Liverpool FC players, united, take a knee for George Floyd and protesters

Liverpool players taking a knee

I salute Liverpool FC players for taking a knee yesterday at Anfield in solidarity with antiracism protesters in the US and elsewhere. They have a fine history of opposing racism in recent years and of working to help people in the community. This timely statement is right in keeping with that. 

There is so much to say about what has been happening in recent weeks. The brutal treatment of Black Americans has come to a head with the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In the midst of a pandemic and with forty million Americans unemployed there is an unstoppable fury across the nation that so many people are being treated as disposable, irrelevant, less than full human beings. I am grateful that so many people are saying this is unacceptable and I pray that justice and kindness will prevail. 

About the Liverpool players, it is moving that they arranged themselves on the centre-field circle. 

Liverpool FC players taking a knee at Anfield

A circle in its abstraction represents equality; there is no one higher or lower than anyone else. The players (other than the goalies who're in green) are in alternate red and black strips (uniforms).  This photograph and the reason for it brings to mind these words by Eli Siegel, from a lecture he gave in 1970: 

It will be found that Black and White [people] have the same goodnesses, the same temptations, and can be criticized in the same way. The skin may be different, but the aorta is quite the same.  

Ken Kimmelman quotes this at the end of his powerful, Emmy-award winning PSA The Heart Knows Better. See it here.