Taking the knee is an empty gesture when reduced to prematch routine
Hsignificance of the protest pioneered by NFL player is lost when every athlete is obliged to do it as a matter of protocol
‘Like a flag flown at half-mast to mark a tragedy.” That was the impeccable comparison coined in 2016 by Eric Reid, Colin Kaepernick’s team-mate in the San Francisco 49ers, when the quarterback first struck the posture that ignited a movement. To the athletes he inspired, taking the knee was a dual expression of vulnerability and strength, a reminder of the United States’s inability to live up to the ideal of equal protection enshrined in its flag and of the players’ own refusal to be silenced. The problem is how much that symbolism has since drained away.
In this country, there is a belief that the endless replication of kneeling in sport somehow heightens its power. And yet, by degrees, the reverse seems to be happening. What was a stirring and important gesture on June 17, when Premier League players knelt in a circle before the opening matches, has after seven weeks showed signs of becoming a grimly perfunctory ritual. Take the scene at St Mirren last weekend, as home players kicked off against Livingston and then sheepishly fell to their knees in a statement that, to put it politely, lacked sincerity.
According to the BBC, they had been caught out by the “new protocol”. This bloodless description suggests it has now been turned into just another part of footballers’ revised prematch checklist: sanitise hands, avoid handshakes, take the knee. All the solemnity of Kaepernick’s original stand, every injustice that he was striving to highlight, and it has been reduced to this: a mere protocol, a posture to perform and then forget about.
Some causes, though, are too vital to be trivialised as diplomatic procedures. Taking the knee resonates when it is personal, when the individual concerned endorses its message with heart and soul. When Lewis Hamilton does so before a Formula One race, the spectacle is poignant, emphasising the struggle of the sport’s first and still only black driver to convey grievances that have defined his life.
The trouble arose when he tried to take the rest of the grid with him. At the British Grand Prix, Hamilton channelled all his powers of persuasion to encourage his fellow drivers to show a united front. Alas, the splintering was more evident than ever, with Kevin Magnussen increasing the number of nonknee-takers to seven. While 13 knelt, seven stood behind. It came across less as a seminal moment in the fight against racism than an awkward group photo, a reminder of F1’s intractable internal divisions on the issue. And as we know from Abraham Lincoln, a house divided against itself cannot stand.
In rugby league, Israel Folau was conspicuous by his decision not to kneel before a match at St Helens last Sunday, with his club, Catalans Dragons, explaining that he had made a “personal choice”. To some, this renders him a crusader, a figure who, in the words of Australian talk-show host Alan Jones, is above participating in “empty gestures”.
Except there was nothing empty about the act in which Folau’s teammates engaged. Kaepernick conceived it as a graceful gesture, with a double meaning of deference and defiance. In his mind, it was one that would underscore the police brutality of which African-americans were so disproportionately the victims, and one that should be sustained despite the best efforts of a president to have those kneeling shunned as unpatriotic ingrates.
This, fundamentally, is the substance that is lost, the more frequently and cursorily it is performed. From the Scottish Premier League to F1, some athletes no longer appear to realise what they are signalling and why. This is not supposed to be some tokenistic display of solidarity, but a sign of deep investment in the overarching quest. We learned yesterday that players would be permitted to kneel at all Champions League games this month: a welcome development, so long as it is not treated as a casual protocol.
Not if Jerome Boateng has anything to do with it, one senses. “It’s important that we continue this in the Champions League, and especially in the final, because the whole world will look,” said the Bayern Munich centre-back. Somehow, on the grandest stages, the essence of the act needs to be reclaimed. Psychologists often characterise kneeling as an expression of subservience and subjugation, where people make themselves smaller. Kaepernick, by contrast, envisaged it as one that made the protagonists larger, throwing their courage into sharp relief against those who sought to belittle and shout them down. Ultimately, taking the knee derives its potency and its polarising effect from the challenge to the status quo.
That is its purpose, and it is one of which its latter-day adherents should never lose sight.