Before the MAGA Catholic kids pro-life rally incident is forgotten from our white consciousness, there are a few themes worth visiting. What’s worth visiting is not the actual racist event or the “out of control” media but the strategies behind what causes so many white people, who claim to be opposed to racism, to dismiss or justify incidents like these.
In general, white people, at least the ones capable of seeing outside our white segregated world, “get” explicit racism—as in why Nazis, black face, jokes with n-words, and making fun of Native Americans are bad. But we don’t understand all the ways we unconsciously support, perpetuate, and dismiss all types of racism in this country—from the explicit, to the implicit, to the systemic. We don’t understand how our reactions to racism are influenced daily by the racism that we have unconsciously and unintentionally internalized just by growing up in a white supremacist society. And this incident, or at least its aftermath, serves as an important example of what white people need to work on when confronting racism.
The following are five themes pulled from white people’s reactions to this incident.
1. White Victimhood and the Rush to Exonerate
There’s not really a good way to sugar-coat this: there was 100 percent no rush to judgment on the first video. If there’s a voice in your head screaming for the comment section right now, please try to calm it down for now. The vast majority who were outraged responded appropriately to an extremely racist incident caught on tape. Any new information, incorrect background details, additional bad actors, or misinterpretations of the situation did not change the racism caught on tape in any way. There was a rush to judgment, but it came with the exoneration of those white MAGA kids and their racism caught on tape—in the form of a white victimhood narrative.
Twenty-four hours after the first video came out, the usual white supremacist tactics were deployed, and, as often happens, white people of all political backgrounds rushed to the narrative that alleviated the white discomfort of dealing with a messy racist “this could be any of our kids” situation.
A new dominant narrative was embraced without question. This familiar narrative painted the MAGA kids as the victims, forced to act racist toward those Native Americans due to the super-offensive Black Israelites and the audacity of Nathan Phillips singling out Nick Sandmann while walking straight up to his innocent and confused existence—to menacingly drum in his face.
“What would be the appropriate reaction for a teenage boy who has never experienced anything like this?”—was the common white response on Facebook threads nationwide.
The easy answer to that question is “move aside.”
He could have moved aside like the dozens of other kids directly in front of Nick did before Nathan got anywhere close. Imagine if the race roles were reversed and a white elder tried to peacefully walk through a group of black teenagers mocking him and one black teenager decided to block his path. Would the “move aside” answer be easier to accept for white people with this color sequence? Would it be easier to understand that Nick actively blocked Nathan’s path? Would it be easier to understand the hostility involved in the act of blocking Nathan’s path?
My second, longer answer involves holding up a mirror focused on the reasons why so many white people accepted, without question, this new narrative. There are plenty of videos showing dozens of MAGA kids laughing, mocking, miming tomahawks, etc., at the Native Americans. There are plenty of videos that show Nathan didn’t single Nick out but was walking through the crowd, and Nick chose to block his way. But as Trump said to his supporters, “What you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening”—none of this evidence mattered during the rush to exoneration.
But even if the narrative were true and Nick was a victim with no choice, it’s still hard to understand how this narrative alone exonerates all those kids mocking Native Americans and all the parents allowing it to happen. It took a few more strategies to help “seal the white deal” on exoneration.
2. Victim Blaming
A common legal defense in court, when a defendant lacks exonerating evidence, is to attack the credibility of the plaintiff. After the first video emerged, Nathan Phillips’s credibility was immediately attacked based on perceived inaccuracies in his military service and personal character flaws in an attempt to prove he wasn’t capable of having a perspective at all, despite literally being in the middle of the incident.
The victim blaming and character assassination of Nathan Phillips was no different than the victim blaming and character assassination of unarmed black people murdered by police. It was no different than focusing on previous run-ins with the law in the cases of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, the marijuana usage of Sandra Bland and Botham Jean, the resisting arrest claims regarding Sam Dubose and Terence Crutcher, or the broken car windows while ignoring the 20 rounds fired at Stephon Clark for holding a cellphone at night. Focusing on incorrect background details or the transgressions of the victim doesn’t change the fact that there’s a murdered black person, innocent of any crime where the punishment is death without trial. But it does often get the murderer off. Inaccuracies in Nathan Phillips’s perspective or flaws in his past don’t change the racism caught on tape. But they do help white people dismiss it.
