cutting or royal tour.
“If men had to have babies, they would only ever have one each.”
She said this shortly after giving birth to her second child, Prince Harry.
“The Queen is always surrounded by corgis so you get the feeling you are standing on a moving carpet.” (corgis：小矮狗)
Queen Elizabeth II was known for always having a cluster of corgis weaving around her ankles.
Diana paints a vivid, slightly comical picture of what it felt like to stand near the monarch, as the sea of dogs constantly shifted around her feet.
“I was bored, it was like being stuck with an eighty year old man.”
This is how Diana described the bleak reality of spending her 1981 honeymoon aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia with Prince Charles who spent the whole time reading and painting landscapes while she felt entirely ignored.
While the public imagined a romantic getaway, the reality of the honeymoon was deeply isolating for the twenty year old newlywed, leaving Diana feeling bored, neglected and emotionally detached from her new husband.
“There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”
Diana was of course referring to Camilla Parker Bowles, now Queen Camilla, acknowledging the long standing, persistent presence of Charles’s former flame throughout their relationship.
She delivered this line during her explosive, highly watched BBC Panorama interview on November 20, 1995. It was the first time she spoke so candidly on television about the breakdown of her marriage to then Prince Charles.
The interview sent shockwaves around the world. Shortly after it aired, under pressure from the public outcry and at the behest of Queen Elizabeth II, Charles and Diana formally divorced.
“I’d love to be able to run along a beach without a policeman following me.”
For Diana, even a simple leisure activity like taking a walk outside or going for a run on a beach required a detail of Scotland Yard protection officers trailing her every move.
The imagery of running along a beach is quite symbolic of her deep desire for freedom, spontaneity and peace, things that were stripped away from her life overnight after marrying into the royal family.
“Being a princess isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.”
To the outside world, especially leading up to her 1981 royal wedding, being a princess looked like a real life fairy tale.
Much like her other remarks about the overwhelm of public duties or the lack of privacy, this quote cuts straight through that illusion. The fantasy sold to the public bore little resemblance to the lonely and highly restricted reality behind palace doors.
“The press is ferocious. It forgives nothing, it only hunts for mistakes… In my position anyone sane would have left a long time ago.”
From the moment she stepped into the public eye as a teenager, the tabloid press hounded her every move, turning her clothes, her facial expressions and her personal life into a spectacle.
Diana was trapped in a toxic, claustrophobic ecosystem where she was pinned between a failing marriage, an unsupportive royal establishment and a public that demanded perfection.
“It took a long time to understand why people were so interested in me.”
In the aforementioned, bombshell BBC Panorama interview, when Diana was asked how she handled the sudden, overwhelming transition from an ordinary young woman, Lady Diana Spencer, to arguably the most photographed and scrutinized person on earth, this was her opening reflection.
The quote takes a darker, more cynical turn immediately afterward when she added, “But then over the years, you see yourself as a good product that sits on a shelf and sells well, and people make a lot of money out of you.”
Bonus Quote
When asked if she thought she would ever be queen, she gave her famous, knowing smile and replied,
“I’d like to be a queen of people’s hearts, in people’s hearts, but I don’t see myself being queen of this country.”
The quote is perhaps Diana’s most defining statement. She wanted to use her position to help people.
She frequently visited homeless shelters in London to understand their struggles firsthand. She famously shook hands with an AIDS patient without wearing gloves to prove the disease could not be transmitted by touch.
She sat on the floor to comfort children in hospitals and hugged leprosy patients. It was a down to earth, hands on approach that communicated deep empathy rather than distant charity.
Months before her death, she walked through an active minefield in Angola wearing protective gear to draw international attention to the horrific injuries landmines caused to civilians, particularly children.
Following her tragic death in 1997, then Prime Minister Tony Blair famously dubbed her the People’s Princess, cementing the very legacy she wanted to leave behind.
Written by Alex Besson
Your fellow student of spirituality and seeker of Self-realization.
