Hairstyles can be more political than meets the eye. Sports ace Colin discovered this with astonishment when he had so-called “Corn Rows” braided. The close-fitting braids are an important part of Afro-American culture – and therefore an affront per se in its white surroundings. He would look like a “thug”, a gangster, then accuse him of his white adoptive mother at dinner. The boy’s pain runs deep.
The miniseries Colin in Black & White opens with a supposedly private quarrel, but does not hesitate long to reveal the political in such small conflicts. But you have to know that this teenager will know all of America just a few years later: Colin Kaepernick became a football star in the early 2010s as a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers. In 2016 he drew attention to himself around the world with a protest against racism. In a training game, he did not get up during the American national anthem, but instead kneeled down. The Black Lives Matter movement made the kneeling a symbol of protest against police violence. Kaepernick was fired at the end of the season and has been without a contract since then.
It’s not just about Kaepernick, the series is fact-rich, clever docutainment
The series continues this knowledge Colin in Black & White ahead, because she doesn’t want to be a biopic, but is a further step in Kaepernick’s activism. He himself developed the show with filmmaker Ava DuVernay, who specializes in civil rights issues and for her documentary The 13th was nominated for an Oscar in 2016 on the structural disadvantage of African Americans in the American judicial system and their reasons.
Linked in a mixture of game scenes and explanatory pieces Colin in Black & White Kaepernick’s youth with Afro-American cultural history and an analysis of the racist structures in American professional sport. “Some will say the system is broken. I am here to tell you that it was created that way on purpose.” Kaepernick himself interrupts the narrative flow again and again, appears as a commentator and moderator of his own story.
In the entire first episode, therefore, there are several digressions about his ponytail hairstyle – about how his basketball idol Allen Iverson caused a scandal in the NBA with the same hairstyle; how his trainer calls his parents angrily – and they give in at first without realizing that they are reproducing racist structures; and how his mother eventually gives in and clumsily walks him to a specialized hair salon.
Kaepernick makes it clear that it’s not just about telling how he went from being an exceptional sports talent in his high school to being an activist. Rather, he wants to show how common his experiences with racism actually are, also from a historical perspective. Like a showmaster, he uses clips from news reports and statistics as well as quotes from rap classics and feature films, and even intersperses historical re-enactments. What could have turned out to be too dry didactics have turned into six episodes of clever docutainment that sums up the interweaving of historical structures, socio-political ideologies and (pop) cultural history.
Colin in Black & White, six episodes, on Netflix.