A rival account
The smiling kid in the video has given a statement about what happened, one which I gather is corroborated by other, longer videos.
I am the student in the video who was confronted by the Native American protestor. I arrived at the Lincoln Memorial at 4:30 p.m. I was told to be there by 5:30 p.m., when our busses were due to leave Washington for the trip back to Kentucky. We had been attending the March for Life rally, and then had split up into small groups to do sightseeing.
When we arrived, we noticed four African American protestors who were also on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I am not sure what they were protesting, and I did not interact with them. I did hear them direct derogatory insults at our school group.
They are apparently part of a group well known to people in DC, kind of the way Hari Krishna people used to be well known, only less benign.
The protestors said hateful things. They called us “racists,” “bigots,” “white crackers,” “faggots,” and “incest kids.” They also taunted an African American student from my school by telling him that we would “harvest his organs.” I have no idea what that insult means, but it was startling to hear.
Because we were being loudly attacked and taunted in public, a student in our group asked one of our teacher chaperones for permission to begin our school spirit chants to counter the hateful things that were being shouted at our group. The chants are commonly used at sporting events.
Ok – but a lot of them were wearing the god damn MAGA caps. Those things stand for something, and it’s not a benign something. School spirit chants in MAGA caps give off a different vibe from school spirit chants not in MAGA caps. That probably has a lot to do with why his smile looked provocative. But, yes, gullibility probably also has something to do with it.
At no time did I hear any student chant anything other than the school spirit chants. I did not witness or hear any students chant “build that wall” or anything hateful or racist at any time. Assertions to the contrary are simply false. Our chants were loud because we wanted to drown out the hateful comments that were being shouted at us by the protestors.
After a few minutes of chanting, the Native American protestors, who I hadn’t previously noticed, approached our group. The Native American protestors had drums and were accompanied by at least one person with a camera.
The protestor everyone has seen in the video began playing his drum as he waded into the crowd, which parted for him. I did not see anyone try to block his path. He locked eyes with me and approached me, coming within inches of my face. He played his drum the entire time he was in my face.
I never interacted with this protestor. I did not speak to him. I did not make any hand gestures or other aggressive moves. To be honest, I was startled and confused as to why he had approached me. We had already been yelled at by another group of protestors, and when the second group approached I was worried that a situation was getting out of control where adults were attempting to provoke teenagers.
I believed that by remaining motionless and calm, I was helping to diffuse the situation. I realized everyone had cameras and that perhaps a group of adults was trying to provoke a group of teenagers into a larger conflict. I said a silent prayer that the situation would not get out of hand.
Fair enough, but it’s also true that he and his (all male) classmates were there to advocate for taking away women’s right to make decisions about their own bodies. They’re not all that benevolent. I realize they’ve been trained into it, but still, that’s what they were there for.
I cannot speak for everyone, only for myself. But I can tell you my experience with Covington Catholic is that students are respectful of all races and cultures. We also support everyone’s right to free speech.
But they don’t respect women’s rights over their own bodies.
On the other hand if he’s telling the truth then Nathan Phillips lied when he (NP) said the kid blocked his escape. Not cool.
[…] Updating to add: see the competing account by the kid in the cap. […]
I am sure that boy wrote all that himself, and that it is a true account freely given without editorial or influence. I am sure that no legal representative was consulted prior to the releasing of this statement. I am sure there is no effort to shift blame or culpability from himself and his school peers to others, for any such blame or culpability that may be assigned.
If young Nick Sandmann is being truthful in his statement, I suspect what happened was something like this:
Sandmann and his classmates were waiting for a bus, and did not realize why the Native American marchers were approaching them. They were already feeling beleaguered from the confrontation with the silly “Hebrew Israelites”.
From the other side, Phillips and his group, who had just finished their march, went over to try and diffuse the situation, and did not understand why this kid did not get out of their way, or why he had that frozen smile on his face. It does look like a superior smirk–but then if you look again you can see it as a confused kid who feels he’s being confronted and isn’t sure why.
