Colin Kaepernick's Colin in Black & White is a bad show that is "Black empowerment for beginners"

Defector

"It is not a show that traffics in subtlety; honestly, the only way it could be more obvious is if they used that Family Matters, TGIF-very-special-episode music to underscore the point every time a white man tells Colin—the character who represents the show’s hero and occasional narrator in some interstitial biographical bits—to turn down all that damn rap music," says Israel Daramola, who is Black, of the Netflix limited series. "The show tries to make Colin (played by Jaden Michael) and his childhood seem interesting by taking the laundry list of racial resentments that would build over time while living in a mostly white enclave with adoptive white parents and then stitching them alongside a series of interludes in which the real, grown-up Kap explains an overarching thesis for how whiteness imposes its will on black people on a macro level. There are kind of a lot of personal shots at his parents—played here, inexplicably, by Nick Offerman and Mary Louise Parker—for being ignorant about how to deal with their black son when he wants to wear braids, or siding with other white adults whenever they treat him inhumanely. There’s also animosity towards coaches who dismiss him as a quarterback or scoff that he’s not 'playing the right way.' Again, this is not new stuff; even goofing on this kind of hackish bigotry is familiar by now. In one episode, Kaepernick seems to want credit for finding black women beautiful and wanting to date one over the white girl his mom picked out for him (there’s a LOT of parental resentment, I cannot stress this enough). Personal stories of racism are important, because they create an overarching narrative of what it is to be black in America. But also there is something to be said about the ways in which mostly well-off black people depict the personal microaggressions they face while living amongst white people and comparing it to the much graver circumstances of the poor and black who end up receiving the material consequences and violence of white racism."