Ava DuVer­nay and Col­in Kaeper­nick are work­ing on a series about his younger years

Amer­i­ca has been swept by a new­found pas­sion for social jus­tice, with mon­u­ments to slave­own­ers being torn down by the dozen as sit­com episodes fea­tur­ing black­face van­ish from stream­ing ser­vices. The ris­ing tide of racial equal­i­ty has lift­ed many boats, includ­ing that of Ava DuVer­nay, who announced today that she’ll soon begin work on a project about one of this movement’s cen­tral figures.

Net­flix has issued a press release stat­ing that DuVer­nay will col­lab­o­rate with Col­in Kaeper­nick on a new minis­eries titled Col­in in Black & White, chron­i­cling the younger years of the foot­ball star turned Black Lives Mat­ter activist. DuVer­nay will pro­duce the series along­side writer Michael Star­rbury, the pair hav­ing last worked togeth­er on the Net­flix minis­eries When They See Us.

Col­in in Black & White will take audi­ences through a for­ma­tive peri­od in Kaep’s life, when he was just a Black teenag­er with white adop­tive par­ents, fig­ur­ing out how to nav­i­gate high school and hon­ing his foot­ball skills as a quar­ter­back. The chal­lenges he faces – no small mea­sure of dis­crim­i­na­tion, undoubt­ed­ly – and how he responds to them will fore­shad­ow his future feats in sport and humanitarianism.

Kaeper­nick him­self will nar­rate the script­ed series’ six episodes, but will not appear onscreen, played instead by a younger actor still to be cast. The tone the series will take is dif­fi­cult to sur­mise; DuVer­nay intends to tack­le dif­fi­cult mat­ters of iniq­ui­ty and prej­u­dice, as the sto­ry demands, and yet the high school milieu and the inspi­ra­tional bent of Kaepernick’s suc­cess sug­gest a need for lightness.

This isn’t the first time Net­flix has mythol­o­gized the ori­gin sto­ry of a Black icon, hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly imag­ined the col­lege days of Barack Oba­ma with the fea­ture film Bar­ry in 2016. Like that film, DuVer­nay and Kaepernick’s series will have to exe­cute a dif­fi­cult bal­anc­ing act between aware­ness of the great future that awaits its sub­ject with­out laps­ing into Dewey Cox-style biopic hackery.