Love or hate: that seems to be the lot of Black England footballers. Score and the nation adores you – you represent the best of British. Have a bad match, and the mob bigotry descends – go back to where you came from, you bloody immigrant.
So it is that today England are celebrating supersub teenager Michelle Agyemang, whose last-minute equaliser – for the second match running – kept the national team in the Euros. Meanwhile, teammate Jess Carter was still reeling from the racial abuse she suffered at the hands of England fans after performances in earlier matches that were deemed below par.
It’s a similar story for England’s men: “heroes” Jude Bellingham, Bukayo Saka and Ollie Watkins scored game-changing goals all the way to the Euros final last year. Three years earlier, when they missed crucial penalties, Saka and two of his teammates faced a tidal wave of race hate.
The abuse this month, coming mainly from England fans, led to 27-year-old Jess Carter saying: “While I feel every fan is entitled to their opinion on performance and result I don’t agree or think it’s OK to target someone’s appearance or race.”
Her England colleagues, including her manager Sarina Wiegman, have come out in support and condemned the “disgusting and disgraceful” racism – and last night, in protest, they decided not to take the knee before their semi-final against Italy. Instead, the players remained standing and the substitutes, just off pitch, lined up in support. But I’m left wondering, was that really the right thing to do?
Taking the knee has, especially since the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, become a signal known around the world highlighting the enduring evil of racism. No one ever claimed it would, on its own, end the bigotry and prejudice embedded in societies for decades. Yet it has given a brief occasional moment, seen by audiences around the world, to remind people that we’ve still got a long way to go.
I can’t quite understand how it could possibly be a good thing, when there’s a clear sign that bigotry is still with us, to decide to abandon a protest against it. Worse, it seems that the Premier League is now also considering ditching the gesture.
In explaining the Lionesses’ decision, Wiegman – who coincidentally dropped Carter from the starting lineup last night – said taking the knee is not enough. “We’ve done that for a while. It seems that the impact is not good enough, as big as we think … we felt we had to do something else, something different.”
Yet is there an equivalent gesture they could make that would be so resonant, so clear, so widely known, especially to an audience of millions beaming in from all over Europe? Last night’s standing protest was completely missable – it’s doubtful that anyone in the arena, let alone those watching on TV, noticed it.
Of course, racism is not something you can just “kick out”. Some commentators, including politicians, have claimed that the problem is “online abuse”, as if clamping down on social media will eradicate the problem; as if racism, prejudice and bigotry didn’t exist before social media. Anyone who stood on the football terraces in Britain anytime before the 1990s will know different.
If you want to know why racism persists, a good place to look would be the national press, whose front pages provide an almost daily diet of intolerance – towards Muslims, migrants, and minorities in general. Or look to our politicians, who take their lead from those same newspapers for fear of a bad headline. And it’s not just Reform UK or the Tory party on the right. Why else would Keir Starmer – who, let’s remember, took the knee himself in the early days of his Labour leadership – now talk about Britain being an “island of strangers” and of legal migration doing “incalculable damage” to Britain. (Several weeks later, long after the damage was done in making migrants and their children feel isolated and unwelcome, he said he regretted the comments.)
The daily demonisation of people deemed outsiders leads to an atmosphere of suspicion, intolerance and prejudice. It denies people jobs and housing, makes them the target of heavy-handed policing, curtails their freedom of speech, unleashes hatred upon them on a regular basis – and a year ago led to them being burned out of their homes by race-baiting mobs for a crime they had nothing to do with. We’ve seen the seeds of this hatred again this week, outside an asylum hotel in Essex.
Is now really the time to stop taking the knee?
Ironically, the England women’s team has its own history of racial imbalance: how was it, many asked – given the array of applicable talent – that the team that won the Euros in 2022, creating so much joy across the nation, had no Black players? What a contrast with the men’s team, which has been fully multicultural for decades. Even last night, the Lionesses team was all-white through the second half – until Agyemang was brought on with five minutes left.
Taking the knee has always been controversial: its originator, American football quarterback Colin Kaepernick, was in effect drummed out of the NFL for daring to challenge racism so publicly. In 2021, then home secretary Priti Patel criticised England players taking the knee as “gesture politics” and said fans have the right to boo them.
I can appreciate why Carter and her teammates might feel frustrated by the lack of progress on race equality, and want something more to be done. But I’d look to those who’ve opposed this protest over the years, and how they’ve aligned themselves with prejudice and bigotry. Then I’d ask myself: “What would the racists want?” And do the opposite.
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