Taking the Knee: inventing a tradition
I along with many others will be ‘taking the knee’ at 6pm on Wednesday 3rd June in solidarity with George Floyd the black man killed by US police in Minneapolis.
Taking the knee is quite a recent protest tradition in the US often involving sports players kneeling rather than standing for the US national anthem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._national_anthem_protests_(2016%E2%80%93present)
It has not previously been much taken up in the UK not least because in most contexts there isn’t much concern if people don’t stand up for God Save the Queen or mumble their way through the words at sporting events.
In that sense, as the seminal work on tradition by George Rude and Terence Ranger argued we are inventing a tradition, and all the best traditions are invented.
That said there is an historical precedent.
January 1819 at the Manchester Theatre Royal, soldiers attacked Henry Hunt supporters who refused to uncover, take off their white hats for God Save The King, just months before the Peterloo Massacre took place in August 1819 where Hunt was the speaker.
That’s one of the issues with inventing traditions of protest. If you look hard enough you can often find someone has done something similar before but it wasn’t carried on. Hopefully this time it will be until justice prevails.
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