take the knee (20th century) a gesture made by sports players, most recently as an anti-racist protest
The phrase “taking the knee” or “taking a knee” has become widespread in the English-speaking sports world. This modern action originated most publicly in American football, with the player Colin Kaepernick. In 2016, Kaepernick refused to stand for the US national anthem. He explained afterwards, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of colour . . . There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” This was a reference to a series of police shootings of people of colour.
This gesture, however, goes back a long way. Martin Luther King took up that position while leading a prayer on 1 February 1965 outside the Dallas County Courthouse in Alabama, along with other civil rights marchers campaigning for the right to vote.
Rinaldo Walcott, the director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, points out that a drawing from the 1780s of an enslaved black man became an emblem of the British abolitionist movement in the 1800s. The image, which shows a shackled man kneeling, went on to be circulated for years. A scroll along the bottom of the drawing reads: “Am I not a man and a brother?”
This still leaves open the relatively trivial question of how this body position got to be called “taking the knee” as opposed to, say, “kneeling on one knee” or some such. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that in 1960, the phrase was used to describe that same gesture being used in South Carolina as a sign of respect for a recently deceased football coach. The phrase also describes a gesture within the game itself, when a quarterback downs the ball. Here from a 1972 account of a game: “Raines instructed Gaston to take a knee in the endzone for a safety.”
Kaepernick hasn’t played in top-flight American football since the end of the 2016 season when he took the knee. Whether that’s due to discrimination has been disputed, with a settlement reached between the player and the football authorities.
This article is from the New Humanist summer 2021 edition. Subscribe today.
