There are lots of deaths everyday in the United States. People have guns and there is a lot of violent crime. Most of it is ignored even in the United States let alone here. Imagine if in May 2020 a person of Chinese origin had been killed by a policeman. It’s perfectly possible. In 2020 there were 457 white people killed by the police in the USA. There were 241 black people, 169 Hispanic and 28 of other races as well as 126 of unknown race.
But there were no demonstrations about most of these people
and certainly no demonstrations in Britain. If a Chinese-American man had been
unjustly murdered by the police in the USA in May 2020, would we still have
footballers going down on one knee because of it. No, of course not. There is
an inequality in our response to violence involving race. We don’t care about
white people being killed, we don’t care about Hispanics we don’t in fact care
about anyone being killed by the American police unless they are black.
The whole discussion of race in the West is toxic
because of this inequality of response. But you cannot fight inequality with
more inequality. It is this I believe that football crowds are responding too when
they boo players taking the knee.
The origin of taking the knee is essentially unequal.
Those American football players who decided to fail to stand when the national
anthem played, did so not because they cared about all police murders of all American
citizens, but only when a black person was killed in this way. Not only that
they only took the knee when a high-profile case of police violence led to the
death of a black person. They did not take the knee when a black person killed another
black person in a violent crime. The only black lives that mattered were those that
could be attributed to white people killing black people. This again was an
inequality of response.
America has a much bigger problem with police violence than Britain does. In 2020 only five people were killed by the police in the United Kingdom. But America is far from the most violent place to live. There are any number of countries, including Venezuela and El Salvador where you have a far greater chance of being killed by the police than the USA. The USA has a rate of deaths involving the police of 28.54 per 10 million people. Venezuela has a rate of 1830.2. While the UK’s rate is merely 0.5. But there are no demonstrations about police killing black people in Venezuela. Footballers don’t kneel to complain about this. It doesn’t even make the news.
In Britain we don’t have a problem with the police
killing black people, yet we are still expected to go down on one knee, which
is essentially an act of disrespect to a flag and a national anthem, even when
it is not our problem. This is why fans are booing.
The footballers and the authorities argue that taking
the knee has nothing to do with either Black Lives Matter or the origins of the
gesture. They are merely making this gesture to show that they oppose racism.
But this is not true. Footballers were not going down on one knee in Britain
prior to the murder of George Floyd. They only began after the widespread Black
Lives Matter demonstrations which began afterwards. If George Floyd had been Chinese
and had been murdered in a similar way, there would have been no
demonstrations, no Black Lives Matter organisation in Britain and no taking the
knee. It is therefore impossible to divorce the gesture from its Black Lives
Matter origin, because it only happened because of the response to the death of
George Floyd by Black Lives Matter activists. To suppose that going down on one
knee is somehow different is to suppose that I could raise my arm in front of
me without this being connected with fascism.
Is there a problem with racism in Britain? Yes. Human
beings everywhere have prejudice about external characteristics including race.
Is Britain a particularly racist place to live? There is discrimination here.
There is prejudice and there is racial hatred. But almost everyone accepts that
racial discrimination is wrong. You don’t need to persuade us of this. Most of
us try to treat our fellow citizens the same and with respect no matter their
race or national origin. We have made progress in the past fifty years. Yet no
matter what we do it is never enough. There is always someone who is ready to call
us racist, no matter how hard we try. There is always someone waiting to pounce
on the least mistake, an unguarded remark or a joke in poor taste.
The problem with modern race theory is that is fundamentally
unequal. Only white people can be racist. Black people cannot be racist. But
this inequality makes gestures such as taking the knee, toppling statues and
cancelling people from the past seem unfair. This is why fans are booing.
When Sasha Johnson the Black Lives Matter activist was
shot in the head, there was immediate media interest. If it had turned out that
she had been shot by a far-right white person, there would have been endless
condemnation, mass demonstrations and calls for more kneeling, but instead it
appears that those suspected of shooing her are black people. Immediately there
is minimal coverage in the media and no one is interested. It only matters if
white people shoot black people. But do the lives of black people shot by other
black people not matter? Why don’t footballers kneel for Sasha Johnson? If they
think about it at all, it is because the black lives that matter are only those
where a white person can be accused of racism. This is why taking the knee is
so divisive. It amounts to an accusation against a whole society, that we need re-education,
that we are unconsciously racist and to blame for our whole history and
everything bad that ever happened to a black person. We are to blame because of
the skin we were born in. Many people are getting tired of being blamed for who
we are by those who are angry with us no matter what we do.
