This is a story that bears thinking about in a variety of ways.
While most cricketers have participated in a “take the knee” moment before matches at the current T20 World Cup (and for the last year), the South African team has done different things during that moment, some taking a knee, some raising a fist, and others, like the superstar Quinton de Kock, simply standing. Cricket South Africa made an announcement before their recent match that the entire team would take a knee, and de Kock chose not to play. (Probably worth saying: SA was playing the West Indies team, and while it was very important, it wasn’t a knockout match.)
Today, de Kock has apologized—it’s a terrible apology, in most of the ways that such apologies are terrible, but there’s no need to write about that in detail—and will join the team in taking a knee before their next match (against Sri Lanka on Saturday). But it does raise the question of what the gesture means now, when he does it under the direction of the institution.
And more: when Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the National Anthem five years ago, when he was institutionally expected to stand, it was a powerful protest against (a) the treatment of black people in the US, specifically by US police, and (2) how our society (including the NFL) makes it easy to ignore that treatment. When other people joined him, it really did become more difficult to ignore that treatment. Black lives really did begin to matter more than they previously had here, and black deaths at the hands of police really did become harder to ignore.
On the other hand, as a symbolic protest (and Mr. Kaepernick, to maximize the reach of his protest, had to make it symbolic) it was naturally misinterpreted by a lot of people, deliberately or otherwise. And taking that symbol out of its context changes it—what does it mean for a black Jamaican or a Muslim from Uttar Pradesh to take the knee in Dubai? It isn’t obvious to me that it is protesting anything, particularly. And when it stops being a protest that is in defiance of an institution, and is now not only approved by the institution but is a condition of being part of the institution, it stops being a goad to change, and risks (at least) becoming an endorsement of the status quo.
And yet… the options at this point are: take the knee, or don’t. Join with your teammates, or stand apart from them. Whatever it might mean for a white South African to take the knee, for a white South African to refuse to take the knee, to refuse to play for the nation of South Africa rather than take the knee, that’s a symbol that is hard to interpret any other way than a protest against an anti-racist agenda. Even if, as seems likely, his taking the knee will not only be viewed as individually insincere but will cheapen the symbol for everyone else, his choice not to take a knee can only be read as racist and as endorsing racism.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.