In February for Black History Month, USA TODAY Sports is publishing the series 28 Black Stories in 28 Days. We examine the issues, challenges and opportunities Black athletes and sports officials continue to face after the nation’s reckoning on race two years ago.
I don’t care about Michele Tafoya’s political beliefs. I don’t care if she’s conservative, liberal or a Klingon. None of that matters. What does is that Tafoya has decided to use the substantial goodwill she built up as a sideline reporter for “NBC Sunday Night Football,” and taken a giant step into the culture wars, by repeating a falsehood about one of the most important sports figures of our time.
Tafoya’s story, and the fiction she tells about Colin Kaepernick is important because it’s instructive about how in some segments of our media and society, truth, and actual history, are irrelevant. The only thing that matters to some is dogma.
Tafoya was recently on SiriusXM’s “The Megyn Kelly Show” in a segment called “The Truth About What Happened to Colin Kaepernick’s NFL Career.”
“You can’t have everything your way in this life,” Tafoya said. “You work your way around and through the obstacles. If he really, really wanted … the one thing he wanted, Megyn, in this life was to be a starting quarterback in the NFL, he’d be one right now, given that he had the talent. But he made some business decisions, and I think he knew what he was risking, and I think that there are legitimate complaints about race in the NFL and everywhere else in America, but that’s not why Colin Kaepernick is not in the NFL.”
This is completely false. Absolutely, positively false.
Normally, what a sideline reporter says isn’t something we should care about, but Tafoya is different. She’s established a great deal of credibility in her decades on the job. She left NBC this year.
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Someone like Kelly, who once said Santa Claus could only be white, or Tucker Carlson, who also had Tafoya on his show, and who openly spouts white nationalist propaganda, would see Tafoya as valuable. She agrees with some of their extremist, views and she’s an NFL expert.
Tafoya, however, either doesn’t know how wrong she is about Kaepernick, or knows, and doesn’t care.
Kaepernick was blackballed by the NFL after he started the league’s protest movement.
This blackballing went on for years.
These are established facts. These aren’t opinions or both sides or do the research, Todd. Everyone who covered the NFL extensively, like Tafoya did, knows Kaepernick was blackballed. It is something that many in the NFL itself, both coaches and executives, have privately admitted for years.
Kaepernick and Eric Reid, who started the protest alongside Kaepernick, sued the NFL and the case was settled.
Commissioner Roger Goodell, following the murder of George Floyd, essentially apologized to protesting players, and even to Kaepernick, for not listening to them sooner.
Tafoya using the phrase “business decision” is something those of us who’ve covered the Kaepernick story from the beginning have heard from his right-wing critics many times before. It’s that because Kaepernick made decisions like produce a Netflix series about his youth, he was giving up football.
Kaepernick made these decisions because teams wouldn’t hire him, not the reverse. People like Tafoya also forget this moment when Kaepernick had a workout, looked good, and still received no offers.
You can dislike Kaepernick. You can think anything you want about him. You can have any politics you want. We can disagree about our politics.
What we must have, however, is an established set of facts.
There’s something else, and it goes to why Black History Month, and accurate history overall, is so important and now needed maybe more than ever. The right wing is attempting to erase large swaths of Black history. As well as other parts of history. Tafoya also talks about critical race theory, another boogeyman of the right, but clearly doesn’t know what it is.
It’s cliché, but it’s accurate. We can’t ever forget history because the worst people will attempt to repeat the foulest parts of it. Rewriting history leads to a rise in antisemitism. Or an increase in Asian hate. Or dozens of bomb threats against HBCUs during Black History Month.
What happened to Kaepernick is also part of history. His protest movement is something that will be discussed and examined for decades, if not longer. Kaepernick’s critics have lied about him and his intentions for years and any contention that he made a “business decision” and opted out of his NFL career like he was opting out of putting mustard on his sandwich is simply another falsehood about Kaepernick.
Tafoya knows better. Or rather, she should.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Michele Tafoya ignores the truth when it comes to Colin Kaepernick