Many of us are aware of the controversy surrounding a group of NFL (National Football League) players in the United States who refused to stand during the national anthem. Instead, they chose to kneel. This action, used to protest systemic racism and police violence, gained much more widespread attention in September of 2017, when over 200 athletes kneeled in response to Donald Trump publicly pressuring NFL team owners to fire athletes who took part in this type of protesting.

Some of us may be wondering, “What is going through their minds?” or “What caused them to do this?” Fortunately, psychology can help us understand both why the NFL players decided to take a knee and why some people reacted so strongly towards this seemingly simple gesture.

Let us first consider this from a group dynamics standpoint. In psychology, group dynamics is the study of groups of people and how they interact both with other groups and among their own group members (Backstrom et. al, 2006). Some who are not in the group of NFL players may interpret kneeling as an act of aggression towards the status quo. We also know that all groups end up developing generally expected behaviors for nearly every aspect imaginable, including life, manners of speaking, and behavior. When an NFL player kneels, he is breaking the status quo of standing for the national anthem. This norm breaking signifies that the one doing the breaking does not agree with the current status quo. This disagreement could be an affront to other people who would prefer to keep that status quo as it is, and as a result, strong reactions are unsurprisingly observed.

Some football players in the United States protested violence and discrimination by kneeling during the national anthem. Psychology can give us some clues about the social motivations beneath their calls for equality.

Standing for the national anthem has become a sort of ritual for many Americans. Rituals have been shown to help foster group cohesion and loyalty. When these kinds of rituals are broken by group members it can be perceived as an attack on the integrity of the group itself. Furthermore, kneeling itself is traditionally a non-threatening maneuver that is associated with reverence and submissiveness. Athletes who kneel during the anthem are not intending to show disrespect towards it; if they were, they could have easily used a different gesture, such as turning their backs. Rather, they are intending to make a statement by deviating from the expected cultural behavior, while simultaneously showing respect for the flag and the song.

Another reason why this non-aggressive act may trigger such reactions is that people in positions of relative privilege may be more likely to stereotype others. In this case, white football fans may believe stereotypes that black athletes are aggressive and violent and, because of this, the non-violent act of kneeling may be perceived as a violent act.

Realistic Group Conflict Theory

There are other psychological lenses through which one can view the act of kneeling. One such lens is Realistic Group Conflict Theory. This theory posits that because different groups often have differing goals, conflict inevitably results when the goals of these groups are at odds with each other, in addition to other triggering elements like low levels of cooperation between groups or differences in group interests. In this situation, one group of people feel that to kneel during the national anthem is a sign of contempt for the anthem and the country, while the football players are interested in restoring equality to disenfranchised minorities. If these two groups continue to exist in opposition to each other, then conflict between the groups themselves will likely remain ever present.

Relative Deprivation Theory

Another theory that may help explain the act of kneeling during the national anthem is Relative Deprivation Theory. This theory states that when a person or people is deprived of a social category, conflict may arise. From this perspective, the players kneeling feel that they, and other members of their group, have been denied equality. The act of kneeling is meant to be an action that can resolve this discrepancy and restore equality to their group.

Social Identity Theory

One last theory that can be applied to this situation is Social Identity Theory. In this theory, when a person is evaluating other groups they are aware of both their own personal identity and their social identity. Conflicts can arise in cases where there is an apparent, whether true or not, difference of status between one’s own social group and the group being compared to. In this case, the conflict over kneeling arose because it pits two different social groups against each other. The players who kneel during the national anthem feel that there is a need for change in the status quo to restore equality between minorities and whites, and are comparing their social identity negatively towards other groups.

Although the issue of kneeling can be better understood through psychology, are there any practical solutions such a perspective offers us? Literature in psychology suggests that when groups are in more frequent contact and dialogue with one-another, they achieve a better understanding of their goals and interests, and subsequently are less likely to be in conflict over those goals (Schneider et. al, 2005). In this example, if people who believe that standing during the national anthem is inherently disrespectful were to discuss their viewpoints with NFL players who kneel during the anthem, they would be better able to understand why the players feel compelled to perform this action – not out of disrespect, but as a call to action for better treatment of all groups.

References

Backstrom, L.; Huttenlocher, D.; Kleinberg, J.; Lan, X. (2006). “Group formation in large social networks”. Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining – KDD ’06. p. 44.

Schneider, F. W., Gruman, J. A., & Coutts, L. M. (2005). Applied social psychology: Understanding and addressing social and practical problems. Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE Publications.

Religion is one of the many factors that we define ourselves with. While many people around the world express frustration with organized religion, or feel distant to the idea of a merciful God, religion – along with the belief in a superior Being as the Creator of the universe and life – is still an important dynamic that shapes our individual and social being.

Many people live in countries in which their religious traditions do not constitute the majority. This results in serious challenges to discovering a sense of belonging and also hampers a person’s ability to effectively search their own soul.  Muslims living in overwhelmingly non-Muslim countries are no exception. While there are still ongoing population movements from conflict zones, there are millions of Muslims who live in big chunks across Europe and the U.S. As decades pass younger generations tend to reduce, or even lose, their ties with their “home” country and culture. In their adopted home in the West, they speak less of their mother tongue and in many cases lose respect for the values of their parents. Concerned with similar challenges of the American Muslim community, Professor Jihad Turk says there a need to develop “a coherent and unified identity as both American and as Muslim.” President of Bayan, a division of Claremont School of Theology in California, Professor Turk believes the solution lies in “having leaders that can help the families and the young people [develop] a unified identity that is fully Muslim but also fully integrated into the modern world and to the United States of America.” One of the leading figures of the American Muslim community, Professor Turk shares some important insights about having faith and religious identity in a modern era. In our interview with him, he argues that many values of Islam live in the West while non-existent in the Muslim lands.

The Washington Hebrew Congregation had a special event in February. Shaykh Abdallah bin Bayyah, a renowned Muslim scholar, was a guest speaker at the Sabbath of Peace event. In this issue, we cover this visit and share observations of visitors about this magnificent interfaith event which was hosted by Rabbi M. Bruce Lustig. Shaykh Bayyah’s call to be “firefighters” to rush to extinguish the fire of violence around the world, instead of seeking the one who started it, is surely the take-home-message from his speech. Special thanks to Layne Weiss, Executive Assistant to Rabbi Lustig, for helping us bringing together this coverage.

The National Football League in the United States shook with a different kind of protest in 2016 and 2017 because some players refused to stand during the national anthem. Based on some approaches in psychology, M. Tarik Ozgur writes on what might have been in the minds of these players and why others reacted to this protest in various ways.

We recently lost a dear friend, Professor Stanley Ridge, the former Vice Rector of the University of Western Cape in South Africa. He was not only a successful academic who had previously contributed to The Fountain, but also a sincere dialogue activist. We are deeply saddened by his loss. What you will find in this issue is one of his recent talks on the importance of dialogue in which he endorses the dialogue and educational activities of the Hizmet community in South Africa.