Video has blame to go around
I have been fascinated this week as folks on the left and folks on the right have further entrenched themselves over a video. Actually, it is multiple videos.
The first video, about two minutes long, was shot Friday and began surfacing Saturday. In the video, Nick Sandman is seen smirking in a “Make America Great Again” hat standing toe-to-toe with Nathan Phillips, a Native American beating a drum. The teen is surrounded by dozens of other boys, many of them in Trump regalia, dancing and mocking Phillips. It seemed clear from the video that Phillips was simply trying to pray and that Sandman and his friends were punks. The video was used as an example of how Trump’s presidency had given license to the racism, ignorance and prejudice.
As the weekend unfolded, however, several more videos surfaced and added context to the scene.
A nearly two-hour video shows how the scene began. The video, shot by a group known as Black Hebrew Israelites, shows them preparing to protest on the Washington Mall. During their protest, they begin to target the students from Covington Catholic High School. The Black Hebrew Israelites, a group described as looney at best and militant at worst, begin to lob incendiary, racist and vulgar insults at the students. They say words I can’t imagine thinking, let alone ever saying out loud.
The students listen at times, laugh at times, sometimes mock the group and at times run through a series of school chants in an effort to drown out the Black Hebrew Israelites.
After more than an hour of the confrontation, Phillips and a group of other Native Americans move into the video, chanting and swaying. Phillips is drumming and the Black Hebrew Israelites begin to call him a series of names. Phillips walks between the two groups and begins to move through the school boys. The Black Hebrew Israelites tell the students that they had better not touch Phillips because they are video taping.
Phillips keeps moving through the crowd and some of the boys move out of his way while others laugh or dance to the beat of the drums. And then Phillips comes face to face with Sandman who refuses to move for him.
Eventually an adult woman comes into the scene and tells the students to come to the top of the steps at the Lincoln Memorial for a photo and the scene dissipates.
No one in this scene looks good. There is blame to go around.
The Black Hebrew Israelites should not have been instigating the incident. They are bullies that found a group of students, most of them likely in D.C. for the first time.
The students should have shown some deference to the elder. They likely should have stepped aside. They acted like privileged teenage boys act in front of their friends.
Phillips, if he was there to defuse the situation, should have articulated that. He should not have marched through a group of children. He had a chance to educate a group of young men, future leaders, and instead he decided to make a video and a point.
And all of us share part of it. We used our own biases to make huge assumptions about a short clip of video.
Trump haters shouted that he had normalized aggression and disrespect toward anyone different.
Trump supporters were quick point out that these students had technically done nothing but stand their ground.
The media, on both sides were more than willing to reinforce the beliefs of whichever side was listening.
And that, in a nutshell, is the problem.
Three groups converged on the scene for very different reasons.
The school boys came to Washington to take part in the March for Life, a pro-life movement to draw attention to the killing of thousands of babies each year.
Phillips and his group had attended a planned Indigenous People March.
The small group of Black Hebrew Israelites at the Lincoln Memorial was there, apparently with a permit, as part of a larger group, to espouse their views.
All three of these groups had been empowered to dig in on their views. They were coming from and standing with a group of like-minded people who reinforced the rightness of their own views.
None of these groups were in D.C. or on the Mall to protest the others. But we are at a point that if the group we want to fight isn’t around, we will fight with whatever group is around.
We vilify anyone who doesn’t believe what we believe. We don’t see them as people who think different. We see them as evil. We are immediately afraid of them and want to show everyone around that they should be scared also.
There is a lesson to be learned here. When we only gather with people like us and listen to voices who affirm our beliefs, making value judgments based on nothing but our own bias and a 20 second video clip, we will continue to have this type of ugly confrontation.
-Mac Cordell is a reporter for the Journal-Tribune.