Only a Black Athlete Can Save Us Now by Grant Farred

Author:Grant Farred [Farred, Grant]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SPO000000 Sports & Recreation / General, SOC031000 Social Science / Discrimination & Race Relations, PHI019000 Philosophy / Political
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

Taking a Knee, Keeping a Knee on a Black Man’s Neck

Amidst all the violence, amidst the myriad protests that wracked and continue to wrack, this nation, Kaepernick maintained a steadfast silence. No one would identify Kaepernick as an oracle. There was no need to. What Kaepernick took a knee for would not be recognized, by a large swathe of white America, for what it is: the fundamental “common sense” of the America political—the right to peaceful protest.

The logic that governs white America’s relationship to the black body is always, a priori, based on the presumption of black criminality. Contained within that logic, as we well know, is the all-too accepted “need” for excessive police force in relation to the black body (no-knock warrants, tasing, all the force it takes to subdue the black body, and, of course, the use of deadly force). This is the path that leads to black death and the need for large-scale black incarceration.

Kaepernick’s was a historically informed, politically critical, taking of the knee. The NFL, the Trump White House, the rabid white nationalists in the conservative media, white Republicans, and their fellow-travelers all across America (I do not doubt that more than a few Democrats were similarly ill-disposed to Kaepernick’s protest), glued to their TV screens on Sunday to watch the NFL, declared themselves virulently opposed to taking a knee.

Derek Chauvin’s knee, on the other hand, has thrown the entire nation into a cataclysm of . . . violence, protests, utopian occupation (Seattle), counterprotests (Portland) . . . with more in the offing. America, the Land of, the Land with, a Wounded Knee. (A nation Wounded, as in Percival Everett’s novel of the same name; a nation where, in the white West, not far from Laramie, Wyoming, an indigenous ranch owner finds “Red Nigger”5 written in the snow, written with the blood of his dead cattle. The only person with whom the indigenous rancher can share the inscription with is his black neighbor.) One man’s kneeling is another man’s deadly force. A white man’s knee is a black man’s death. A black man’s kneeling on an NFL sideline prefigures a black man’s death by kneeling by a white police officer on a black man’s neck.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.