Michael Harriot always beats me to it.
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I agree that people should not be using the “tomahawk chop”. Right after the event at the Lincoln Memorial, there was a football game on where thousands of people were doing it. I don’t think the kids were doing it as a response to the Native Americans, because the few who did it were doing it before he arrived. I hope we will soon be in an era where such a thing is a rarity. The way to achieve that goal is not going to be doxxing and threatening every kid you see doing it. Perhaps one of the people accompanying Elder Phillips could have mentioned that he found it offensive, instead of " “Go back to Europe where you came from”. I don’t know if you are going to keep everyone from doing Haka chants, or even that people do it as a racist insult.
The blackout games from years past are probably not going to be happening much any more, for the same reason that people are unlikely to use the word “niggardly”. That is, because people might misinterpret it’s origins and purpose. Like they are doing with the “three pointer” sign.
BI: “Your president is a homosexual!”
kids: “Who cares?” “yeah, who cares!”
BI: “You give faggots rights!”
kids: “whoa!”
BI: ““The Bible condemns homosexuality!”
kids: “they are still human!”
BI(at Black Covington student): “get out n****!”“get out!”
Other students hug the Black student and say “But we love you!”
If these sorts of dialog are our standard for determining that the kids are racist monsters who should be doxxed and physically harmed, we are in trouble.
Because none of the many recordings so far released of this incident show those kids making any more controversial remarks than those quoted above. I suppose we could get transcripts of the school cheers they used, and pore over them for offensive phrases. I am sure that is happening as we speak.
But even if there is questionable language in the school chants, the correct response would be to notify or protest the school’s administration or clergy. Picking out individual students and proposing they be burnt alive is not a proportional or appropriate response.
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That’s entirely false, it’s the second chant after Elder Phillips approaches the crowd of teens. It happens after they surround his group.
Yes, the ancient times of 2011 and 2015. How different the times are 
Which they used at the Lincoln Memorial in pictures for some reason, but with one hand and trying to obscure it… also something I didn’t bring up.
As for more casual racism:
Shit’s still racist, but doing it in response to the drumming of a Native American is indescribably worse.
Racism isn’t just shouting racial epithets at people, and you know that.
A white high schooler with minstrel show make-up isn’t a misinterpretation of its origins. High school super fans doing black outs doesn’t pre-date minstril show black face make-up design. Are we supposed to say it’s obviously not intended to be racist because he didn’t paint his lips red but white? How many things has to be easily dug up about the school before we acknowledge that even if they are not literally assaulting people of color their school community obviously has some glaring racial tolerance issues?
Racism isn’t a game of how many points one side scores versus the others. A black supremecist group in Washington doesn’t make the shit the kids did that went viral less racist, it just means there’s a lot of assholes in the world. Like the ones sending death threats to Elder Phillips. You are making it sound like people are praising the BI and condemning the kids, and that’s never been the case.
I get that your game here is to falsify and mislead, but you know it doesn’t work when people just follow up on the source material. The take of “the kids did nothing wrong because there were more racist black people around and the drummers dared to get too close to the crowd of high schoolers” is as irresponsible as people using viral videos as their primary source for their punditry.
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My point is not to falsify anything. The whole issue started when a moment of the encounter was posted with misleading and false statements about the nature of the situation. You can see whatever you want in that kid’s smile. And since he does not really say anything or make gestures during his interaction with Elder Phillips, we have to look carefully at the accusations made against him in the context of the videos of the whole incident. The kid’s reaction to the racist and homophobic statements made by the BIs are not irrelevant to that context. And it appears that Elder Phillips believed the kids were attacking the BIs when he intervened, and saw the BIs as victims. Of course, he also only saw a small part of the long interaction between the groups.
“They were in the process of attacking these four black individuals…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”
I think that he likely misunderstood the situation. And he intervened by drumming and singing, which I think is pretty cool. The kids had been responding to the BIs in a similar way, with the school cheers. But I don’t think you can look at the longer video and come away believing that anyone really felt threatened. The BIs made some threats, but they were not taken seriously. I don’t think anyone from either of the three groups came away from the interaction thinking that anything remarkable had happened.
It was not until @2020fight posted the clip from Brazil (according to CNN), while posing as a California school teacher, with the caption “This MAGA loser gleefully bothering a Native American protester at the Indigenous Peoples March.” that this became a controversy. The clip was promoted and amplified by a “network of anonymous accounts” to become viral. That account, according to NBC,“sent more than 65,000 tweets in just over two years.”
And I think that valid criticism of the school is not an excuse to threaten individual kids, unless those specific kids have been proven to have personally and overtly committed the offensive acts. Being at the March for Life does not qualify in that respect. Lots of people were there for lots of reasons ( all of which I disagree with). But it is a peaceful march, and has been going on since 1974. Anyway, it is a school outing, I blame the school. As for the Blackout game, 2011 is not “ancient history”, but it is almost certainly before the kids currently being accused were students there.
