a note from FTL team: this month, we have been incredibly honored to hand over the ftl convo club curation reigns to Halleemah Nash, our guest curator for October. throughout the month, we have been diving deep into Colin Kaepernick’s Perilous Fight, exploring its powerful themes of resistance, identity, and justice. in the essay below, Halleemah shares a deeply personal reflection on how she sees her own life story mirrored in Kaepernick’s journey. we are so grateful for her vision this month, and we know her words will resonate with you just as deeply as they did with us. read on for Halleemah’s essay.
a few things I love - trap music, shakespeare, a red lip, and the san francisco niners. so when follow the leader presented what the next convo club pick might be, i was AMPED at the mention of my quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s new memoir, Perilous Fight.
we had just finished Careless People, dissecting the havoc caused when powerful figures act without care for the human lives in their orbit. transitioning from a one story about reckless, destructive power to a story about a leader who organized and channeled collective power felt like a literal palette cleanser.
before i flipped to page one, i knew i had to take a beat. i had to brace myself for all the emotions that come up when I think about Kaep’s story.
of course, I was forced to revisit that old heartbreak of the 2013 49er super bowl loss to the ravens (beyonce gave us a literal stadium blackout to regroup after being down, we staged a comeback and still fell short. I’ll never be over it. cried real tears.). but beyond the fan part, i had to sit with the heavy, complex, frustration of what Kaepernick’s experience in the nfl truly represents: how relentlessly these corporate systems are engineered to extract our labor and consume our talent while refusing to acknowledge, let alone support, our basic humanity.
but past the grief, i wanted to learn more about the journey of my GOAT quarterback.
listen, i know how that sounds coming from a diehard San Francisco 49ers fan. for two decades, my undisputed answer was Joe Montana. four rings, zero Super Bowl interceptions, so cool under pressure he had ice water in his veins. the textbook, high-gloss definition of a GOAT.
in this chapter of my life, though, i assign a deeper meaning to that “g” in GOAT. real greatness lives in the alignment between our gifts and our purpose. and when I look at what it means to carry power, strategy, and principle into hostile territory and redefine what it means to come out with a win, Colin Kaepernick is my quarterback.
Kaep is also walking in a legendary lineage of Black quarterbacks who stood for more than football. i have to give flowers to James “Shack” Harris and Doug Williams and Warren Moon, always. but when we talk about pure, culture-shifting impact on the game, the collective movement for Black liberation, and modeling our agency to define our best work? nobody’s touching #7.
i was already a fan of Kaep the player, but through these pages, i got to know Colin the human.
i realized pretty quickly that this was not just a sports memoir, this was nostalgic storytelling and a straight up masterclass on navigating high pressure systems as people of hue.
it laid out the issues so many professionals face every day. like the pressure to achieve greatness paired with the sting of never truly belonging. or the violent awakening you get when a system you loved reveals its fundamental hostility toward your humanity. and the exhausting, high-wire choreography required to exist in spaces that want your talent but reject your truth.
he summed up in the most relatable way for our current world of work: the league would shake me awake.
most of us enter our careers chasing shiny brands, fancy titles, and social approval. we naively believe that if we perform at an “elite” level, the company/system/industry will protect us, value us, and reward our loyalty. but eventually, it shakes us awake. and that wake-up is anything but gentle. and that awakening has effects.
this truth and Kaep’s story, reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from MacBeth that plays in my mind when I consider the false dilemmas marginalized people face.
at its core, Macbeth is this cautionary tale about how blind ambition can corrupt a good person and destroy their mind. but tucked in this 400-year-old tragedy is this dope interaction between two nameless characters—the first and second murderers—who are not cold-blooded killers, but desperate men utterly broken by society.
when Macbeth approaches them to do his dirty work (murder Banquo), they explain their willingness to commit violence through their sheer exhaustion with systemic suffering:
SECOND MURDERER. I am one, my liege, whom the vile blows and buffets of the world have so incensed that I am reckless what I do to spite the world
FIRST MURDERER. And I another So weary with disasters, tugg’d with fortune, That I would set my life on any chance, to mend it or be rid on’t.
