On Saturday, former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick appeared with Jemele Hill at the National Black Footwear Forum in Detroit to discuss his life and memoir, The Perilous Fight. During their conversation, Hill specifically brought up one detail that stood out to her from Kaepernick’s memoir: His mother urging him to date Taylor Swift.
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Subsequently, the ex-NFL player revealed that his mother, Teresa Kaepernick, wanted him to date a white girl like Swift. Kaepernick, however, confirmed that he wasn’t interested in dating white women. Now that his confession about dating Swift has gained traction, Kaepernick’s wife Nessa took to Instagram and jokingly blamed Hill for bringing attention to the story in the first place.
“I blame @jemelehill for this lol,” wrote Nessa in one of her stories, while adding, “I love everyone lol. Swifties, I got love for you.”
As that happened, Hill responded while re-sharing Nessa’s post in her story, writing, “No Swifties were harmed in the asking of the question,” while also adding laughing emojis.
In one of her next stories, Nessa once again blamed Hill, writing, “@jemelehill this is your fault lol Love you Swifities.”
The development gained momentum after Colin Kaepernick accounted for his life in his memoir. In one of the segments, the former 49ers quarterback discussed the time when his mom suggested him to ask Swift out while he was playing for the 49ers.
“It was disappointing to me that my mother didn’t seem capable of seeing who I really was,” Kaepernick wrote in his memoir. “Years later, when I was in the NFL, she told me that I should ask out Taylor Swift (long before Travis Kelce made his move) because we would be perfect together. No slight to Taylor, but she was not my type.”
While Kaepernick didn’t reveal the timeline, he explicitly admitted that it was before Swift started dating the Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. At the same time, however, Kaepernick was discussing his life growing up as a black kid with adoptive white parents.
The 38-year-old said that when he was a teenager, he was interested in a black girl named Crystal. His mother, however, encouraged him to take Lindsay, a white girl and the daughter of one of her friends, to a formal dance.
“I asked Crystal to the homecoming dance, a formal affair involving fancy gowns, tuxedos, and corsages. We had a nice time at the dance. When I got the official portrait from that night, featuring me and Crystal posed up in that classic, airbrushed frame, my mother hid it away in the back of a drawer,” Kaepernick wrote.
“My mother convinced me to ask Lindsay, the daughter of one of her friends, to the next formal dance. Lindsay was white. When I brought that picture home, my mother promptly plastered it on the wall for all to see. In her mind, Crystal was just a phase. Lindsay was the kind of girl I should want.”
Kaepernick writes that this reinforced his feeling that his mother didn’t fully understand who he was, particularly his identity as a Black man. He explicitly says the issue wasn’t anything against Swift personally. She simply “was not my type.” Now, Kaepernick is married to Nessa, a radio host, with whom he shares a baby.