As an athlete whose actions receive enormous amounts of media attention, Colin Kaepernick chose to use his powerful position to bring worldwide attention to the unjust murders of innocent black men at the hands of Ame...As an athlete whose actions receive enormous amounts of media attention, Colin Kaepernick chose to use his powerful position to bring worldwide attention to the unjust murders of innocent black men at the hands of American police officers by kneeling silently during the national anthem before football games.Kaepernick was soon joined by other players in the NFL who shared his view that the anthem and the flag, both symbols of the nation, do not represent Americans as they should(Miller, 2017, para.3), since the police officers who killed Alton Sterling and Philando Castile—to name a couple—were given paid leave instead of being found guilty of murder.The movement, "taking a knee", is an example of how nonverbal communication can have indexical meanings founded in cultural ideologies.Following Silverstein(2003), this paper traces the semiotic trajectory of kneeling, from its traditional, first-order index of respect and humility, to its second-order index of protesting police brutality, its third-order index of disrespect for the nation, and, finally its fourth-order index of solidarity and retaliation to insult, ending with a discussion of the role of patriotism in the ordered indexes.The aim is to show that even gestures can have indexical ordering.展开更多
文摘As an athlete whose actions receive enormous amounts of media attention, Colin Kaepernick chose to use his powerful position to bring worldwide attention to the unjust murders of innocent black men at the hands of American police officers by kneeling silently during the national anthem before football games.Kaepernick was soon joined by other players in the NFL who shared his view that the anthem and the flag, both symbols of the nation, do not represent Americans as they should(Miller, 2017, para.3), since the police officers who killed Alton Sterling and Philando Castile—to name a couple—were given paid leave instead of being found guilty of murder.The movement, "taking a knee", is an example of how nonverbal communication can have indexical meanings founded in cultural ideologies.Following Silverstein(2003), this paper traces the semiotic trajectory of kneeling, from its traditional, first-order index of respect and humility, to its second-order index of protesting police brutality, its third-order index of disrespect for the nation, and, finally its fourth-order index of solidarity and retaliation to insult, ending with a discussion of the role of patriotism in the ordered indexes.The aim is to show that even gestures can have indexical ordering.
