Tribune. July 2, 2021, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has published clarifications regarding Rule 50 of its Olympic Charter, which mainly aims to ban any political demonstration during the Games. In April 2021, the IOC Athletes’ Commission shared recommendations – accepted by the Executive Committee – which, a priori, would prohibit athletes from kneeling on the ground. These new details thus give them the right to express their opinions on the ground, only if they do not target, directly or indirectly, any population, country, structure, and / or their dignity.
On July 15, Hege Riise, the coach of the British women’s Olympic football team, therefore announced that his players would kneel down, following a collective decision to “Show everyone” that racism and discrimination are “serious” subjects.
However, if one follows the clarifications of IOC Rule 50, how would it be possible to denounce racism and other forms of systemic discrimination without targeting a particular structure or state? The realization of the original protest gesture itself took place, in 2016, during the American national anthem, during which quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt down to denounce structural racism and social injustice in his country.
The basis of systemic racism
While some football teams in 2021 reproduced his gesture before the matches of the 2021 European Men’s Football Championship (Euro 2020) – however never during their national anthem – it is important to stress that these gestures and movements anti-racists developed in reaction to structures organized on the basis of systemic racism that often favored a particular caste of people – this is the case for whites for example, in France, England or the United States .
Racism, institutional by definition, has thus taken root in a society and a history through processes and structures developed to exclude certain populations from social, economic and political spheres in order to benefit others. This can be translated into explicit public policies or through more subtle processes, at different levels.
Thus, if one bases oneself on the definitions resulting from the social sciences, anti-white racism cannot exist in France, in England or in the United States because no system was built around an exclusion targeting Whites in particular, contrary to what many figures of the far-right Western claim.
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