Act 3, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth
i get that Shakespeare can sometimes be hard to understand or break down. Ta-Nahesi Coates was on All Things Considered discussing this exact scene and even host Terry Gross had to ask for a deeper explanation.
here’s my take: the murderers’ raw desperation proves that when people are systematically crushed and mistreated, they reach a tipping point where they simply stop caring about the world. when the world’s relentless cruelty finally breaks a person, it breeds a dangerous, systemic coping mechanism: the recklessness of indifference.
when i was coming up in my career, i was an Executive Director for a nonprofit in Chicago. i was early in my leadership career, so i was wide-eyed and eager to serve, lead and raise money for a cause i believed in. and this job was a dream job of sorts. it lived at the intersection of all the things i love: service, community impact, and leadership from a lived experience.
every now and then I like to rock braids and honor my signature authenticity. it never occurred to me that it would be an issue until one of my mentors (another black woman, btw) told me that i would never be able to raise millions of dollars with braids in my hair. she explicitly and inexplicity told me that who i was in full expression was not acceptable.
so in “fundraising season” or for any major pitch i embraced a toned down look. no red lip. hair straightened or pulled back. slowly and quietly subduing the truth of who i was to appease a system that didn’t value me anyway. and suddenly my dream job was starting to slowly eat away at my spirit.
it’s what i thought i had to do to be successful. and that is the opening of the trap that happens at work. over time, more and more, i found myself shrinking into a palatable version of myself that stripped me of my power and made me question over the years, was it worth it?
for Kaepernick, the price of refusing to conform meant getting blackballed from the game he dominated. i used to carry sadness over his career as an NFL quarterback being cut short the way it did. but reading Perilous Fight healed some of that because i learned just how much was born out of his sacrifice. he built his own table, his own authority, and his own service pipeline completely outside of the corporate brand he used to think held the only trophy that mattered.
here in 2026, i find myself actively redefining success as an entrepreneur, reclaiming my freedom and expression as a Black woman in this country, and rejecting toxic workforce cultures in favor of human dignity, my definition of what it means to be great has evolved.
today, more than 600,000 black women have been forced out of work and that doesn’t count those of us who left voluntarily because we couldn’t take it anymore. for too many of us, the price of standing in truth looks like forced resignations, quiet retaliations (welcome Ryan Clark to the chat), or getting slapped with the “difficult” label for refusing to smile through harm.
and i know so many of us are interviewing, figuring out how we best present ourselves to survive and take care of ourselves. trying to navigate this difficult time. and i also know how easy it is to not care anymore because of the all the ways the world and the culture of work have let us down and told us that who we are isn’t enough.
but a fundamental question for all of us doing the hard work of redefining success: what does it actually mean to win?
freedom can look like building a career that doesn’t require abandoning our identity or negotiating away our core values just to keep a paycheck. to get pushed out of a role or to voluntarily drop the golden handcuffs and realize the exit wasn’t a defeat, but a full-blown initiation into something greater, that’s what we call making your next move your best move.
and while Kaep didn’t exit the NFL with a Super Bowl ring, he took his pain and turned into purpose and funded, resourced, and captured the heart of the culture through Know Your Rights Camp, Ra Vision Media, Kapernick Publishing. that is real power.
and i love that throughout the book, Kaepernick shouts out the champions that anchored him while he navigated hostile waters, and the importance of community. Mrs. Attaway, his grade school teammate’s mom who consistently checked on his well-being when he felt isolated. Randy Moss, the veteran wide receiver who offered straight talk solidarity. Eric Reid, the brother who took a knee alongside him so he wouldn’t have to kneel alone. Nessa, his partner who handed him The Autobiography of Malcolm X helping to ignite his political consciousness.
no one survives a perilous fight alone and we cannot navigate the recklessness of indifference in isolation. it takes a village of truth-tellers to remind us who we are when the corporate machinery tries to grind us down into a version of ourselves we don’t even recognize. for every Black woman currently sitting in an interview trying to figure out how much of her magic she has to dim just to pay her rent, or for anyone who has voluntarily dropped the golden handcuffs to choose their own sanity, know that you are not kneeling alone.
As the ftl conversation club closes the final chapter on Perilous Fight, i’m leaving the table more convicted than ever that the path i’m on is the right one. winning isn’t about getting a system that was built to exclude you to finally hand you a trophy or validate your worth. true greatness is refusing to let the vile blows and buffets of the world turn your spirit cold. it’s rocking your braids, wearing your red lip, standing flat-footed in your truth, and realizing that when you build your own table, you’ve already won the game.
warmly,
Halleemah
you can learn more about halleemah’s best work here and connect with her on Linkedin here.
Definitely on the right path! It’s a type of inner security aka stability that transcends anything the system could offer. Great job facilitating this month!