“Colin In Black And White” Manifests The Power And Politics Of Hair For Black Athletes

A few years ago, I was on a flight to an academic conference for a research presentation.

A few minutes after sitting down, an older Black man sat next to me. He struggled with his seatbelt and strategically positioned himself in his seat, noting to nobody in particular how small the seats were on the tiny plane. He finally resorted to leaving his right leg outstretched in the aisle, and as he got comfortable, he perched his bright red NC State Wolfpack ball cap on his right thigh.

He turned and asked me several questions, eventually asking what I did for work. When I told him I was pursuing my doctorate degree, he got excited. “Go ‘head girl! You get that PhD!,” he exclaimed while reaching out his hand for me to shake. “What do you study?”

“College sports, actually,” I hesitated, as I often get mixed responses when telling strangers, especially men, of my research.

“Ohhh shoot,” he said with a grin on his face. “You’ve done it now.”

I quickly learned that he played basketball in college and was one of the first Black scholarship players on the NC State team.

“We couldn’t have mustaches when I played,” he reminisced, recalling his days in college and the ways his membership on the basketball team, even in the 1970s, impacted which behaviors were allowed and which were not. “But we decided we were gonna grow them anyway… That lasted all of TWO WEEKS! We ain’t wanna be riding that bench!” he burst into laughter as he remembered their attempts to manage coaches demands and their own personal desires. “We did grow our hair out though. There was a rule on the team that the players couldn’t have their hair past their ears.”

“But your hair grew up and out, not down?” I interjected.

He pointed in acknowledgment at me.

“But our hair grew up and out,” he repeated with a smile. “I had a big afro. And I could keep it because it didn’t go past my ears. All of us had them. We’d pick those things out, shape it up real nice,” he pretended to pat where the fro would’ve reached on his head now. “Something those white boys couldn’t do.”

His final statement solidified who he was referring to as he narrated this ‘us vs them’ dichotomy.

I was reminded of this exchange when watching Colin in Black and White.

The series animates Kaepernick’s years in high school in a way that reminds me of Everybody Hates Chris, The Wonder Years, or Young Rock. They’re all boy-narrated coming-of-age stories guided by an individual who is watching back events in his life alongside the audience.

For this story, the narrator is both visually and aurally represented.

Dressed in a tailored black suit and simple black turtleneck, Colin Kaepernick himself appears throughout the entire series. He watches selected moments in his life play out on a large screen that is framed by a dark gray room. The space he embodies is quite striking.

But perhaps most striking about the aesthetic is Colin’s hair. In the show, his hair grows up and out in the way my seatmate described. Colin’s perfectly manicured halo of combed-out hair frames his face in an afro – a hairstyle that has, over time, been linked to protest and resistance. He has now been sporting this style for years.

Colin in Black and White follows a young Colin in Turlock, California, as he navigates his predominantly white town and high school as a biracial, adopted Black boy. He excelled at football, basketball, and baseball. And while he dominated as a pitcher, playing quarterback was his passion.

We know how this story ends – Kaepernick makes it to the NFL as the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers and is systematically blackballed out of the league for protesting police brutality against Black and Brown people.

But the dramatic retelling of his younger years provides an interesting explanation for the kind of athlete and activist he would eventually become.

We see young Colin stumble through situations that are expected for a high schooler – showing his nerves around girls, hanging out with friends, competing in athletic competitions, and planning for college. Yet his experiences are shadowed by the fact that he is a Black boy living in this white supremacist world. This pushes the series to simultaneously tackle beauty standards and colorism, the overwhelming whiteness that organizes baseball, and the need to develop language to address daily microaggressions and outright anti-Black racism.

Colin, as our trusted narrator, provides both personal and historical context to the events he’s rewatching, analyzing interconnections and mirrored experiences to demonstrate the ways that his life might be representative of larger narratives.

Black Hair Power

Throughout the series, what stuck with me the whole time was that halo of hair.

In a way, that’s the focus of the series’ first entry.

Episode one opens with the provocative comparison of the NFL combine to the auction block. Kaepernick is far from the first to make this connection and I doubt he’ll be the last. But his visual and narrative emphasis on Black men’s hair is novel.

Black hair is political.

From the passing of the Crown Act and references of natural hair being worn on television to comments made about people that links their morality and cleanliness to their hair. These conversations also seep into the world of sport. From athletes being forced to cut their hair to compete and being ridiculed for how their hair looks to the banning of equipment meant to specifically protect Black folks’ hair.

It happens at all levels of competition.

