MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 26th August, 2021) UK Home Secretary Priti Patel's criticism of both the Black Lives Matter protests and the England national soccer team's decision to "take the knee" is "disappointing" and underlines the Conservatives' "reactionary" views on race relations, George Amponsah, a BAFTA-nominated filmmaker, told Sputnik in an interview.
A wave of Black Lives Matter protests swept through the United Kingdom following the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, in the United States.
Many Conservative lawmakers, including Patel, have offered sustained criticism of the protests, especially as statues to UK figures historically linked to the slave trade were toppled or defaced.
"[I feel] disappointed, a little bit weary, based on a sense of how long this sort of thing has been going on, in terms of the leadership of this country. Some of it, I suppose, causes me to raise a bit of an eyebrow as being someone who is born in this country, as a Black British person," Amponsah remarked.
The director, whose 2015 documentary film into the 2011 police shooting of Mark Duggan - The Hard Stop - was nominated for a British academy of Film and Television Arts award, said it was unclear why Priti Patel, herself of South Asian descent, would be such a fierce critic of movements that are inherently aimed at achieving racial equality.
"It's introspectively quite an interesting situation when you've got a Brown lady, who is very much top of the tree within the Conservative Tory party, taking this very reactionary, very much right wing approach to what should be seen as advancements in terms of a progressive society, which actually embraces equality amongst the races," Amponsah stated.
During an appearance on the LBC broadcaster this past February, Patel called the Black Lives Matter protests "dreadful."
In the same interview, she also criticized English Premier League soccer players for "taking the knee," a form of protest set off by National Football League quarterback Colin Kaepernick who knelt on one knee during the US national anthem in 2016 before games in protest against police brutality.
The English national soccer team also "took the knee" at EURO 2020 this past summer. Patel slammed the protest once again, saying that the decision amounted to "gesture politics."