… as the expression of a confused kid…
P.S. Smiles are weird. They can signal appeasement OR hostility. And people frequently smile when they don’t really feel smiley, and those forced smiles can be especially hard to interpret.
This whole thing is a good lesson in context and in bias confirmation. I wanted that kid’s blood last night.
Smiles *are* weird. If you take virtually any photograph of someone smiling and look at it for a few moments, the smile seems to drain off the face.
I’m not sure what to make of this incident. I’ve read several versions of the story now. I find it hard to believe that the kid was as benevolent as he’s making out, but perhaps he wasn’t quite as malevolent as he appeared in that video.
Well, apart from the whole wanting to force women to have babies thing, obviously. It is god-damn difficult to assume (or even believe) benevolence from someone who holds that view, however indoctrinated.
Smiles are indeed weird. My first impression, via a short clip on Twitter, was that Phillips was getting in the kid’s face for some reason. Then I looked around a bit and saw the other clip, the one that showed a bunch of the MAGA boys in a circle surrounding Phillips, and that made the boy’s smile look rather different.
Only a few reports have identified the four Black protesters, ‘part of a group well known to people in DC,’ I’ve seen the group named in one report, they were NOT ‘muslims’ of any kind, but rather a crackpot ‘Black Israelite’ cult group. I’ve seen members of a like-identified group spewing racist hatred on the streets of downtown San Francisco.
Still, no excuse for MAGA hats and busing high school boys across state lines to support popish bigotry. And if the ‘Israelites’ were being so offensive, no one has surfaced any footage of it yet. And Philips was certainly within his rights to walk up to the little shits with his drum.
Yes, bad. When I had only been in town a year, I had a student in one of my classes who was doing volunteer work at one of the grade schools. She was telling me one day, proudly, that she had been helping the pre-schoolers make posters that morning…anti-abortion posters. She seemed to assume I would validate her and approve; I could only stand there with a frozen smile on my face, wondering who I could talk to about school children being forced to take a religious stance, until I remembered that she volunteered at the Catholic school, not one of the public ones.
I still had to wear the frozen smile. Why? Because a college teacher has so few people willing to defend them these days if they challenge a “sincerely held religious belief”, because no one will support a public school teacher for taking a political position, that I was frozen in the moment. And 13 years later, I am still frozen in that moment, still experiencing the horror of having pre-kindergartners taking a political stance on an issue they have not yet been able to develop clear understanding of. And because of activities like that, they never will.
John the Drunkard, This post from Reason has a link to the entire video:
https://reason.com/blog/2019/01/20/covington-catholic-nathan-phillips-video
Well, it does us good to remember that flaming idiocy, bullying and cruelty is not the sole domain of people we don’t like.
I’m not sure anyone came out of this encounter well, but you know what? I still have a really difficult time thinking of those kids as the underdogs. I think I’m going to keep despising them for their MAGA hats and their anti-woman bullshit regardless of how this encounter went down.
I can’t justify watching over an hour of video, but I’ve read the various narratives and counter-narratives, and watched excerpts of what everybody is claiming are the key sections of video.
This Twitter thread by Lisa Harper has a good pushback against Sandman’s counter-narrative, though I disagree with some of the assertions. I particularly draw your attention to posts 20 and 21 and the accompanying video clips.
A few overall observations:
1. The group of black Hebrew demonstrators, or street preachers or whatever you want to call them, certainly don’t come off well. They’re obnoxious and sort of cranks. But they’re in no way threatening to this massive group of Covington students.
2. Covington’s response to the black Hebrews is fairly obnoxious as well. They could have ignored them. They could have engaged them on actual substance. Instead, they just shout them down with school fight songs, in a display of “look how many of us there are, we can drown you out.” It’s not by itself racist, and more juvenile than evil — and of course, these are juveniles. At this point, it seems more like a failure of supervision by the adult chaperones, who are nowhere to be seen.
3. I don’t see any indication that the standoff was in danger of getting violent, by either side. (I certainly don’t see what the Reason article is claiming about the black Hebrews trying to “goad” the students into attacking — and I note that would have been suicidal given the numbers.) But I won’t say that Phillips couldn’t have seen it differently. There is certainly something a little disturbing about this massive group of loud white youths in their MAGA caps (which is an aggressive act itself — that cap is a symbol of something nasty, and sends a message to non-whites especially) shouting down and mocking and laughing at a much smaller group of black men.