The primary targets of the hate, Sandmann and Phillips, do not deserve what is happening to them. Sandmann is being persecuted and threatened based almost entirely on what people imagine he was thinking while he smiled. Elder Phillips drummed and sang and did activism, but he is a Native American activist. I support that 100%. He does not deserve to have his past microscopically examined and his military service mocked. But this whole event is a relatively minor interaction between people, which is being amplified and used as a proxy for conflicts neither participant is responsible for.
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Not true.
What you see with your own eyes is not a lie. The moment was a microcosm that has been well proven to be exactly what it seemed to be.
Again, not true. He’s being “persecuted” for being the spokesman of a group of racist shits. It’s not about his expression or what it means, at all, whatsoever. It’s about his actions before and afterwards.
The fact that he’s being rewarded by the president for being a racist should be all you need to know, really.
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What I saw with my own eyes in the initial image was a kid smiling at an elderly gentleman drumming very close to him, surrounded by kids and people with cameras. It could have been captioned “Kentucky High School visitors join Native American elder in a chant after Indigenous people’s rally”, and been perfectly believable.
If they had presented the image or video without comment, I really don’t think many people would have drawn the conclusion they did.
The doxxing and threats were well underway before he made any public statement. His action “before” was attending a school function and…standing in a spot on the monument steps. “during”, he smiled, and gestured to another student to not argue with another protester. “After”, he released a statement that he was mostly confused by Elder Phillip’s actions, and did not know who he was.
If this is our new standard for behavior deserving doxxing and death threats, we are in big trouble, especially if we have decided to judge kids and Native Elders by those standards.
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Unless a person is utterly determined to never see anything as racist because it doesn’t affect them negatively.
I am fully sick and tired of people with no skin in the game and nothing at risk telling historically and currently marginalized and oppressed people that we somehow don’t what racial bigotry looks like when it smirks at us in the face.
Again, FUCK THIS THREAD and everyone who deigns to defend or excuse bigoted behavior.
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There is like… I dunno 3 other threads I can say that about today, too. But totally fuck this thread and excusing bigotry a million times over!
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There are always posts that make me feel that way, but this topic in particular makes me want to facedesk for real.
How dare people that have never lived my experience, or Nathan Phillips’ experience, or the experiences of pretty much every person of color in the US ever try to gaslight us into thinking we didn’t see exactly what we saw.
No matter why, no matter what happened before the footage started, no matter what the Black Hebrew Israelite cult did or said:
WE KNOW MALICE, SPITE AND DISRESPECT WHEN WE SEE IT.
How dare anyone try to convince us otherwise.
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you don’t even have to be a person of color to see it if you have your eyes open and have the integrity to admit what you saw. some people are working so hard to convince others that bullshit is really chocolate cake but the ones they’re really trying to convince is themselves.
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Seriously, though.
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Just as an example of how I feel you are purposely being misleading, you have tried to make a conversation about a group’s behavior hyper-focused onto one kid who you are then spinning as hard as you can to say excuses the obviously racist and harmful things coming from that school. I get it, you want to take your Gateway Pundit talking points and focus on then so you don’t have to address the very real problems with the school… but I don’t care about how many assholes in this world harass people online or the excuses that the kids were already riled up by the time Elder Phillips got there. I don’t even care about what the smiling kid though while being at a bare minimum a cocky teenager.
I do care that an all-white school with a traceable history of racism is being given a pass because the original video wasn’t as cartoonishly explicit as some people wanted it to be. It’s still very explicit, it’s still bad enough that the school has hired a PR firm and is scrubbing their social media history clean and silencing their alumni, and it still deserves attention.
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Like many people, I first encountered the clip without context on Instagram (because some people rush to post before anyone else). Many responders felt like I did, a view of a kid benefiting from racist privilege.
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WHAT?! Are you telling me plantations weren’t just bed & breakfasts with strict disciplinary measures?
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Dude, it was fucking Song of the South, all the way!
Them darkies knew how good they’s had it, and they was happy!
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Side note: 2006?
Song of the South was re-released in theaters several times after its original premiere, each time through Buena Vista Pictures: in 1956 for the 10th anniversary; in 1972 for the 50th anniversary of Walt Disney Productions; in 1973 as the second half of a double bill with *[The Aristocats]
(The Aristocats - Wikipedia)* ; in 1980 for the 100th anniversary of Harris’ classic stories; and in 1986 for the film’s own 40th anniversary and in promotion of the upcoming Splash Mountain attraction at Disneyland.[ citation needed ] The film has been broadcast on European television, including the BBC as recently as 2006.[27]
I think I saw it in '72 or '73 (5 or 6 years), and really wonder which adult took me to see it…
Post-racial my ass.
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I wasn’t born until '75, though I do recall seeing it aired on cable in the US at least once as a little kid.
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