Since last weekend, the nation has been engaged in vigorous debate about a video taken of MAGA-hat-wearing white male teenagers at the Lincoln Memorial. The teens, students at Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky, were in town for the annual March for Life rally—because, apparently, it’s never too early to indoctrinate young men with the belief that women shouldn’t have autonomy over their own bodies. They ended up at the Indigenous Peoples March and, while there’s been a ridiculous amount of debate about “who started it,” the video that sparked the outrage shows Native American elder Nathan Phillips drumming and singing while a mob of the teens hollered, did tomahawk chops, and acted like they had (what black folks refer to as) no home training—completely disrespecting and taunting Mr. Phillips in the process.
Of particular note were the actions of one student, Nick Sandmann, who was captured on the video standing face to face with Phillips, all the while smirking and standing his ground (no pun intended), refusing to move. The backlash on social media was swift, and rightfully so. People (especially people of color) called out the obvious bullying and racism inherent in a bunch of Trump-supporting white teens, wearing hats that symbolize white supremacy, forming a mob around Phillips, making fun of him, and refusing to move.
We should know by now that white supremacy is not static. Instead, it is a dynamic system that lives and breathes, thriving because we refuse to do the necessary work to dismantle it. This is why it, and the people who uphold it, find all kinds of creative ways to defend and normalize it. And because this is true, it was only a matter of time before conservatives would start jumping through hoops to defend these teens—reminding us all that they are just boys who did a foolish thing but couldn’t be held responsible for it because “boys will be boys.” Never once did they center Mr. Phillips in this narrative, nor the people of color in this country who deal with this kind of racial animus every day. Never once did they acknowledge that young people of color (especially black boys) are never given this kind of benefit of the doubt. The message was clear: White boys get to do offensive things, under the guise of youthful indiscretion, and this is simply a natural part of life. Whiteness + maleness + youth = automatically deserving of our empathy and forgiveness.
And since the narrative of innocent white maleness isn’t quite complete on its own, there had to be a nemesis for this to make sense. Right on cue, another video emerged, showing members of the Black Israelites (which the Southern Poverty Law Center refers to as a hate group) yelling slurs and harassing the boys prior to their encounter with Phillips. This became the necessary excuse for the Right to claim that the outrage over this incident was fake news. Now the story is that the teens are the victims. The Black Israelites are the justification for the teens behavior—even eclipsing the fact that Mr. Phillips has said that he purposely put his brown body in between the teens and the Black Israelites, hoping to diffuse what could have become a physical altercation.
White conservatives (and a lot of well-intentioned white liberals, for that matter) love to position racism as a “both sides” proposition. This is a widespread view that demonstrates the extent to which people misunderstand how both racism and white supremacy operate. Research shows that a majority of white people believe that there is widespread discrimination against white people today. And after eight years of a black president and increased perceptions of white disenfranchisement, white fragility has reached its peak. Thus, blaming Black Israelites is the perfect way to double down on the growing narrative that it is actually white people who are under attack in this country—and not the continually increasing population of racial and ethnic minorities.
As a side note, anyone who lives or works in Washington is familiar with the Black Israelites. They usually stand outside the metro at Gallery Place in Chinatown and shout at anyone who walks past them. They yell at black people about our wayward ways, they yell at women, they warn everyone that the world is going to hell, and, yes, they yell at white people. There aren’t that many of them, but they show up from time to time at marches and events in the District, and everyone knows to ignore and not engage with them. It’s not surprising that an encounter with them would be shocking, maybe even scary, for a young group of white male teenagers from Park Hill, Kentucky. But what we saw in that video was not fear. Fear usually evokes a fight-or-flight response. These were not teenagers who looked scared or felt out of place. Quite the opposite. Instead, they channeled their rage, hormones gone wild, and bad behavior toward the Native American elder who actually tried to stop the situation from escalating.
Predictably, the media backtracked on its outrage, in defense of the behavior of these students. There is now a plethora of think pieces and apology tweets, written almost exclusively by white people, imploring the rest of us to slow down and learn what they think is a valuable lesson about jumping to conclusions. Instead of interrogating the aggressive, mob-like behavior of white males directed at a man of color, we are expected to believe that their reaction was a response to the bigotry they encountered. In other words, the whole thing is actually the fault of “bad black people,” and racism begets racism. Whiteness is now the center of this story. Apologizing to the MAGA-hat-wearing teens is the story. It is amazing to watch how even the most “woke” white people can’t seem to rid themselves of the habit of trying to make racism justifiable, to make it make sense. But it does not make sense—unless you are consciously or unconsciously committed to upholding white supremacy.
