The politics of gestures

 Watching the BBC documentary Uprising, as well as being horrified by the story of the 1981 fire and its aftermath, I was reassured that we  have come some way away from the racism that caused the events focused on in the programme, though there has been a regression back towards it in the last ten years or so. We clearly need to take this resurgence seriously and make sure it is kept in the public eye, for laws and public utterances will only take us so far. If racism remains in hearts and minds, undetected perhaps even by the individual himself (or herself, but it seems sadly more characteristic of a certain type of male), it will continue to be a corrosive poison on relations within the many multi-racial communities in this country, and a stain on our national life.

Football, as it so often does, has crystallised this in the last few weeks. Our wonderful national team, who have rightly won so many plaudits and continue to command our admiration and loyalty, in spite of their failure at the last hurdle of the Euros, made the decision to ‘take the knee’ as the American phrase has it, before each match – at first drawing boos from the crowd, but later winning them over. ‘Taking the knee’ is an odd way of showing solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, it seems to me, since bowing in this way suggests subservience or devotion – but to what?); but it has become a custom that the team as a whole decided to follow in support of black rights. Given the horrible social media abuse meted out after the final to the (irrelevantly black) members of the team who unfortunately did not land their penalties, abuse which I think all English citizens should be ashamed of (and most of us are), it is clear that racism is alive and well in the football fan base and therefore presumably in the nation at large, and taking the knee can therefore be seen to have been an important and justified action.

Which brings me to Pritti Patel and her scornful comment, earlier in the tournament, that this was ‘gesture politics’. That she delivered this pejoratively not only is rather surprising -- because she is a descendant of non-white immigrants herself and has apparently suffered from racism in the past -- but also suggests she does not understand the power of gestures in themselves, or does not see them as a genuine form of politics. Why do we wave the national flag? Why stand for the national anthem – or sing it, come to that? At another level, protest marchers often raise a clenched fist (popularized as a political gesture by Black Power in the 1970s and 1980s) and they almost always carry banners and chant slogans. In the past some political movements have used uniforms, which are a kind of gesture too, to indicate membership, and also in some cases to strike fear into their opponents – the Nazi Brown Shirts come to mind. Each political movement invents its own gestures, the paraphernalia which expresses its beliefs and its aspirations, and some are then taken over to express similar beliefs, emotions and political views by others. Visual and kinaesthetic, appealing direct to the visceral responses we all have beneath our more rational consciousness, these are all forms of what Pritti called ‘gesture politics’.

The point is, though, that they are powerful. Flag waving, anthem singing, banner holding, fist pumping, the Nazi salute -- gestures, and body language in general, are not just making up the numbers, even in an ordinary conversation, still less in a public speech or protest. In themselves they bring a different dimension to something spoken, or in this case, unspoken. Is this not why opponents dislike them – because they are saying something that can affect us at a different level from pure speech? They speak to us in subliminal ways. Pritti should think again before she despises gesture politics, or sees it as something irrelevant or stupid.