Published in ILLUMINATION
We curate & disseminate outstanding stories from diverse domains to create synergy. Apply: https://digitalmehmet.com/contact & https://illumination-curated.com
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柯培尼克回顧柯培尼克事件 -- Rohan Nadkarni
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我1972到加州，1993回國定居。這段期間逐漸養成週末看美式足球來消遣的習慣。由於住在南灣區，「四十九人隊」又長紅了一陣子；自然以它的球迷自居。回台後，雖然沒球賽可看；我仍然從體育版和體育網頁追蹤相關訊息。對柯培尼克和他引發的社會議題也就相當熟悉。
我沒有讀完下面這篇報導的全文；不過，對一位以行動實踐自己理念，並奮鬥不懈的人，理當致敬和表彰。
Colin Kaepernick’s unfinished business
Rohan Nadkarni, 09/01/26
Colin Kaepernick still puts in a workout at 4:30 a.m. most days. His football life may be long over, but his life's work is not.
Ten years after taking a knee to stand against racism and police brutality at great cost to his career and finances, the former star quarterback is stepping back into the spotlight.
His memoir, "The Perilous Fight," comes out on Sept. 15. And in interviews with NBC News, his first time speaking in depth about his protest's fallout in years, Kaepernick reveals the story behind how he came to take a knee in 2016, an act that made him both a hero and a pariah, and one of the most divisive figures in the country.
Kaepernick, 38, is now also a father of a 4-year-old girl. That, he says, helped him understand he has unfinished business in his life and cause. Being a dad "increases the responsibility and urgency of the work we're doing," he says. He doesn't want his daughter — or anyone else — to think he stopped fighting or that the fight was not worth it. "I don't want my community to watch me and have the takeaway be that if you fight for Black folks, it's over for you," he writes in his book.
Much has shifted in American politics, culture, sports and policing since 2016. And much work still needs to be done, Kaepernick says, which is why he chose now to recount the decade-long odyssey that began with a quiet protest during the national anthem.
Though the years have provided perspective, Kaepernick says they haven't dulled his displeasure with the NFL. The quarterback who once led the San Francisco 49ers on a Disney movie-esque run to the Super Bowl in 2012 says he hasn't watched an NFL game since he was exiled from the league.
"I'm not gonna support an organization that one, is actively blackballing me, but two, has targeted my brothers who have been protesting as part of this as well," Kaepernick says. "I watch college football."
(NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has said on multiple occasions he doesn't believe Kaepernick was blackballed.)
On Sept. 1, 2016, Kaepernick and his San Francisco 49ers teammate Eric Reid kneeled during the national anthem before a preseason game. It was not the first time Kaepernick didn't stand. His protest actually began a month earlier, on Aug. 14, when he sat on the bench during "The Star-Spangled Banner."
The idea had simmered in the months prior to the season when, he writes in his memoir, he was recuperating from surgeries. He might not have taken a knee if he hadn't injured it first.
The rehab gave him more free time than he ever had in his life. And in the midst of news of police violence, Kaepernick immersed himself in literature on Black liberation, reading books such as "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" and "Black Skin, White Masks" by Frantz Fanon.
Kaepernick says he hadn't planned the initial protest in mid-August until he heard the opening of the anthem and felt he couldn't bring himself to stand. No one seemed to notice him sitting at first. It wasn't until after the 49ers' third preseason game that Kaepernick was finally asked why he sat out the anthem.
"I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color," Kaepernick told NFL Network's Steve Wyche. "To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder."
Kaepernick was unprepared for the response, he writes in the book. After the game, he called his partner, Nessa, and mentioned the reporter's question.
"Hmm. Well, what did you tell him?" she asked. "On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the worst, how hard did you go?"
"I don't know. Maybe a 4," Kaepernick replied.
The backlash was immediate. Fans burned his jerseys. Current and former players said he disrespected the flag. Donald Trump, then a presidential candidate, said Kaepernick "should find a country that works better for him."
"This is not a four, man," Kaepernick recalls Nessa telling him when the news blew up.
Even though the story of the protest has been told countless times since 2016, Kaepernick set the record straight on one key detail: who came up with the idea to kneel in the first place.
Before the Sept. 1 game, Kaepernick was approached by Reid, who wanted to support the protest. It was Reid who suggested the idea to kneel, Kaepernick says. Not Army veteran Nate Boyer, as was widely reported at the time and since.
Boyer, a Green Beret and former Seattle Seahawk, had penned an open letter to Kaepernick in the Army Times, writing: "Even though my initial reaction to your protest was one of anger, I'm trying to listen to what you're saying and why you're doing it."