4. Whatever you want to say about the black Hebrews, Phillips isn’t being rude or threatening or engaging in slurs or insults. You would have to assume that all non-white people think alike in order to believe that. I’m not sure that his efforts were terribly helpful in de-escalating things (in part because I don’t believe they were really escalating anywhere bad to begin with), but I don’t have a quarrel with his actions.
5. I can’t tell from the camera angle (it’s too focused on Phillips and Sandman) how viable it was for Phillips to go around Sandman. You can see that the students behind Sandman have parted, so that there is a path that Phillips could have taken if Sandman weren’t standing where he was. Sandman was absolutely blocking the path that Phillips wanted to take. He was not blocking Phillips’ escape; there were other directions he could go. But standing where he was, in Phillips’ face, after other students had backed away, was clearly a provocative choice. He was not some confused kid unsure what to do, he was deliberately getting in an old man’s face, secure in the knowledge that he had a mob at his back.
6. Sandman’s smirk is consistent with the actions of his classmates. They’re smirking and laughing and making faces at the cameras and generally acting as if this native man with his drum is super-fucking-HILARIOUS. It’s incredibly disrespectful. This is also, by the way, their reaction to the black Hebrews — I see no signs that any of the students were “offended” by them, just that they thought they were absurd and mockable. Which, to be fair, they arguably are. But that doesn’t apply to Phillips.
7. I saw no indication of any adult supervision of the Covington students.
I would also recommend this summary by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, which I pretty much agree with.
Screechy, thanks for that. I guess people will use all the available video and commentary to suit their own world view, but I’m comfortable with the summary you provide above.
I’d add, crowds can be really funny in the vibe they give. There is an unpredictability and febrility to a crowd that can tip it from good natured excitement to threat of violence and back again in an instant*. This vibe doesn’t show up easily on video, but if you’re in such a crowd it sure does. So, if Phillips felt that the situation was explosive and primed for violence, it’s quite plausible that at that moment that is exactly how he interpreted it.
* Years ago I was in a volunteer fire brigade. Every year the local Agricultural University held a ball (alcohol fuelled party). We would all wander down to the fire station as the night worre on and get kitted up because we knew that some time between 10pm and midnight some over excited kid would trip the fire alarm. Then we’d have to turn up, make sure several hundred drunk kids had evacuated the building and check that there wasn’t actually a fire before letting them back in. You could guarantee that someone would think it was such a laugh the first time that it would be even funnier to do it again.
The night I was involved the alarm got tripped again before we’d even climbed back on the appliance. The kids that just wanted to get back to the party were not amused that they were being hussled out of the building again. Now we’re surrounded by hundreds of very drunk 18-20 year olds. Many are laughing, some are angry, some decide it would be funny to try and souvenir some of the gear from the appliance lockers – meaning we have to protect it and can’t spare manpower to clear the building and reset the alarm. At this point the crowd begins surging toward and away from us with the mood swinging from gleeful excitement to anger in literally a heartbeat. Then they just dissolved away and we finished our job and left.
I am, of course, shocked to learn that Covington has a history of racism including dressing up in blackface for basketball games against schools with black players.
My comment is just about the photograph that appears to show Sandmann smirking in Phillips’ face. Of course I responded to it emotionally. I felt there was a good guy (Phillips) and a bad guy (Sandmann).
But I remember the photo of Trump in the truck where he looked like a child leaning forward excitedly and making “vroom-vroom” sounds. I checked a video to see what really happened. Trump climbed into the cab, he leaned forward to adjust his seating, and the photo was snapped in the middle of him leaning forward and sitting back. It’s like Richard Avedon said in this interview:
I thought Trevor Noah had a thoughtful response.
I also came across this post, which links to a tweet with video showing more bad behavior (apparently) by the CovCath boys.
Well, given that the original framing of the story fit all my cognitive biases (rich young entitled white males being disrespectful to Native American elder) a little too well, I DID watch the entire video last night.