3. Blame Shifting
Shifting the blame to the Black Israelites was no different than the blame shifting in the context of racial disparities, biased treatment, and systemic racism people of color receive from white people and white institutions in this nation.
Sentiments such as, “if only black people followed police orders better, they wouldn’t be shot so much,” ignore the role that implicit racism plays in police brutality no matter how a black person acts and that not following police orders doesn’t warrant police brutality.
“If only people of color made better choices, many of them wouldn’t be stuck in poverty,” ignores the realities of living in a white supremacist world built on 400 years of past and present systemic racism without reparations.
These sentiments are not so different from, “if only those Black Israelites didn’t start crap, those MAGA kids wouldn’t have been forced to be so racist towards the Native Americans.” Statements like these are often used to downplay the reality people of color face while exonerating the white people who perpetuate that reality.
4. Attacking the Media
The PR firm Nick Sandmann’s family hired probably knew they could have Nick on TV lying about not doing anything disrespectful or racist towards the Native Americans, despite being caught literally doing these things on video, because they probably knew the effectiveness of attacking the media when the media tries to accurately report on white supremacy. Nick’s PR firm probably knew their attack on journalism and their accusations of the media rushing to judgment would prevent any further fact-checking or responsible journalism.
This attack is no different than Trump’s strategy of attacking our media, which has kept most media outlets from even mentioning the words “white supremacy,” let alone reporting on it. When Jemele Hill called Trump a white supremacist on her personal twitter account in 2017, instead of having much-needed conversations nationwide about white supremacy and its relationship to the Trump presidency, there was a massive campaign, going all the way up to the White House, calling for her firing. This campaign resulted in ESPN publicly apologizing for Jemele accurately pointing out Trump’s association with white supremacy, one month after Trump called white supremacists at the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, “very fine people.”
It’s so much easier to attack the messenger by finding bias or sketchy details than to deal with the message. I think that’s why the media, with all their flaws, are taking the blame for white people’s inability to understand, let alone deal with, white supremacy.
5. Defending Racial Dog Whistles
President Reagan was the first to create MAGA (Make American Great Again) as a racial dog whistle, which is a coded racist phrase or issue that pretends to be race-neutral. Dog-whistle politics took shape at a time when explicit racism, such as Jim Crow segregation and lynching, were becoming less acceptable. After the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, many politicians who supported segregation and opposed civil rights for people of color traded their “segregationist” hat for a “conservative” hat and joined the Republican ticket under the new “Southern Strategy,” which coded the old racism of the past with new dog whistles: “states rights,” “law and order,” and “welfare queen.” These terms may seem race-neutral but were used to push policies, such as tax breaks for the wealthy and the shredding of social safety nets, that disproportionately hurt people of color. Lee Atwater, a political strategist for Reagan, laid it all out in a 1981 interview.
Trump has a similar strategy in MAGA, yet white people still believe or at least pretend that these racial dog whistles are actually race-neutral. Decades after Reagan, the majority of white people from all political stripes are at best dismissing the MAGA dog whistle and at worst defending it.
Even if you’re one of the millions of white people who have never stepped out of our segregated world long enough to understand the real racial impacts of MAGA policies, and you wear a MAGA hat with no intent to be racist, the impact is still racism and is still felt among people of color. Understanding intent vs. impact is essential when understanding racism. You have the freedom to wear MAGA hats, but you do not have the freedom from the consequences, which include being accurately labeled a racist and receiving the very justifiable anger of non-white people who suffer from racist MAGA policies.
The Larger Consequences
The larger consequences of white supremacy, such as mass incarceration, neoliberalism, discrimination, police brutality, etc., all have their roots in the internalized racism of all white people, allowing us to consciously or unconsciously support, perpetuate, and dismiss the racism we claim to oppose. If we want to create real change, we have to address these roots. Addressing these roots isn’t so much about showing up to protests, donating to civil rights groups, and confronting family members at Thanksgiving (although these things are important and desperately need our continued attention). It’s more about showing up to anti-racism workshops, reading (and financially supporting) anti-racism resources, and confronting your own internalized racism 365 days per year.
Personally, I’m not going to lose sleep hoping those MAGA kids and parents receive their just desserts. I know they won’t. But I am invested in white people understanding this isn’t an isolated incident but a very common theme in our society that needs to be confronted.
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