There is a knee-jerk reaction at work here, one so powerful that we are willing to unsee what we all saw and know was wrong. Writer Laura Wagner implores us not to doubt what we saw with our own eyes.
Nothing about the video showing the offensive language of Black Israelites changes how upsetting it was to see the Covington students, and Sandmann in particular, stare at Phillips with such contempt. I don’t see how you could watch this and think otherwise unless you’re willing to gaslight yourself, and others, in the service of granting undeserved sympathy to the privileged.
This is not a message that most people of color need. We know what we saw. We felt Phillips’ trauma in our DNA. The visceral emotions evoked for us as we watched a screaming, chanting mob of young white males disrespect Phillips was all too familiar. It’s not just that we understand this as the cultural, social, and emotional violence of white supremacy that our parents, grandparents, and ancestors experienced. Some of us have experienced this directly ourselves. That’s what makes this so frustrating. After centuries of brutal evidence, entire social movements, viral cellphone videos, and more conversations about white supremacy than ever before, even the best-intentioned white people are still imploring us to rationalize and compromise with white supremacy.
I can’t help but reflect on the concepts of place and identity as I watch and re-watch the videos. Nick Sandmann and his classmates feel entitled to a sense of place and space as young white men in America. It’s a sense of place and space that people of color don’t generally feel and are not afforded. It’s why we can be shot on sight, or arrested, or have the police called when white people feel that we don’t belong somewhere. The clear sense of place and space for white young men is why these teens knew it was okay to challenge a Native American elder directly in his face at an Indigenous Peoples March. There is no consequence for their actions—in their school, at home, or in society. Their behavior was reinforced by the white adults around them. Not a single one disrupted what was happening. Not a single one saw their actions as disrespectful (in fact, they can actually be seen participating).
But this isn’t shocking. White society, in general, refuses to disrupt it too. And that’s where we need to start. White folks who have an instinct to rationalize this incident and find “both sides,” who are inclined to blame the Black Israelites for turning these boys into racists, to apologize for “judging” these teenagers, to ignore that a Native American elder placed himself in harm’s way and reframe him as the aggressor, should do the work of introspection and reflect on how they are also complicit in the marginalization and oppression of people of color.
We don’t need to worry about Sandmann. He is being given every opportunity to be seen and heard as a victim. His parents had enough money to hire a public relations firm to solidify him in our eyes as the aggrieved party. His entire class was invited to the White House. He was given the opportunity to tell his story on NBC. And even in his interview, he asserted that he had “every right” to stand his ground in front of Mr. Phillips. He is not sorry. He said so on national TV. And we should not feel sorry for him—though we should feel sorry that white supremacy has taught him, at such a young age, such a complete and total lack of empathy for and a sense of disconnection from human beings who are a different color than him.
What we should actually feel sorry about is that, as a society, we simply refuse to learn the lessons of white supremacy—even when we see it with our very own eyes. We continue to give it life and energy because it is what we know and what feels familiar. That’s why we are so invested in excusing the behaviors of these MAGA-hat-wearing white teens as normal—even though we know they are not. We should know by now that racism and white supremacy are not limited to incidents of cross-burning and white hoods and robes (though it could certainly be argued that MAGA hats are the modern-day equivalent of KKK robes). We recognize it when Donald Trump calls Mexicans rapists and criminals and African countries shitholes, and we should be able to recognize it here among today’s white youth.
Instead, we are pulled into the same banal line of thinking that suggests that because they are young and their hearts aren’t evil (how do we know they aren’t?), they must be good, and are therefore not racist. But racism isn’t just about the acts of so-called evil people. It’s also about all the good people out there who jump through hoops to use rationalizations and reasons to excuse what we know is not reasonable. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, “The ultimate tragedy … was not the brutality of the bad people, but the silence of the good people.” We need fewer self-appointed “good” white people today, and more people willing to speak the truth about injustice, and about how white supremacy is so obviously infecting their young people, instead of defaulting to simply putting blinders on.