I saw kids. Kids, some of whom listened to the Hebrew Israelites goad them (yes, the Hebrew Israelites addressed them, and were extremely offensive. I certainly didn’t get the impression they were trying to goad them into any physical attack–and the kids never at any point seemed the least bit aggressive in response, unless you think school cheers are aggressive.) (One religious nut repeatedly threatens violence, but towards a man who is skateboarding nearby. I’m pretty sure that’s not one of the Covington students.)
I don’t know why a bunch of kids hanging around waiting for a bus wouldn’t listen to a bunch of batshit crazy street preachers. Why not? Their response to some of the nastier stuff is to start doing their cheers.
I don’t know why Sandmann didn’t step out of Phillip’s way, but it’s clear that Phillips approached him.
The original story had it wrong. Does that mean these kids are angels? No.
So what? The point is, THIS:
Is clearly mistaken.
Now I see people are posting a picture of some Covington kids–obviously not the same ones, as the photo was taken in 2012–in an attempt to–what? Prove that somehow we were all right to jump on the nasty bandwagon to begin with, because even though the narrative was false hey look the at kids from that school wearing black paint in 2012?
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/covington-catholic-black-paint/
I think we’re supposed to try and correct for that?
I find the idea of school chants weird and chilling. Is this normal in the US? I’ve heard that there’s a certain amount of pledging allegiance to flags and so on, but are kids really chanting “go school” on a regular basis?
When I was a schoolkid in the UK in the 70s we’d do practically anything to avoid identifying or being connected with our school. There was no pride in going to a particular school, you just went to the nearest one and tried to pretend you didn’t, often to the extent (especially in my case) of hardly ever turning up.
If anything, the teachers were even more inclined to disassociate themselves from their place of employment. Often while actually teaching a class. My music teacher used to put on a cine (!) movie of some classic bit of opera, told us to draw a picture of it and then lock herself in the cupboard for the rest of the lesson. She never actually taught us anything about playing instruments. My English teacher was just plain sadistic. She’d *always* pick on the kids who hated public speaking (guess who) to read stuff out in class. Because reading things out was somehow learning about literature and language. Anyway, it was hard not to come away with the impression that they hated being there at least as much as we did.
School spirit was inconceivable and I very much hope it still is, it sounds like a terrible idea.
I do too (find the idea of school chants weird and chilling). I guess they are normal, although they weren’t in mine – but we did have a School Song and a School Blazer, and I did find both a mix of absurd and irritating.
We had a bunch of great teachers though, many of them PhDs who of course couldn’t get real academic jobs.
Lady M,
I think Phillips was using the term “attacking” not to mean in a physical sense, but as in shouting down, etc. It’s an unfortunately ambiguous usage, but hardly an uncommon one. I long ago lost track of how many times New Atheists were accused of “attacking” believers by… writing books or blog posts. I wish journalists and editors would be more careful about clarifying these things.
As to why people are posting the blackface videos: come on, really? Don’t be a brick. The point is that this school has a very recent history of students exhibiting racism with the apparent tacit approval of teachers and coaches. It’s relevant for the same reason that all of the accounts of the toxic culture at Georgetown Prep were to evaluating Brett Kavanaugh’s claims of innocence. For those of us who don’t believe that the video completely exonerates these kids — and you yourself admit that “they’re no angels” — it’s relevant background information about the environment in which they’re educated.
Except they weren’t exactly doing that, either. After the Hoteps called them “incest babies,” one boy does lead a cheer, but he’s facing his fellow students, away from the Hoteps.
Wait a minute… are these high school kids about to be appointed to office?
For heaven’s sake. A false story lead to an online mobbing. One boy’s mother was doxxed and people contacted her employers.
Relevant to what? To justifying our original overreaction? To making ourselves feel better about the harm we caused?
Oh, I guess that makes everything all right, then.
Maybe if we uncover enough dirt on these boys, we’ll end racism and sexism.
“Shouting down” just means drowning someone out vocally. What difference does it make which direction the kid leading the chant is facing?