The inequality of treatment is such that a TV
programme about Anne Boleyn can have a black actress. There is an argument to
be had about whether black people can sensibly portray non black historical
characters. I dislike it because it makes such programmes unbelievable and
lacking in realism. Why go to great efforts to have an accurate depiction of
Tudor dress if we don’t care about an accurate depiction of Anne Boleyn’s race.
But I could see the logic of colour-blind casting if it was done fairly. But it
is not. While historical white characters can be depicted by non-white people, historical
black people cannot. Try making a remake of Roots with all the slaves and their
descendants cast with white actors. If the character in a novel is described as
being black, it is whitewashing to use a white actor to depict them. But Morgan
Freeman can play an Irish character with red hair in the Shawshank Redemption
and that is fair.
It is now problematic to have an operetta such as the
Mikado with white singers, but it is not problematic to have black singers depicting
people who would have been white. It means that a staging of Turandot with a
full black cast would be no problem at all, but if it had a cast of Italians
for whom it was written it is liable to be condemned. Bridgerton can have black
aristocrats in Regency England, but a Suitable Boy cannot have white actors
depicting Indians in post war India. We are not allowed to distort black
history and fiction, but we can pretend that there were black aristocrats which
is a distortion of British history.
Only white people are privileged because we live in a majority
white society, that supposedly makes all black people no matter how successful
or rich underprivileged. It means that a multi-millionaire black footballer is
less privileged than a single parent white family with little money and less
hope. But if a white person happens to live in a society which is
overwhelmingly black, he will not find that black people have black privilege he
will not be underprivileged in relation to them no matter how poor he is and no
matter what discrimination he faces.
It is all one-way traffic. While white people are
condemned for cultural appropriation if they adopt the styles or culture of
people from other races, those other races can culturally appropriate the English
language, classical music and the inventions of white people with no
condemnation whatsoever. This is because cultural appropriation like racism is deemed
to be a power relation. Black people with less power can culturally appropriate
all they wish and can use racist language about themselves and others without
being called racist. It is this unequal treatment that the crowds are booing.
People in Britain are beginning to sense that modern
race theory is a racket. If a black cricketer were discovered to have tweeted
something racially offensive about white people in his teens, he would not be suspended.
If a black hero were discovered to have benefited from the slave trade he would
not be cancelled. There is an unforgivable sin called racism, but only white people
can ever be guilty of it.
As footballers go down on one knee they are praying to
the God of Racism. This is an angry God who has divided us all into the sheep
and the goats. The black sheep are without sin, incapable of error and never to
blame. The white goats must kneel down and repent. They must pretend that Britain
was always multi-cultural and multi-racial. They must be careful what they say
and do, for one slip and they will be cancelled. They must confess that those
people from the past who we admired, respected and who made our country what it
is were in fact racist. Instead of pride in our past we must instead feel guilt.
Each of us it turns out is a descendant of bigots and slaveholders and the sins
of the fathers must be visited on the sons and we must repent and pay
reparations.
But ordinary football fans are beginning to realise
that the God of Racism that they are told they must kneel down to is itself a
racist. Modern race theory does not treat all races equally and does not want
to. It was invented so that one side would always be guilty and one side always
innocent. They want you to kneel down to a theory that is itself racist because
it is founded on the unequal treatment of people due to their skin colour. The
modern understanding of racism has become merely a stick to beat white people
with whether they deserve it or not. It is never used against anyone else.
The biggest danger is that when white people begin to discover
the inequality of treatment, when they fully realise the racism inherent in
modern race theory, they will reject the whole concept of being anti-racist and
will give up on fairness, tolerance and treating others as equal no matter what
they look like. The inequality in the modern conception of race will lead
people to no longer see racism as an unforgivable sin, because how can a sin be
unforgivable if only white people can commit it, while for black people it isn’t
even a sin at all.
At this point taking the knee will not merely be an
empty gesture worthy of booing and derision, but rather a source of division
and hostility between races and will begin to undermine the progress that we
have all made by treating each other simply as human beings. If white people
begin to sense that they are being conned by a race industry that wants to
treat them unequally, unfairly and unjustly then race relations across the
western world will be set back decades until we can once more realise that all
human beings are capable of prejudice and racism and that we can only overcome
this not by emphasising what divides us, but by recognising the humanity that
we share. People of all races must realise that identity politics will make race
relations worse unless we all work together to reject its divisiveness. This is
why people are booing and why their boos will only get louder.