On the day of the game, Boyer met with Kaepernick and Reid and relayed stories about how veterans responded to his open letter. The conversation, Boyer says, then shifted to how the protest could be respectful of the military.
"I think it was Colin specifically that asked it. He said, 'Well, do you think there's a way that we could protest that's not going to offend people in the military?'" Boyer recalls. "And I said, 'No. No matter what, some people will be offended.'"
Boyer then told Kaepernick he believed sitting on the bench "wasn't the most inspiring" and that the protest could be more effective if he was next to his teammates, perhaps bowing his head while standing.
"He said no immediately, and I respect that," Boyer says, and the conversation then logically turned to taking a knee. He doesn't dispute that the two players may have come to that conclusion before meeting him.
"I remember them nodding their heads and looking at each other," Boyer says. "Maybe Eric did suggest that, and that's kind of what that look was."
After the Sept. 1 game, Reid told reporters "[Boyer] agreed with" the idea for them to kneel. Kaepernick says the notion it was Boyer's idea appealed to the media because the backing of a white military veteran made the protest seem more "palatable."
As for why Kaepernick didn't clear up the misconception at the time, he says he and Reid wanted to focus on their message, not get caught "in a personal back-and-forth over whose idea it was."
Though Kaepernick and Reid ultimately switched from sitting to kneeling, the protest continued to stoke controversy. Then-Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called it "dumb and disrespectful." Even his parents initially said it was "disgraceful."
Along with the backlash, there was also a groundswell of support from the people he was protesting for, as well as athletes from other sports who joined the effort.
"Oftentimes, we hear a lot of the side of the pushback, but I think what's disconnected from a lot of that is actually the response directly in communities that we were seeing, and the momentum and the excitement around the effort of no, we're actually going to change this," Kaepernick told NBC News during a recent sit-down.
Those who condemned his protest chose to focus on his kneeling during the anthem — as opposed to the police violence that drove him to do it.
"The critique of the method is a way to distract from the actual message," Kaepernick says. "The conversation that was being had is taking a knee is more problematic than Black people being killed. Just simply put, 'Hey, we need to talk about taking a knee. This is urgent. We need to resolve this.' But another Black person gets killed, and it's like, 'Oh well, that's kind of normal.'"
In most of the coverage, Kaepernick's assertion rang true. The conversation stuck to the red, white and blue, and not the disproportionate number of Black Americans killed by police that the quarterback tried to bring attention to.
As Kaepernick tried desperately to keep his protest on message, the rest of his life was picked apart, from his romantic partner to his clothing choices. When Kaepernick revealed he didn't vote in the 2016 election, ESPN's Stephen A. Smith called him "irrelevant" and a "flaming hypocrite."
Reaction from players was also mixed. While Reid, Kaepernick and five other players kneeled in Week 1 of the 2016 season, many who said they were sympathetic to Kaepernick's cause disagreed with his decision not to stand for the anthem.
There was a group chat with roughly 100 players from all 32 teams that often grew contentious. In his memoir, Kaepernick writes of a text exchange in September 2016 in which then-Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman told him he shouldn't tell players how to protest. (Through his podcast producer, Sherman declined to comment.)
The tension in the group chat was palpable, one former player in the chat who spoke on condition of anonymity tells NBC News. Some suggested Kaepernick was only kneeling for personal gain, even though by then it was clear he'd suffer a professional blow. In 2017, he became a free agent after the 49ers told him they would release him. The summer passed, and beyond a meeting with the Seattle Seahawks, no teams scheduled workouts.
"I thoroughly enjoyed meeting with Colin, we just didn't get to the next level," then-Seahawks coach Pete Carroll told NBC News in an email about the meeting. Kaepernick says his meeting with Carroll and general manager John Schneider focused on his political beliefs. (The Seahawks did not respond to a request for comment.)
"Which, in pretty much any environment outside the NFL, would be immediate litigation," Kaepernick says.
The same league that let Michael Vick play again after he went to prison for dogfighting, and allowed Deshaun Watson to sign a contract for $230 million following accusations of sexual misconduct by more than 20 women (Watson has maintained his innocence), was keeping Kaepernick out.
"There's not a definitive moment that I would point to," Kaepernick says about when he realized what was happening.
Instead, it was more of a culmination.
