Despite his absence from National Football League (NFL) fields, Colin Kaepernick has exerted an ongoing resonance in American sport-media discourse over the last few years. This article addresses such resonance through three “flashpoints”: President Donald Trump’s inflammatory comments on Kaepernick at a 2017 rally, Nike’s Kaepernick advertising campaign in 2018, and the 2020 resurgence of Black Lives Matter within which Kaepernick, and the act of kneeling, remained central. It is argued that these flashpoints indicate, in varied ways, the hegemony of racial neoliberalism and civility as structuring ideologies in the twenty-first-century United States. Kaepernick amplified his voice through the endorsement of racial-neoliberal discourse (Nike ad), while Trump’s comments and the recent wave of high-profile killings of Black Americans generated condemnation largely focused on acts of (in)civility rather than deeper roots of systemic inequality. Yet recent events also point to signs of the cracking, if not fundamentally de-hegemonizing, of racial neoliberalism, particularly through a turn (if only temporary) away from colorblind “antiracialism” in sport.

尽管科林·卡佩尼克缺席了美国国家橄榄球联盟 (NFL) 的比赛，但在过去几年里，他在美国体育媒体的讨论中一直产生共鸣。这篇文章通过三个“闪点”解决了这种共鸣：唐纳德特朗普总统在 2017 年的一次集会上对卡佩尼克的煽动性评论，耐克在 2018 年的卡佩尼克广告活动，以及 2020 年黑人生活问题的复兴，其中卡佩尼克和下跪行为仍然是核心. 有人认为，这些闪点以不同的方式表明了种族新自由主义和文明作为 21 世纪美国意识形态结构的霸权。Kaepernick 通过支持种族新自由主义话语（耐克广告）放大了他的声音，而特朗普的评论和最近对美国黑人的高调杀害引起的谴责主要集中在（不）文明行为上，而不是系统性不平等的更深层次的根源。然而，最近的事件也表明，种族新自由主义即使不是从根本上去霸权，也有破裂的迹象，特别是通过（如果只是暂时的）体育运动中的色盲“反种族主义”转变。