More and more football supporters are complaining about the players continuing to ‘take the knee’ many months after they first started doing this. A group of Millwall supporters booed their own players for performing the peaceful gesture this weekend. However, it isn’t just Millwall fans who have turned cold on ‘taking the knee’; increasingly I am seeing my own friends sharing posts opposing the gesture on social media and making negative comments on news stories. These are not people whom I would describe as racist or bigoted either. They post things like “enough is enough” or “keep politics out of sport”. The problem is, I believe, the same difficulty we always run into with political symbolism – no two people ever read it the same way.
All political symbolism falls foul of the fact that there is never a single interpretation of a symbol that everyone shares. Political symbolism is very much the victim of a multi-faceted lens. Millwall footballer Mahlon Romeo was distraught at the fans actions. He said, “the fans who have been let in today have personally disrespected me… What they’ve done is booed and condemned a peaceful gesture which was put in place to highlight, combat and stop any discriminatory behaviour and racism. That’s it – that’s all that gesture is.”
But how do those who get so publicly aggravated by the gesture view it? Why do they get so annoyed? I think the answer lies in a mixture of a lack of willingness to understand, a need for education, a genuine belief that politics should be kept out of sport, intolerance and racism. Yes, there is no doubt that pure racism is a factor, but not a factor in all cases I believe.
I think a misunderstanding of the Black Lives Matter movement is at the root. Of course, the death of George Floyd – by choking, as a police officer put his knee on his neck for nine minutes – in Minneapolis was a spark for the recent protests and the outburst of BLM sentiment. A character assassination on Floyd did reveal that he had some serious offences to his name. This does not alter the fact that a police officer’s job is to detain unarmed offenders, not kill them. Neither does it really tell the whole story. Floyd got caught up in the criminal justice system as young as 23. The fact is, that most black youths from his estate in Texas did. Texas had one of the highest incarceration rates in the USA and several studies illustrate that Texan authorities are more likely to target black men than white. Black men were routinely rounded up by police officers and once they had one bad mark against their name it became easier to pile on more.
The BLM movement in general has become much maligned. There has been a lot of nonsense talked about BLM and it has fallen victim to people’s lack of willingness to understand its arguments. Recently it was wrongly reported that it was setting up as a political party. In fact DUP and UUP politicians in our own council chamber voted against lighting up the civic building because of these inaccurate newspaper reports – despite the very quick response (within minutes) by BLM stating that this was not true. Neither do BLM UK wish to ‘abolish’ the police as was stated in the council chamber also.
This idea to ‘de-fund’ the police is an unfortunate slogan for a more subtle idea – and it originated with BLM USA and in a very different context.
In the USA the primary goal is reallocation of resources, funding, and responsibilities being taken away from the police toward other social initiatives. According to Alex Vitale, a professor at Brooklyn College, over the last 40 years, police have been used as a solution to America’s social ills – from mental health interventions to drug addiction – mostly as result of the USA’s poor welfare system. The cost of policing in the US has tripled in that time to $115 billion. In many cities, spending on police dominates city budgets, sometimes amounting to over half!
Proponents of ‘defunding’ argue that there should be investment in areas that support people, rather than arrest them. So, to help victims of domestic violence there should be more investment in women’s centres specialising in trauma. Police could also be removed from the process of sectioning the mentally ill. More investment could also be made in education and youth centres and even in educating police officers on how to effectively deal with someone accused of using a counterfeit $20 note – such as Floyd. Whatever way you look at it, ‘defunding the police’ is probably an unnecessarily antagonistic slogan for something which is actually more nuanced.
The systemic discrimination against black people is not in dispute. The African slave trade and slavery lasted for centuries and it leaves a legacy for families today. The century after the abolition of slavery in the USA was a brutal one for African Americans. Segregation, no voting rights, all-white governmental and judicial systems meant that the end of slavery did not mean the end of suffering.
The brutal murder of 14 year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi was a potent symbol of the powerlessness of African Americans in 1955. Two men beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head and then threw his body, tied to a large fan with barbed wire, into the river. An all-white jury set both men free at a time when no single white man had ever been convicted of killing a black man in the south in the USA.
African Americans had to fight for every advancement they made. Even after the Supreme Court declared the desegregation of schools in 1954, black schoolchildren would need to be escorted to schools. The Little Rock Nine and Ruby Bridges spring to mind. Little, six year old, Ruby, was escorted by armed guard to school every day in 1960. She walked past crowds screaming vicious racist slurs at her. She spent her first day in the principal’s office owing to angry white parents removing their children from school in protest. Only one teacher, Barbara Henry, was willing to accept Ruby, and all year, she was a class of one. Ruby ate lunch alone and sometimes played with her teacher at recess, but she never missed a day of school that year. Ruby’s family suffered severely. Her dad lost his job and the stores refused to serve her family and her grandparents were evicted from the farm where they had lived for decades.
If people think that systemic abuse and racism is a thing of the past they are wrong. Yes, things are better… but if you think that better than slavery, segregation, social ostracism, disenfranchisement and extreme violence is ‘enough’ then you really should try to listen more to those like Mahlon Romeo. You should watch Enslaved with Samuel L Jackson. You really must watch 13th, which is currently on Netflix. You should also watch the Kalief Browder Story, which can also be found on Netflix.
If you think that racism only exists in the USA and not the UK, then listen to the countless black footballers and others who tell you this is not the case. Listen to really learn and understand. I would recommend you also read, Michael Fuller’s book, A Search for Belonging: A story about race, identity, belonging and displacement.
If you don’t know; if you don’t understand, then please don’t criticise those taking the knee. If you don’t want to learn that is fine also – people lead busy lives; but please refrain from unsolicited and ill-informed comment.
Finally, if whilst sitting in your armchair, stuffing your face in front of the fire, you find it an aggravation seeing players taking the knee; if that irks you and makes you angry enough to go to war (on your keyboard), if you cannot even tolerate that… then it should make you wonder: Could you have been one of the parents taking your child out of school because you couldn’t tolerate a black child attending? Could you have been one of the teachers who refused to have a black child in the class? Perhaps you might have been the store owner refusing to serve the family or the boss refusing to employ the upstart of a father? Could you have been one of the jurors in the Emmet Till trial?
Enough is enough right?
Sure, they had schools of their own…why the hell did they want to attend white people’s schools? The vote? They’ll be wanting to rule the country next won’t they?Emmet Till? Surely he should have known his place in the south and respected our traditions – and shouldn’t have spoken to a married white women in a playful tone, or any tone for that matter? Who would you have been in the days of slavery, when those ‘bleeding heart’ liberals wanted to free the slaves?
Taking the knee? So disrespectful, right? They’ve made their point already haven’t they?
Well maybe they have? Maybe they feel they haven’t? Either way if you can’t endure a few months of watching footballers take the knee, imagine what black people had to endure for centuries before you start crying your woes…
MultifacetedLens 