"Coming on the back of going to a Super Bowl, going to an NFC Championship, setting records, and not a single team would bring me in, even for a workout?" Kaepernick says.
In August 2017, the Miami Dolphins — whose owner Stephen Ross previously launched a nonprofit to fight systemic racism — signed quarterback Jay Cutler after an injury to starter Ryan Tannehill, even though Cutler had already retired. NFL team executives, meanwhile, used the media to try to throw water on the idea that Kaepernick was blackballed.
Some coaches and GMs did reach out, Kaepernick says, and explicitly told him, "Yeah, we want to bring you in, but it's getting shut down above us."
One of those coaches, Kaepernick writes in his book, was John Harbaugh, the then-head coach of the Baltimore Ravens. Kaepernick spoke extensively with Harbaugh during the summer of 2017. Harbaugh's brother Jim was Kaepernick's coach during the 49ers' run to the Super Bowl.
Kaepernick writes that Harbaugh was "pushing" to sign him, but was "shut down from above."
In October 2017, Kaepernick filed a grievance against the NFL under the terms of the league's and players' collective bargaining agreement, alleging that owners were colluding against signing him due to his protest.
"Everybody believes that he was blackballed," says one former player who was in the league during 2016. "Players knew that this would happen. That was a firm belief around the league."
Goodell pushed back on the notion of organized collusion to keep Kaepernick out of the NFL.
"Those are decisions that each individual owner has to make and their clubs, coaches, GMs," Goodell told NBC in 2020. "And I've talked to a lot of our clubs about it and I've encouraged them. I'd love to see him play again."
In November 2019 — months after the NFL settled Kaepernick's lawsuit — the league tried to arrange a midseason workout for him in front of all 32 teams. The details of this day are now infamous, as Kaepernick ultimately called off the NFL's workout the morning of due to an extensive waiver he refused to sign — a waiver Kaepernick believed would sign away his employment rights and potential future claims — and instead managed to organize a workout of his own.
The dissolution of the workout drew another round of skepticism, with many claiming Kaepernick was pulling a media stunt or was not serious about wanting to play again.
While Kaepernick was out of the league, the NFL went about trying to turn the temperature down on his protest, battling the aftermath of an especially divisive election and a ratings slide some attributed to the player demonstrations.
The league partnered in 2017 with the Players Coalition, a group founded to address systemic racism, and has since committed more than half a billion dollars to various social justice causes. Kaepernick wasn't part of the group. (Reid said in 2017 that Kaepernick was kicked out of communications with the group by co-founder Malcolm Jenkins, which Jenkins denied.)
The NFL did whatever it could to stop the kneeling, the former player says, believing the league wanted to weed out players who kneeled: "What happened was the league and the Players Coalition came to a deal, and then the league did what they were going to do … They wanted their games to go back to normal."
Kaepernick's protest likely cost him tens of millions of dollars, even accounting for whatever he got from the NFL in the settlement.
But as his career was sacked, as television pundits continued to make personal attacks, and as 986 people were killed by police in 2017, Kaepernick stayed largely quiet.
He says that was by design.
"No individual should be speaking for everyone across the country. I don't think that's a responsible way to approach things," Kaepernick says. "It's also being able to enable other people to step into leadership positions, because that's what movements actually are. It's not one person just driving things."
Months after his workout snafu, events unrelated to Kaepernick raised the volume on his protest once more.
On May 25, 2020, 46-year-old George Floyd was killed by police officer Derek Chauvin in Minnesota.
Video revealed Chauvin kneeled on Floyd's neck for over nine minutes, killing him. Chauvin was convicted on multiple murder charges in 2021.
Nearly four years after Kaepernick kneeled in response to police brutality, worldwide protests emerged in the wake of Floyd's killing. Kaepernick says seeing the protests around the world made him hopeful in the moment, especially as people in some cases risked their own well-being to be heard in the middle of the pandemic.
"There was a significant portion of the population that previously was disconnected from these realities," Kaepernick says. "It was like, oh, actually I have to sit with this now and I have to grapple with this. And am I OK with this? And what is my role within this? Am I complicit?"
Corporations also scrambled to meet the moment, including the NFL. In June 2020, several NFL players coordinated social media posts asking for the league to condemn racism and "admit wrong in silencing our players from peacefully protesting."