And this was not a “false story.” There is more to the story than originally reported, but the core point — and what got most people ticked off in the first place — remains, i.e. that the Covington kids in general, and Sandmann in particular, were grossly disrespectful of Phillips. It is absolutely true that Sandmann deliberately put himself in Phillips’ face and smirked at him. It is absolutely true that his classmates whooped and hollered and did tomahawk chops to mock Phillips. Oh, and if you want to talk about new information, we’ve now learned that is is also absolutely true that these kids were also recorded harassing women and shouting “it’s not rape if you enjoy it.”
Since addressing any single incident of racism or sexism will not end the overall problem, I guess we should ignore every single incident. Sound logic.
Sadly, I agree that nothing is going to come of this. The school will issue some bland press release about how the matter has been handled internally. Sandmann is going to be just fine. I expect him to be making the rounds on Fox News any day now, followed by his own YouTube channel, and then a speaking role at the 2020 GOP convention.
I see some are still saying that Sandmann blocked Phillips. In what way? If you watch the video leading up to that, Phillips walks up to one boy, sings right into his face, then he moves sideways to stand in front of Sandmann and sings right into his face. What is the cue for Sandmann to move? And in what direction?
Let’s flip the roles. Say there is a group of Native America people standing around, and a white guy in a MAGA hat walks up singing and beating a drum. The white guy gets super close to one of the Native American people, singing right into his face. Then he moves in front of another Native American person, sings into his face, making continuous eye contact, moving even closer and bringing his drum within inches of the Native American person’s face. Would anybody be scrutinizing the Native American person’s face to see if he had disrespected the MAGA hat guy with an improper expression? Would they be wondering why he hadn’t gotten out of the way?
Yes, obviously there’s a historical context that can’t be ignored, but if it’s completely ridiculous if the roles are reversed, then maybe it’s still pretty damn ridiculous in the original situation.
Wait a minute. All of these people were in a public place.
Are you saying that the street preachers had a right to speak and the Covington kids were required to keep silent? While being verbally abused, yet?
No, Screechy. Watch the video. Phillips walks up to Sandmann. Sandmann does not step in his way. This is very clear.
Sandmann stood there with an expression on his face that we all initially interpreted as a hostile smirk. It may have been one. It may have been extreme discomfort. It may have been a bit of both.
I can’t read the kid’s mind, and neither can anyone else. Confirmation bias and fundamental attribution error are going to color how we interpret it. At worst, we see a high school kid being a jerk.
It is absolutely true that the kids whooped and clapped in time to the beat of the drum. Some of them made “tomahawk chops,” which Google tells me is a sportsball thing that’s been around for a while and that people are being asked not to do for obvious reasons. That was offensive.
Oh goody, more absolute truth.
It is absolutely true that somebody at the rally did that. Funny how people “know” that it absolutely was one of the Covington kids. There were other people there that day.
Watch the video in question. :
– The guy who made that nasty rape joke was wearing a Bengals sweatshirt. Covington is in Kentucky. (fact)
– The guy who made that nasty rape joke was standing with or next to a group of girls. Covington is an all-boys school. (fact)
– The guy who made that nasty rape joke looks to be older than the high schoolers. (impression, mine, arguable)
– I don’t see the guy who made that joke among the Covington school kids in later shots. (he could have been standing in the back)
– The girl who posted the video also tweeted that she did not know if the guy went to Covington. (fact)
Enough. If anyone wants to bring up the “fact” that some of the
witchesCovington kids made white power gestures, I’ll refer them to Snopes (the “okay” gesture as a white power signal was apparently a thing started by trolls back during the Kavanaugh hearings).Covington is directly across the river from Cincinnati. I went to a conference in Cincinnati, and stayed at a hotel in Kentucky, possibly in Covington, given the proximity. The Bengals are the most popular NFL team in Kentucky, which does not have an NFL team within the state.
Lady M,
I have watched that portion of the video. I disagree with your (and Skeletor’s) description of it, as do many other people who have watched the entire thing.
This thread is already causing me to get testy with someone I generally like and respect, so I’m just going to leave it there.