Often these discussions are gendered, focusing on the experiences of Black women. However, as an anthropologist interested in the way that Black male athletes negotiate ideas of Blackness, maleness, and youth while on historically white college campuses, I’m particularly attuned to moments when Black men discuss their hair because of what this relationship is meant to signal. Over time, I’ve noticed that this interest is quite relatable, as demonstrated by my chat with my seatmate. These conversations cross genres and forms, which only further highlights their importance.

Bryant Keith Alexander devotes an entire autoethnographic chapter in Performing Black Masculinity to his trips to the barbershop and hair salon to care for his locs, as he navigates these gendered and intimate spaces as a gay man. Joshua Bennett dedicates a trio of poems in Owed to his hair, which if read in succession, detail the intricacies of growth over time, beginning with a meeting with the barber and ending with the grown-out style of the high-top fade. In “Kinfolk,” a song that D Smoke calls a “celebration of Blackness,” the rapper recognizes the beauty and versatility of his hair, his hairstyles reflecting different moments in his life. During a strikingly vulnerable and candid chat with his father, Cam Newton theorized about his recent release from the New England Patriots, mentioning his freeform locs as one of the reasons he is seen as intimidating, distracting, and transgressive.

And then there’s Colin Kaepernick, grappling with notions of respectability, professionalism, self-expression, and hip hop culture, all because of the resistance he faces to his desired hairstyle as a 14-year-old Black boy. We see young Colin struggle with the politics of cornrows at a time when this style was closely associated with NBA player Allen Iverson.

Young Colin wishes to have his hair braided like his friend and like Iverson and navigates the challenge of trying to convince his white mom to allow him to do it. Though his parents go along with it for a while, she becomes increasingly uncomfortable in the Black spaces they must frequent to maintain the style and becomes incredibly unsettled by what she claims the style represents.

When his baseball coach says his style violates a team rule, his parents are given an avenue to protest his hair choice. During a family dinner, Colin’s exasperated mom claims that he looks like a ‘thug’ and insists that he get his hair cut. It’s clear how painful that moment is for young Colin, as he realizes that his parents aren’t willing to advocate for him just so he can keep his hair in his style of choice.

In his essay “It Rained in Ohio on the Night Allen Iverson Hit Michael Jordan with a Crossover,” Hanif Abdurraqib masterfully explains how that word – ‘thug’ – had been associated with Allen Iverson, someone who performed his Blackness both on and off the court in ways that embodied his ‘difficultness,’ ‘undisciplined play,’ and ‘disregard for the rules.’ This was all allegedly represented in his attitude, his clothing, his jewelry, and his hair, all visualizations that distanced AI from other players.

Protecting Black Men’s Hair

Allen Iverson’s experience is quite telling.

In such a political sporting landscape (one which simply reflects issues that are relevant off the playing field), Black men are stereotyped as violent, threatening, hyperphysical, and hypersexual. As older than they actually are. As violent, angry, and dumb. As commodities. These ideas are then inscribed on and through their physical bodies.

But these constant popular references to and discussions of Black men’s hair perhaps suggest one simple point: it is one of the ways these men are able to express themselves, in a way of their own choosing, to challenge and critique the normative discourses that have so frequently shaped the way they interact with their social worlds.

When so many ideas and theories have been mapped onto the Black male body, the political choices these men make through their hair allow for them to craft the narratives themselves. They are choosing to adorn their bodies with certain hairstyles, and dealing with the repercussions of those choices, to show that their bodies are key sites for understanding both how power is exercised on the body and ways that power can be resisted.

Hair might seem unspectacular, as it naturally grows from one’s head, but there’s beauty in the fact that something as mundane as hair has the ability to cultivate this kind of conversation.

In a world that criminalizes and punishes Black men because of racist assumptions and stereotypes, there’s freedom in the idea that they might use their hair as a tool of resistance, transgression, recognizing and disregarding norms which, by nature, are meant to be conformed to. These styles often represent a connection to community, family, and a certain way of life that allows for subversion to be performed.

Colin, whether a high schooler or a grown man, consciously or unconsciously, embodied resistance through his hair.

At the episode’s end, Colin’s hair is cut shorter and remains that way throughout the rest of the series. We learn from the narrator that he felt so uncomfortable with this particular form of self-expression that he did not braid his hair again for another 14 years.

But in the final moments of the series, Colin writes a letter to his younger self, instructing him to love his Blackness, live in his truth, and trust his power. I can’t help but think that one of the ways he’s instructing himself to do that is through proudly displaying his hair, in whichever way he pleases.