This article is published in Vanity Fair issue 29-30 on newsstands until July 13, 2021
I write this column before the match against Spain, so who knows. However it will have gone, with Belgium our national team won in every sense. On their kneel – the taking the knee inspired by the gesture that Martin Luther King made in nineteen sixty-four to Selma for the right to vote for African Americans – all the smartest commentators I know had written more or less the same thing, namely that symbolic gestures must be felt and not performed without believing it, as maybe it was done in Munich.
Perhaps I am not that intelligent and I believe instead that there are gestures that must be done because it is right to do them, and because by doing them – even if they did not start from our conviction – we decide to be part of a community, in this case that of those who reject and denounces racism and supports Black Lives Matter. I also think that those who manage to communicate with so many people with just one gesture, like the national team players, must ask themselves the problem of behaving well, and that even if the right gesture does not come from the heart who cares, it is enough that tell your brain. The black-gloved raised fist of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the two-hundred-meter podium at the 1968 Mexico Olympics was certainly a gesture of head and heart, but whatever its genesis was it made history (and it cost them sports career).
And even if it is disheartening to confront the fact that more than fifty years later we are still here to defend or criticize the symbolic gestures of sportsmen and to confront the same problems that inspired them, we never forget the image of those raised black fists. Even if Donnarumma, Barella, Insigne and company at the end of their career will not be remembered for having kneeled or not in favor of Black Lives Matter in the summer of 2000, they can at least say they did the right thing. Doing the right thing is sometimes more important than saying or feeling the right thing.
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