Cricket SA messed up by making it compulsory to take the knee if you want to play for the Proteas. Quinton de Kock, in turn, messed up by deciding he would rather not play for the team than take the knee.
The choice in how we analyse this is not between uncritical support of CSA’s decision or a lazy defence of De Kock’s right to a decision he can live with as a matter of conscience. There is a tissue of issues here that show how poorly questions of racism are dealt with in our society. Let’s cut through it all systematically.
First, taking the knee has become a symbol of resistance against racism by many athletes and sports teams across the world in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.
Creating and expressing symbols, just like the performance of rituals, are powerful elements of our lives as social beings. They are ways in which we express our identities, or our principles and values. More than that, they can be constitutive of who we are.
Think, for example, of the raised, clenched fist and the accompanying speech act: “AMAAAAAAAAANDLA!” It was a vociferous expression of anti-apartheid and anti-colonial activism, a cry of brute determination to overthrow the violently unjust apartheid regime.
But here’s the snag: to be imbued with meaning, such symbols and rituals must be performed voluntarily. A spy for the apartheid government who fools us all by mimicking the symbols of resistance is morally pathetic.
Of course, epistemologically speaking, we cannot easily detect what lurks in everyone’s heart at a mass rally. But we surely can agree that, as a matter of principle, sincerity is a precondition for the ritual performance of symbols of resistance to be most fully valuable.
The symbolic value of taking the knee is wholly undercut by making the policy mandatory.
That is where the decision by CSA falls apart. The symbolic value of taking the knee is wholly undercut by making the policy mandatory. It is simple why that is so.
If you do not know whether the athlete is in fact committed to anti-racism, then there is no guarantee that they are an agent for change when the cameras are switched off. You also cannot be comforted, as a victim or survivor of racism, when you see a team mandated to take the knee doing so because their empathy with your racism experience isn’t guaranteed.
Only voluntary expressions of commitment to anti-racism can make me hopeful as a black person that the one performing such symbols truly is my ally.
In fact, CSA inadvertently makes it hard for us to know who to trust and who not to. I don’t trust De Kock as an ally in the fight against racism. His decision, which I disagree with and will explain why shortly, is transparent — and the transparency in turn allows me to know what to expect and not to expect of him. I do not reward him for such transparency. I would prefer he understood the gravity of the history of racism. It is not an achievement to be honest about bigotry. The aim should be to not be a bigot. But it is useful to know where I stand with him.
The CSA policy directive creates fake allies. How can that be desirable? How can that be of benefit to racism’s victims and survivors?
Second, CSA doesn’t need to be embarrassed by the different views held within the squad. It is ridiculous to imagine political homogeneity in any society that is founded on values such as pluralism. Obviously, there is a minimum threshold of decency that can reasonably be demanded by any employer. No-one who is a racist, for example, can try hide their racism behind a false appeal to absolute freedom of expression. Our law (correctly so) doesn’t even allow you to discriminate when you decide who you want to rent your property to. But, again, the choice is not between unfettered libertarian notions of freedom at one end or the social engineering of “consensus” at the other.
When I see some players not taking the knee, I don’t find myself thinking: “This is an embarrassment for CSA.”
Instead, I make provisional assumptions about the individuals involved, understanding it to be an elementary fact of adult life that some athletes have regressive politics and, equally possible, some athletes with whom you share a commitment to justice and egalitarianism may genuinely disagree about the pathway to that outcome.
The CSA board seems to have acted swiftly in part because it thought that there is something profoundly embarrassing in not having one team view on the matter. Is it embarrassing though? Is it not more embarrassing that the board would prefer to pretend there is no internal disagreement between the cricketers?
Third, while appreciating, for the reasons I argued above, the value of symbolism, I think CSA would do better to focus most of its energies on structural racism within the sport across the country.
We need more resources spent on unearthing and nurturing black talent. We need all explicit, institutional and implicit biases to be rooted out within the team; for example, in terms of selections patterns, locker room culture, and so on. These are subtle and harder to deal with, but materially more meaningful ways to transform cricket.
