Racism: Alive, Well and Living in America
Harassment of Indian activist by kids in MAGA hats may be new normal — unless we fight back
Harassment of Indian activist by kids in MAGA hats may be new normal — unless we fight back
Another week and we get another reminder of the racism that still courses through the American psyche. The latest installment — a group of white high school students from Kentucky shouting “Build the Wall” and pantomiming a “tomahawk chop” at a Native American activist who apparently was attempting to cool tensions during dueling protests in the nation’s capital — follows on the heels of U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-Ia.) defending the phrases white supremacy and white nationalism in The New York Times, the failed bomb attacks on Democrats, and the shootings in Kentucky and Pittsburgh.
A video of the white kids taunting Nathan Phillips, the activist and a Marine Corps veteran, went viral, eliciting a well-warranted public opprobrium. But now, with the release of a longer version of the video, the right is saying it has been a rush to judgment. The video that went viral — which only shows the kids taunting Phillips — is only a small part of the story, they say, and now that the longer video has been released we know that the teens may have been provoked.
This is hogwash. Yes, the longer video shows a more complicated trigger for the events, but it does not change what happened, and it doesn’t lessen the racist nature of what happened.
Here is the story, as reported by The Washington Post:
The video, which began to spread Saturday morning, showed a throng of young, mostly white teenage boys, several wearing the caps, closely surrounding a 64-year-old man who was beating a drum as part of the Indigenous Peoples March happening near the Lincoln Memorial on Friday.
A few of the young people chanted “Build that wall, build that wall,” the man said, adding that a teen, shown smirking at him in the video, was blocking him from moving.
An unverified, longer video of the event shows that the altercation between teens and the man was part of a broader tense scene on the memorial plaza over politics and identity. Another Native American man tells one of the youth: “Go back to Europe. This is not your land.”
Conservatives say the longer video shows that Indian activists instigated the events. But The Washington Post interviewed several witnesses who say otherwise. Jessica Travis, a Florida attorney, told the Post that
“The kids really went into a mob mentality, honestly,” she said, adding that she didn’t see any chaperones trying to control the situation. She said she heard one student tell the Hebrew Israelites to “drink the Trump water.”
And a photojournalist, Jon Stegenga, who was covering the Indigenous Peoples March, told the Post he heard students say “build the wall” and “Trump 2020.”
Phillips was attempting to keep the peace. As he told the Detroit Free Press, a group of Catholic students from Kentucky in Washington for the March for Life had gotten angry over speeches being made by a group called the Black Hebrew Israelites when “things got heated.”
“They were in the process of attacking these four black individuals,” Phillips said. “I was there and I was witnessing all of this … As this kept on going on and escalating, it just got to a point where you do something or you walk away, you know? You see something that is wrong and you’re faced with that choice of right or wrong. “
Phillips said some of the members of the Black Hebrew group were also acting up, “saying some harsh things” and that one member spit in the direction of the Catholic students. ”So I put myself in between that, between a rock and hard place,” he said.
That’s when it escalated, with the students turning on Phillips, chanting pro-Trump slogans and encircling Phillips and another Native American activist.
“There was that moment when I realized I’ve put myself between beast and prey,” Phillips said. “These young men were beastly and these old black individuals was their prey, and I stood in between them and so they needed their pounds of flesh and they were looking at me for that.”
Pound of flesh — this is the most accurate way of judging what happened on Friday, I think. The issue isn’t who instigated — too often we seek to ascribe blame in this way, ignoring the underlying factors that lead to escalation. The issue is the virulently racist manner in which the kids respond.
James Fallows in The Atlantic dismisses the conservative rewrite, keeping the attention where it belongs — on students who were attempting to intimidate Phillips. Watch the longer versions of the videos, he says,
complete with students doing “tomahawk-chop” chants while Nathan Phillips is singing, and in other ways behaving as if they are mocking him. Anything is possible, but see if this looks as if he is taking advantage of them.
He adds that the moments before and after the original three- to four-minute video that went viral should not be allowed to obscure a “reality that seems impossible to deny.”
For a sustained period, a large group of young men, who had chosen by their apparel to identify themselves with a political movement (and a movement whose leader uses “Pocahontas” as an epithet and recently made a “joking” reference to the massacre at Wounded Knee), act mockingly to a man their grandfathers’ age, who by his apparel and activities represents a racial-minority, indigenous-American group.
I think what bothers me most is that these were kids, just as the students who menaced African American protesters at southern lunch counters and in souther schools in the late 1950s and early 1960s were kids. Kids do stupid things, and in a perfect world thee would be consequences and growth. We would watch this video and say that the intimidation and seething racism exhibited by these teens was unacceptable. We would not look for excuses, would not attempt to scapegoat men like Nathan Phillips.
This is no different than the victim blaming that always takes place after a police shooting, or the bogus “good people on both sides” nonsense offered by President Trump and his supporters in
Charlottesville. This nasty act of intimidation should not be viewed as a purely individual act, but as a product of our current cultural zeitgeist. These kids are parroting the adults, following their lead. They have been granted license to engage in the worst elements of their racism and entitlement by Trump and Republicans like Steve King and Louie Gomert.
What we are witnessing here is another instance of public racism. The initial public response signals that this is quite different than what happened in the Jim Crow South, that this kind of behavior ultimately is not acceptable. But the backlash, the attempt to rewrite the reality of what happened indicates that the direction we are going as a nation remains disputed, that there is a lot more work to do, and that we cannot let our guard down. We have to keep calling out this behavior, have to keep fighting.