The Kaepernick brand: articulating ‘Resistance branding’ in the racial economies of visibility

As mainstream celebrities circulate social justice signifiers, concurrent with a stark global rise in reactionary authoritarian populism, this paper considers how the levers and sites of political struggle are articulated when visibility is cast not as a prerequisite to politics, but politics is cast as a prerequisite to visibility. It critically analyses the emergence of resistance branding, referring to the process by which an individual or corporate entity adopts signifiers of political resistance and moral opposition in pursuit of cultural visibility. I explore the phenomenon of resistance branding through a specific case study: athlete-activist-celebrity Colin Kaepernick. The signature kneeling protest during the National Anthem of a 2015 NFL preseason game catapulted Kaepernick into a becoming a branded icon of authentic political resistance, repression, and sacrifice. Kaepernick has since embraced and maneuvered to extend this image, such that the Kaepernick Brand now proliferates across sport, advertising, publishing, merchandise, philanthropic organizations, and commercial sponsorships. Extending Stuart Hall’s work on the commodification of Black subjectivity, I explore Kaepernick’s trajectory to highlight the conjunctural shifts – most notably in regard to spectacularized sport, celebrity politics, and neoliberal recuperation – that rendered Black radical critique a pathway for fame/fortune rather than ostracization and repression. I argue that the Kaepernick Brand emerged within the racial economies of visibility, referring to how Black identity and its (assumed) corollary politics are shaped by buyers, sellers, and middlemen within the digital consumer marketplace. I conclude by assessing resistance branding as a mode of counter-hegemonic struggle within contemporary racial neoliberalism. I argue that, despite its potential material and symbolic benefits, resistance branding individualizes resistance, locates the locus of resistance in the commercial marketplace, and renders us reliant on the benevolence of capitalism’s spectacular winners rather than emphasizing incremental and unglamorous forms of grassroots resistance.