In 2016, American football quarterback Colin Kaepernick made headlines with his peaceful protests during one of the games. The football player refused to stand up for the US national anthem, which is required from everyone attending or participating in the event. Instead, Kaepernick went on one knee, with which he attracted attention from viewers and the press. Later, the San Francisco 49ers’ quarterback explained his decision to break the rules by his commitment to social justice causes. Kaepernick said that he was not going to “show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color (Abad-Santos, 2018).” In 2019, Kaepernick became the face of Nike and starred in an advertisement that won an Emmy the same year. Some people were moved by the message while others criticized the athlete for commercializing his efforts. This paper provides an analysis of Nike’s commercial starring Kaepernick from the Marxist standpoint. Even if Kaepernick himself does not identify as a Marxist, it is quite easy to trace back the roots of and the motivation behind his peaceful protest to the Marxist ideology. According to Marx, the world could be explained in terms of exploitation and oppression. Every society in every era was largely guided by the class struggle between the oppressor (the ruling class) and the oppressed (the working class or proletariat) (Gliniecki, 2018). It should be noted that the struggle does not have to be obvious or explicitly violent: Marx draws attention to the veiled civil war that is going on without being noticed (Gliniecki, 2018). If in earlier ages, oppressors had to resort to open altercations, conflicts, and brute force, today, the tools of oppression are more subtle and intricate. Marxism teaches that the next step after imposing control over the means of production is asserting ideological dominance. The objective of ideological dominance is to serve the interests of the ruling class by presenting their ideas about favorable class dynamics as a norm and common sense. For instance, ideological dominance might mean propagating unequal, exploitative relationships as natural, acceptable, and even desired (Gliniecki, 2018). Marx writes that ideological control results in the so-called false consciousness (Gliniecki, 2018). The working class is coaxed, coddled, and deluded into accepting the current order of things. Therefore, the capitalists have more leeway to pursue their interests further and normalize their efforts to make a profit at someone else’s expense. Sports, which is the field in which Kapernick has been building his career so far, cannot be analyzed separately from the rest of society because, for sociologists, not a single part of society exists in isolation. Therefore, the same social forces of oppression and exploitation exist in sports. One may argue that sports are a field that offers many people belonging to disadvantaged communities a vehicle of upward social mobility. At a glance, such a stance is not completely ungrounded. Lawrence (2019) reports that in the NFL (National Football League) 68% of athletes are African-American and only 28% of them are White. However, the people who benefit financially such as broadcasters from these athletes are predomina