The CSA board seems to have acted swiftly in part because it thought that there is something profoundly embarrassing in not having one team view on the matter. Is it embarrassing though? Is it not more embarrassing that the board would prefer to pretend there is no internal disagreement between the cricketers?
And we need CSA to take us, the fans, seriously enough by having an open conversation with us, too, about the logic for such a major directive. Why this symbol? Why not a home-grown South African one? Why the deference to the US? Can we not develop our own praxis? What have you done to engage politically illiterate members of the squad to understand the value-laden requirements of sporting ambassadorship? Ought we to have a debate about the extent to which commitment to a particular vision of ourselves as a fledgling nation is a precondition for wearing national colours? Those are among a range of issues, the kinds of questions CSA need to lead us on.
That said, I have no sympathy for Quinton de Kock. None. The guy doesn’t have problems with symbols. He understands their political power very well. That is why he made a hand gesture in solidarity with rhinos when he scored a century against the West Indies. He knew in that moment that a massive media and public spotlight was on him, and he leveraged it for a cause that matters to him. I think that is great. Rhinos need such ambassadorship. But so do victims of racism and by choosing to not take the knee, De Kock leaves one with no other conclusion than that the project of anti-racism is not one that matters all that much to him.
Yes, it is irritating to be compelled to take the knee. But you pick your battles in life. Which is more annoying for De Kock: the existence of racism in the world or an employer saying he must take the knee in a show of anti-racism support? It is deeply disturbing that an ambassador of a country with our history should arrive at the conclusion that the minor irritation to take the knee outweighs the symbolism of doing so.
Put differently, if De Kock genuinely believed in the anti-racism cause, would he place the same relative weight on the irritation with CSA’s decision? I think not. I think the guy is telling us that saving rhino matters more to him than helping to achieve an anti-racist SA. And we made him captain? My goodness. May we never make that mistake again.
For those who say, by the way, that he “at least” is being honest, it is important to reiterate the limitations of that retort. Honesty isn’t an end in itself. Justice is the only goal. If I confess to violence, the confession should not be rewarded with praise. Our bar must be set higher in terms of what we expect of each other, and certainly of our national heroes. Without thwarting individuality, it is not unreasonable to expect a commitment to anti-racism. An open disdain for that goal does not merit praise.
Lastly, what should we make of the arguments from the likes of my fellow Sunday Times Daily columnist Tony Leon that we need to show “intellectual grit” and not be easily wanting to oppose the views of folks like Gareth Cliff and Quinton de Kock?
Leon shifts the goalposts, which is a fallacious tendency among liberals in this debate. They talk about free speech for most of the discussion as if free speech is being encroached upon. That is not true. Unless you are a libertarian or right-wing about speech, then you must accept that there are moral limits to speech rights.
Also, if you truly value speech rights generally, then you should welcome speech acts in which interlocutors challenge the content of each other’s views. Cliff is challenged for being boorish and for performing misogynoir. Those are ethical failings on Cliff’s part and the only way to avoid being skewered is to show why the critics are wrong in the substance of their criticism. Leon wants to help Cliff, not by taking the substance in criticism of him seriously, but by fallaciously framing a meta-debate about speech rights. That is such a weak and tired trick.
What these men (and, yes, they are mostly men) do is to pretend that critics of De Kock or Cliff are intolerant of disagreement. Isn’t it ironic that what in fact is going on here is that hegemonic powers that never had their assumptions of epistemic authority questioned are the intolerant ones? And so legitimate criticism is scoffed at as “mob mentality” or “cancel culture”, lazy sloganeering aimed at avoiding a response to searing, patient and important arguments against your position.
So, no, an analysis of the abuse of power by a Gareth Cliff or the ethical shortcomings of a cricketer are not threats to free speech. They are criticisms that should be honestly engaged and that should not be waspishly dismissed by the children of hegemony like Tony Leon.
• McKaiser is a TimesLIVE contributor and analyst
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