< Colin Kaepernick says 'I Color Myself Different' in his first children's book

April 2, 20228:00 AM ET

Colin Kaepernick says 'I Color Myself Different' in his first children's book

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COLIN KAEPERNICK: I'm Colin Kaepernick - played football professionally with the San Francisco 49ers from 2011 to 2016. I'm the author of "I Color Myself Different."

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

It's a children's book that grew out of something that happened to Colin Kaepernick when he was 5 years old. His kindergarten teacher gave his class an assignment - draw a picture of your family.

KAEPERNICK: What I realized then drawing my family was that, in my entire class, I was the only one who didn't look like the rest of my family. So being Black adopted into a white family, when you have this simple assignment come about, you get a lot of different questions about, why don't you look like your family? Why are you the only brown one in your family?

SIMON: NPR's Samantha Balaban picks up that story for our children's book series Picture This.

SAMANTHA BALABAN, BYLINE: In "I Color Myself Different," a young Colin Kaepernick reads books on the floor, throws a football in the park and thinks it is supercool that not many people look like him. I have supercool skin and supercool hair and a supercool family, Kaepernick writes. Sometimes it's not easy. But being one of a kind sure is amazing. When his teacher, Mrs. Musa, asks Colin's class to draw pictures of their families, Colin is excited.

KAEPERNICK: So pulls out all the crayons, colors his entire family yellow and gets to himself and realizes that, no, I don't look like my family, so I can't use the same color crayon - so pulls out the brown crayon and then colors himself brown.

BALABAN: His classmates ask him, why did you color yourself different from your family? Young Colin freezes at first. And then he tells his class, I'm brown. I color myself different. I'm me, and I'm magnificent. Kaepernick says, in real life, it was a pivotal moment.

KAEPERNICK: It's the first documented instance that I have in my life of definitively identifying as brown and laying the foundation for my identity as Black.

BALABAN: "I Color Myself Different" is the first children's book for both Colin Kaepernick and illustrator Eric Wilkerson. Wilkerson has worked in film, commercials and video games and used Adobe Photoshop for these illustrations.

ERIC WILKERSON: The first thing I wanted to do is give the characters a stylization that made it look more like still frames from an animated film. I wanted it to feel like you're turning the pages and it's like somebody just paused the movie, and you're just getting that snapshot.

KAEPERNICK: To his point, it is cinematic. You don't feel like you're just looking at a picture. You feel like you're stepping into it and you're a part of it. One of my favorite illustrations was the final page - young Colin standing upright, shoulders back, chest out a little bit, chin up with just this smile, a grin on his face and just a confidence and also hope for the future.

WILKERSON: That's what I tell my students. I call that the low-angle hero pose. It's meant to evoke exactly the emotion that you just described. So (laughter) that makes me happy. Yeah.

KAEPERNICK: Executed to perfection (laughter).

WILKERSON: So I was talking with Colin in our initial phone calls basically asking, what do you envision this story looking like? What do you envision the color scheme, the palette of this book being? I'm very focused on color and the usage of color to evoke an emotional response in the viewer - bold reds, desaturated blues. All of these things mean something in animation. So I wanted to try to carry over as much of that mindset into my first children's book because that's where I'm coming from. I'm coming from working in entertainment.

BALABAN: The book is bright and colorful and also includes a lot of personal touches, like Colin Kaepernick's original artwork, which Wilkerson gave a professional upgrade.

KAEPERNICK: The bodies are round. The necks are pretty long. The heads are pretty big and round. I think they're stick legs, like, triangle block feet. I tried to draw hearts in there, but they kind of looked like tomatoes - no arms at all. And he absolutely did me some favors. That's the beautiful part. When you get to work with incredible illustrator like Eric, he gets to make all of us look good. So (laughter)...

WILKERSON: The family drawings that are done in the book are a mix of stuff that I did where I would physically hold a crayon the wrong way and then try to draw with it, but also giving myself only two minutes to do it. That is how I approached drawing some of what a kindergarten student would do. Then I have friends and family that have children that were the approximate age that Colin would be in the book. And I asked them, draw your family, and I'll scan it, and I'll put it in the book. So even my daughter drew our entire family, and it's on the bulletin board in the classroom in the book. And I was so thrilled that we got to put that in there.

KAEPERNICK: As we're creating this and we were thinking of, you know, personal touches like Eric did with the family portraits in the backdrop - it was my nieces Lani and Knysna who drew all of the artwork for the end pages. To me, it was just a special moment, a special touch because just thinking about two young Black girls being able to see their artwork in a published book and from a young age to be able to say, oh, yeah, I've had my artwork published. Now what else can I do? Like, where else can I go with this - and see how it just - it begins to open up possibilities for them just mentally of where they can go and what they can do.

BALABAN: Colin Kaepernick says he wanted to be very clear about the message this book is sending. Being different, as he writes, is supercool. But being different is also normal. Ultimately, he and Eric Wilkerson hope that this book helps kids feel less alone.

WILKERSON: I have a biracial daughter. And I remember in our - one of our Zoom calls, telling Colin that my daughter just started a new school. And I remember her coming home, getting off the bus and saying, Mommy, Daddy, there are four other brown kids in my class - like, at 6 years old being aware of that and, like, being happy that she wasn't the only one. So having a book like this out there for any child that feels different, regardless of whether it's a physical difference or whatever - it's important.

KAEPERNICK: The part that I love about being different is you don't feel like you're a replica of sorts. You drive through neighborhoods and you see track homes. You don't feel like you're just - you're one of the track homes. I get to be unique. I get to be my full self. And I get to just be free in that sense. And I think being able to give that message to young kids to be able to love their differences and just ultimately love who they are is a really, really powerful message.

BALABAN: That was author Colin Kaepernick and illustrator Eric Wilkerson talking about their new children's book, "I Color Myself Different."

Samantha Balaban, NPR News.

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