The next day, Goodell responded in a video message.
"We, the National Football League, condemn racism and the systematic oppression of Black people," Goodell said in the video, echoing the words players demanded from him. "We, the National Football League, admit we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest. We, the National Football League, believe Black lives matter."
Kaepernick wasn't impressed.
"His response through that video was only because of pressure from players, not because it was altruistic," Kaepernick says.
The idea that the league should have listened to protesting players "is so laughable in my mind, and so disingenuous," Kaepernick says. "We had been trying to address the issue that the NFL created with blackballing me for years. To come out and say we should have listened on the back of that — while I'm still actively trying to play in the NFL — it's so performative." (performative：做樣子，唬弄)
Starting the season after Goodell's video, the NFL began adding messages such as "Choose Love" and "End Racism" in the end zones of every stadium. It continued donating millions to the Inspire Change fund. In 2021, the league expanded on its Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview at least two minority candidates for certain jobs.
"'End Racism' in the back of the end zone is a great marketing campaign, but what are the actions behind it?" Kaepernick says. He adds that at the same time the league was putting slogans on the field, it was employing the practice of "race norming," arguing that Black players began their careers with lower cognitive function in an effort to deny them payments as a result of a 2013 concussion lawsuit. (The NFL halted the practice in 2021.)
"I don't think the NFL has materially changed. None of their actions show that," Kaepernick says. "We have seen it time and time again. For them, it has gone back to business as usual, and I think that is a tragedy that we have allowed them to be able to get to that point."
In a statement to NBC News, the NFL said: "The issues Colin and other NFL players raised remain important to the league and deserving of continued attention and action," noting the league still works with Inspire Change to "support meaningful progress."
The NFL added: "Since 2017, that work has reached thousands of national and grassroots partners, backed by more than $575 million in contributions. We remain committed to listening, collaborating, and taking action that creates lasting impact."
While 2020 appeared to cast Kaepernick's protest in a more favorable light, the country's collective backlash seemed even more pronounced after Trump was elected to a second term.
Many corporations and college campuses rolled back their diversity, equity and inclusion practices. Many politicians disavowed or walked back their anti-police stances from the aftermath of Floyd's death.
Meanwhile, high-profile athletes, including some who supported Kaepernick, have retreated on taking political stances on issues such as the killing of Americans by immigration enforcement agents this year.
"We have seen on the corporate side a shift in capitulation to the administration," Kaepernick says, which he says in turn has had an effect on athletes.
In this environment, Kaepernick says he tries to be strategic about when to speak up.
"I try not to just flood things and be a stream of consciousness of everything because it does lose some of the impact," he says. "I try to be intentional. When is it the right time and place for me to speak up on something?"
Though his prospects of getting back on the field have dimmed, Kaepernick says he still trains as if he's in the NFL.
His daily routine typically begins with his early morning workout. Then, he says, his real work begins: He helps get his 4-year-old daughter ready for school. He devotes time to his various business endeavors, ranging from the Know Your Rights Camp to his AI company, Lumi Story, to his production house, Kaepernick Media.
Being a father has especially added a new sense of urgency, he says.
"You no longer have the luxury of thinking about it from a perspective of, it's just me going through this world," he says. "You think about it from the responsibility of creating an environment and a society that allows someone that is like your child to be able to grow up and thrive."
Kaepernick says his approach to politics has also evolved. He's voted in the last two presidential elections and says he recognizes now that the strategy of not voting wasn't right.
Though still committed to his cause, Kaepernick says he often does his work behind the scenes. His Know Your Rights Camp has helped pay for 150 independent autopsies — such as the one for Nolan Wells this year — and has also paid hundreds of thousands in legal grants and bail relief. In August, Kaepernick pledged another $1 million to community organizations.
Even as the country rubber-bands between the hyperactivism of 2020 and the cultural and political backlash since, Kaepernick — after all he's been through — remains optimistic.
"I'm very hopeful when I think about the moment that we are in," Kaepernick says.
Does that mean he feels his legacy is vindicated?
"Candidly, I don't think about legacy a whole lot," he says. "What I think about is what are the areas that I can do work that I think are going to have an impact and help us move towards that future together. At the end of the day, people will decide what that legacy is, and hopefully that's a positive one."
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
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