The brain-frying hijack of decency
by Melanie Phillips:
What if the England squad had given the Black Power salute as a protest against racism?
Even more chilling than the way in which brains are being fried by evil dogma that appropriates the language of virtue is that so many in public life are falling into line with it.
Thus the influential Conservative MP Steve Baker says the Tories should rethink their opposition to “taking the knee” and “get alongside” the England football team that performed this gesture in the Euro matches. As the Guardian reported:
“Much as we can’t be associated with calls to defund the police, we urgently need to challenge our own attitude to people taking a knee,” Baker wrote in a message to MPs on the Conservatives Against Racism, For Equality group. “I fear we are in danger of misrepresenting our own heart for those who suffer injustice.”
On BBC Radio’s Today, Baker said further:
It is one thing to boo the referee with a marginal decision, but it is another to boo brave, black players who are saying no to racism and bravely going out on the field to take a knee and say we are expressing our solidarity with those who are suffering racism.
Baker has lost the moral plot big time. A grave injustice is indeed being done — but not to the genuflecting footballers. It’s being done to those who are now being defamed as “racist” for opposing taking the knee — or even for failing to condemn those who have opposed it.
Thus the Home Secretary Priti Patel — herself a woman of Indian descent who has been regularly subjected to racial abuse — is being monstered as a racist for refusing to condemn those who booed the England players for taking the knee. The Times reported:
One member of the England squad, Tyrone Mings, said of Patel: “You don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as ‘Gesture Politics’ & then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we’re campaigning against, happens.”
The allegation that Patel stoked a racist fire is disgusting and unjust. All booing is bad form. But while some of those booing the England squad at the Euros may have been bigots, the players weren’t being booed because of their skin colour but because taking the knee is rightly understood to be in itself a viciously bigoted gesture.
As Mings fails to appreciate, it’s not just consistent but morally imperative both to oppose racist bigotry against the players, which has been appalling (although much of it after Sunday’s final was said to have come from abroad), and oppose the racist bigotry behind the gesture of taking the knee.
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