The American Scholar

On Our Knees

KNEELING HAS REENTERED American political discourse. In the protests after George Floyd’s murder, Black Americans approached police officers and knelt. To lower one’s body in front of a man wearing riot gear and weapons, a man who is vibrating with the knowledge that today may be the day he will use them, takes a rare kind of physical courage. In some ways, it is an escalation of the raised hands and chants that followed Michael Brown’s killing in 2014: “Hands up, don’t shoot!” It is an attitude of petition and surrender transformed into an act of defiance. At once vulnerable and insistent, the posture demands a commitment from the kneeler and, I imagine, wrests an emotional reaction from the officer that must be very difficult to suppress.

This emotional urgency is certainly part of the gesture’s power. But part of its power is also in its historical resonance. I say that kneeling has reentered our discourse because it calls to mind old images—older than last summer, older than Colin Kaepernick’s steadfast protest on the football field and the angry responses he provoked—an ancient iconography of Black men and women on their knees that is worked deeply into our visual culture.

The silhouette of the Black person kneeling is a cliché in Western art, one that has been demeaning to Blacks more often than it has been empowering. Like the other Procrustean caricatures we encounter in daily life, it limits us to something less than full humanity. Its appropriation in our recent protests shows yet again Black Americans’ capacity to master the badges of our oppression in powerful new ways. We are a people, after all, who took the castoffs from other men’s tables and the tough, gristly refuse of the slaughter, and made a cuisine that became the quintessentially American food. We are a people who created glad music about our pain, and that music, the blues, now underlies all of America’s homegrown genres. Our kneeling during the George Floyd protests, while holding signs that read, “Get your knee off our necks,” was another dramatic proof of our ability to transform a painful inheritance into a new narrative.

Viewed in the broader context of Black creative power, the re-emergence of this gesture can be taken as a threat, not only to subvert and reclaim individual confrontations with power, but essentially to remake the American narrative. To understand where we are now, therefore, it may be worthwhile to consider the history of this iconography and to reflect on what it means that we reenacted it in the summer of 2020.

THE VERSION OF THE kneeling figure that first comes to mind, and the one that most directly influences our time, is on the emblem of the British and American anti–slave-trade societies. Produced in the late 18th century by Josiah Wedgwood, it depicts a Black man kneeling barefoot and in rags. His wrists are fettered, and a chain dangles from his uplifted, clasped hands. The text, “Am

I Not a Man and a Brother?” arches across the scene. Later versions by all-female abolition societies made the figure a kneeling Black woman, with the text “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?” As a popular signal of sympathy for the cause, the emblem appeared on everything from pottery and other household goods to wax seals and fobs, shoe buckles, hair ornaments, and intaglio jewelry. It was even struck into repurposed low-denomination coins, which society members exchanged as tokens and keepsakes.

Although he became ubiquitous, the slave on Wedgwood’s seal was hardly the earliest example of the kneeling African in Western imagery. His ascendance represents the decline and diminution of a more ancient figure: Balthazar, one of the three magi who journeyed from the East to honor the newborn Christ. Early Western depictions of the Adoration of the Magi portrayed the three kings as European, but from at least the 14th century, artists began to use these paintings to showcase their skill at depicting the different races and ages of man. Melchior, sometimes aged, was portrayed as Arab; Caspar, in the prime of his life, as European; and Balthazar, sometimes a youth, as African. The fashion for

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The American Scholar

The American Scholar4 min read
Facing The Facts
In The Missing Thread, alongside the female stars of classical antiquity, like Sappho, Cleopatra, and Boudica, British classicist Daisy Dunn introduces us to a selection of arresting minor fiures: the swimmer who disabled ships during the Persian War
The American Scholar4 min read
We Are The Borg
In the fall of 2014, an MIT cognitive scientist named Tomaso Poggio predicted that humankind was at least 20 years away from building computers that could interpret images on their own. Doing so, declared Poggio, “would be one of the most intellectua
The American Scholar6 min read
For Whom Do We Create?
American Fiction is the film I’ve been waiting for since I majored in ’lm studies at Columbia University more than two decades ago. Only 27 minutes into it, I was compelled to stop, not only so that I could contemplate the beauty and complexity of th

Related Books & Audiobooks