All male, all white students sent in full Trump MAGA gear to an out-of-state protest. = “That’s just an expression of religious love of life.”
White students jeered at for their MAGA wear, called “crackers” = “This is provoking people, and you can’t blame people for reacting strongly. If people use bad words, then it’s only reasonable to respond in kind.”
Students laugh at and jeer at a Native American: “Words are just words, and no one should be upset at words.”
Net effect (as usual): “Trump Supporters should be protected from any prejudice against their beliefs. Everyone else deserves blame for not being adequately polite and tolerant enough around white supremacy.”
Oh, fuck this thread, and anyone twisting themselves into pretzels in order to defend indefensible behavior.
I say again, NO ONE CAN BE “PROVOKED” INTO BEING A BIGOT.
It doesn’t matter what four Black members of some little known cult did or said; what matters is what happened when Nathan Phillips didn’t just stand there and watch a shitshow escalate into something even worse.
Instead he stood up, stood his ground, and ‘got in the way,’ to do the right thing;, even though it could have possibly put himself in real mortal danger.
Don’t any of you sit there all cozy, and dare to try to tell us marginalized, oppressed people that we don’t recognize that smug sneer of malevolence when we see it; it’s been on the face of every colonizer, every oppressor, every predator, every bully who knew they could get away with treating other people like shit, without facing any consequences…
It’s the face of everyone who has ever reveled in ‘punching down’ just because they could.
It’s almost as if @markfrauenfelder suffers from the same disorder that infects the mainstream media, by which they can’t hear indigenous people talking.
ETA: to be less cryptic: The mainstream media is fine with running a story about an indigenous person being victimized. They also sometimes run stories about indigenous people getting in trouble with law enforcement. But the minute they encounter an indigenous person saying something, they wander off and ask some white guy to tell them what to think about it all.
Hence the whole arc of this story - Phillips actively intervened to try to make peace between the students and the Black Israelites, and got mocked by the proudly racist students for his trouble. But the only part of the story that made the mainstream papers was the last bit - poor abused Indian elder getting mocked by proudly racist students.
Then when @markfrauenfelder realizes there’s more to the story, his first instinct is not to post an update linking to one of the many interviews with Nathan Philips, nor to link to one of the many alternative media accounts giving context to what went down, but rather to post links to a bunch of white men (and a white boy) telling the world what they think happened. Oh, and it just so happens those white dudes are all right wing. The universe is full of weird coincidences, isn’t it!
I, too, join the chorus of people who think this take is the equivalent of taking a shit on reality. I watched all the videos from every angle to give the story a chance to take a new narrative before I replied to anything and blogged about it. There is no way in hell those kids were showing him respect, they were acting like a pack of rabid assholes. The writer gives a Trump-wearing rich racist all the benefit of the doubt in his PR statement and totally ignores the comments and experiences of Mr. Phillips and his companions.
But I knew this would happen, too. I knew they’d soft peddle and white wash what was done, starting with claiming they were just boisterous boys getting into the spirit of things. You can literally hear one woman with Mr. Phillips decry in anger and fear “you’re all acting like a mob.” That is what they were, and that is the take away here. That and that Mr. Phillips is one hell of a noble man, with more courage and integrity than I’ll ever know in my life.
TIL that when Nathan Phillips is described as “a keeper of a sacred pipe”, this means that his role in the community is to be a peacemaker, someone who stops fights and defuses conflicts. So when he intervened in the confrontation between the Black Israelites and the little crowd of proudly racist white teens, he was doing the right thing, but he was also following his sacred duty and calling.
I say this a connoisseur of herbs: peace-pipe jokes and racist cartoons and lyrics capitalizing on them have done a disservice to what was a centuries-long solemn diplomatic and spiritual practice of the civilizations our ancestors worked with tireless hate to obliterate.
What was really missing from this conversation was the opinion of a white guy, and especially a white guy that doesn’t like when black people use the n-word.
This crowd was chanting mocking war cries at a Native American elder drumming. Nothing that has been said “disproves” what was in the video.
