England’s demand that everyone respects “taking the knee” is just imperial arrogance in new clothes
Anglos (Britons as much as Americans) seem incapable of understanding how their priorities are not everyone else’s, and it makes them look bad
Hungary played England in a football match on 4 June, and despite the much-fancied, superstar-laden English team losing the match 1-0, most British press coverage focused on the fact that Hungarian fans booed English players “kneeling against racism” beforehand. Anyone who watches the English Premier League will be accustomed, maybe even oblivious, to seeing this over the last couple of years, but the institution clearly remains odd to many Hungarians at least.
The England national team manager Gareth Southgate seemed genuinely perplexed as to why the booing happened, but he was in no doubt that racism (however he defines it) was involved. UEFA—the European organizing body for football—banned Hungarian fans for “incidences of homophobic and racist behavior” in 2021, but thanks to some loophole they were able to fill their stadium with 30,000 children who then had the impertinence to boo and whistle the English players as they knelt.
When you watch a football match on a British sports channel today (e.g., Sky Sports, BT Sport) you are faced with an almost overwhelming degree of race-centric politicking. Inspired by the NFL player Colin Kaepernick, who in 2016 got down on one knee during the American national anthem “for a more peaceful and just society”, players in the Premier League now kneel before every match, while commentators solemnly invoke its sacred telos: to end racism and discrimination in all its forms. Players’ shirts say “No Room For Racism”, and even as you watch matches you are routinely pestered by “Black Lives Matter” or “Kick It (i.e., racism) Out” icons intruding on the screen.
It’s noteworthy that this has only been the case since George Floyd was killed on 25 May 2020, and it’s genuinely hard to remember what British sports broadcasts were like before that day. By June, players warmed up in t-shirts that said “I can’t breathe” (in reference to Floyd’s last words) and “silence is violence”. But this was also when players started taking the knee before matches, and you can sympathize with people who began to make a connection between the two—that all this started because, and only because, some miscreant named George Floyd was killed by a thuggish police officer in faraway Minnesota.
We now find ourselves in a situation, more than two years later, where schoolchildren on the other side of the world, waiting to watch a football match, are inconvenienced en masse over of the death of a man who is utterly irrelevant to their lives. Even if you could convince people that the kneeling doesn’t happen because of George Floyd, and the movement merely coincided with his death, most people still wouldn’t want their lives disrupted over the concerns of black Americans or black Britons. Most Hungarian children probably haven’t even seen a black person before, much less met one.
Is it a huge deal that ten seconds of a person’s time are wasted while players kneel in obeisance to some social abstraction instead of doing what they’re paid to do? Not really. But that’s a poor way of deciding whether an action is ethical or not. Ten seconds multiplied by 30,000 is a lot of collective human consciousness being assaulted—three and a half days’ worth of consciousness, in fact. And that everyone is booing tells you they don’t want their time wasted by whatever that thing is. They don’t appreciate this tyranny of the Anglo moral compass, and perhaps their wishes should be respected.
Let’s say you could convince Hungarians that the kneeling is to eradicate racism. What a noble idea. Who could be against that? Let’s leave aside the inconvenient fact that racism (rather than bad policing) seems to have played no role in the death of George Floyd. Let’s also act as if groups of humans differ only in respect to appearance but not in terms of heritable behavioral characteristics. In other words, let us pretend humans are blank slates who are destined to one day flourish together in the idealized racism-free utopia envisioned by “anti-racists”. Are people not entitled to ask: “Why are we being assailed by this anti-racism campaigning now, as if it’s the number one priority facing all of humanity?” Cultures with substantial numbers of blacks and whites may indeed feel that it is (e.g., USA, South Africa), but why should Hungarians have to endure the esoteric rituals and self-flagellations of Anglo-Americans in their own country, on their own dime, and during their own free time? If racism truly is a scourge on the scale that British and Americans claim it is, then is only because those countries inflicted it upon themselves—Hungarians have nothing to do with the plight (such as it is) of black people in either Britain or America.
Does racism deserve this much attention? Remember that the “victims” of this brand of racism are several of the players on the football pitch, feted as heroes by billions around the world, living lives of unimaginable wealth and privilege. Yet Hungarians live next to a country at war in which up to 100,000 people have died. Not a war between blacks and whites, but between groups of white people. In June 2022, blacks butchered around 50 of their fellow blacks in a church in Nigeria. A civil war comprising belligerents of the same racial group has been responsible for around 200,000 deaths in Myanmar. Millions have died in an ongoing conflict in Afghanistan. Most of the victims have been Afghans. Hundreds of thousands have been killed in a brutal, ongoing war in Yemen; Arabs killing Arabs. And beyond these atrocities, we all contribute daily to the devastating ecological vandalism of the planet, millions have died from the coronavirus, and since you started reading this essay around five children have died from malaria. Who kneels for them?
Note that this is not mere whataboutism. We are witness to a grave moral miscalculation, like forcing the world to mourn the mistreatment of Puritans who fled persecution in England while ignoring the multitudes of native Americans who died as a result of that migration. We don’t have time to kneel for everyone, so we have to choose carefully. And the English are choosing poorly.
Perhaps it’s not kneeling against racism that offends Hungarians. Perhaps it’s the arrogant and self-absorbed Anglo-American belief that such a parochial and ill-defined phenomenon deserves the world’s attention ahead of the many genuine horrors facing the planet—and the 30,000 Hungarian children destined to live on it.