Colin in Black & White: Adolescence, Activism and In-Betweenness in a Postmodern World

Abstract

Colin in Black & White (CIBW) is a six-episode documentary miniseries released on Netflix on October 29, 2021. It was created by the award-winning African American filmmaker Ava DuVernay and Colin Kaepernick, a transracial adoptee (biracial child/white parents) and former US football player who decided to kneel instead of standing during the US anthem at the beginning of each football game to protest racial injustice. Three years after the founding of the Black Lives Matter movement and just a few months before the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the racial context in the US was explosive. However, the series is not about this pivotal moment of sports protest. Instead, it is a postmodernist take on a coming-of-age story about Colin Kaepernick’s life as a teenager, from the time he was an eighth-grader to his senior year in high school, narrated by present-day Colin Kaepernick. If activism is clearly the objective of the series, the target audience does not appear to be so clear. Are the creators targeting Black youth? The uninformed white population? The general public? To answer these questions, this article seeks to explore the dialectics created by in-betweenness and the various ways it is being expressed, whether it be choices governing the audiovisual text, sports, or racial identity.

Keywords

• Colin Kaepernick
• Ava DuVernay
• sports activism
• in-betweenness
• postmodernism
• autobiographical documentary