Kneeling is a respectful form of protest.
By now you’ve probably read and seen plenty about the widespread adoption in the NFL — and the whole American sports world — of now-unemployed quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s protest gesture during the playing of the national anthem.
Even as relations with North Korea threaten to go nuclear and Puerto Rico sits devastated without much electricity or clean water, “taking a knee” over race relations and Donald Trump is all anyone can talk about.
There’s a lot to talk about, clearly — about the racism that motivated the protests, about how Trump will seize any opportunity to stir up racist resentment, about the apparent hypocrisy of the NFL and its owners, about what protocol the anthem does or should demand.
But one fascinating thing is that the angry, indignant reaction from Trump and those like him has been — continues to be — in response to this particular
form of protest. It is not as if Kaepernick and those who have joined him are flipping the double bird with their tongues out, or hopping around in circles making fart sounds under their armpits, or dropping their padded shorts to hang a moon under the rocket’s red glare. They are kneeling. As protest gestures go, this strikes me not as insulting or disrespectful or even confrontational, but pretty much the opposite of those things.
Perhaps it is because I am Catholic.
“We chose to kneel because it’s a respectful gesture . . . like a flag flown at half-mast.” ERIC REID FOOTBALL PLAYER
The liturgy of the church I was raised in is a famously calisthenic exercise: the congregation getting up and down and up and back down again, sitting, standing and kneeling together at different points of the ceremony. When I was a boy, I remember jokes from Protestant friends about the mystery of the logic behind this workout of a mass. But the shorthand, as it was explained to me, was straightforward. You sit during the mundane business, you stand for the more important parts and you get on your knees for the truly sacred parts.
Because kneeling is the gesture of reverence, of adoration, of meditation, of humility before great power. It is a posture you adopt to make an urgent request you have no reason to expect will be granted, “Lord, I am not worthy . . . but only say the word and I shall be healed.”
And outside the walls of the church, hasn’t kneeling always meant much the same thing? You kneel before a monarch to show deference, before your beloved to request marriage, before a figure of authority or torment or judgment to plead for mercy. It is a position, often, of surrender. It is not less respectful than standing. If anything, it is more so. Kaepernick began kneeling during the anthem, rather than sitting, after speaking with Green Beret veteran Nate Boyer, as a gesture of respect to military veterans that would still allow him to get his point across. His teammate Eric Reid, who joined him in the gesture, wrote this week in The New York Times, “We chose to kneel because it’s a respectful gesture. I remember thinking our posture was like a flag flown at halfmast to mark a tragedy.”
In our great fictions — movies, television, books — who attacks a man when he is on his knees? Horrible tyrants, vicious gangsters, relentless slave drivers.
And yet, here in real life, U.S. President Donald Trump sees a man kneeling, during the sacred civil ceremony of the anthem, and decides to go on the attack. He calls this gesture “disgraceful.” He calls anyone engaging in it a “son of a bitch.” He says they should be fired.
He finds it so galling that they dare to treat their anthem, the symbolic representation of their country’s common ideals, not as a command that they stand at attention for inspection from authorities, but as a prayer they offer up. Or so it appears to me. A prayer that the anthem’s promise, and the promises in the pledges and documents it is said to represent — “the land of the free,” “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” “freedom and justice for all” — may yet be fulfilled. Expressing a heartfelt yearning, offered from a position of sacramental humility, that the symbols might become reality for all of the people the anthem and the flag are meant to represent.
Trump’s response was, instead, to attack. Because of that, Colin Kaepernick and his handful of allies have been joined on their knees by hundreds more, including owners and those in other sports. As those new protesters express their anger at the affront by the president, and their unity in anger at that affront, let us hope they do not lose sight of the request for justice that inspired the kneeling in the first place.
It is a beautiful gesture, one befitting both the anthem and the American situation. Perhaps it may even seem too understated a gesture, too respectful. But it is a gesture to which the appropriate response is obvious: Amen. Edward Keenan writes on city issues. ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow @thekeenanwire