The order of the smirk
Updating to add: see the competing account by the kid in the cap.
More on the high school bullies who mobbed a Native American drummer in DC yesterday.
The images in a series of videos that went viral on social media Saturday showed a tense scene near the Lincoln Memorial.
In them, a Native American man steadily beats his drum at the tail end of Friday’s Indigenous Peoples March while singing a song of unity for indigenous people to “be strong” in the face of the ravages of colonialism that now include police brutality, poor access to health care and the ill effects of climate change on reservations.
Surrounding him are a throng of young, mostly white teenage boys, several wearing Make America Great Again caps, with one standing about a foot from the drummer’s face wearing a relentless smirk.
It’s the bro smirk, the smirk of dominance. Trump smirks a lot.
Nathan Phillips, a veteran in the indigenous rights movement, was that man in the middle.
In an interview Saturday, Phillips, 64, said he felt threatened by the teens and that they suddenly swarmed around him as and other activists were wrapping up the march and preparing to leave.
The teenagers started chanting “Build that wall” and Phillips decided to get out of there.
“It was getting ugly, and I was thinking: ‘I’ve got to find myself an exit out of this situation and finish my song at the Lincoln Memorial,’ ” Phillips recalled. “I started going that way, and that guy in the hat stood in my way and we were at an impasse. He just blocked my way and wouldn’t allow me to retreat.”
…
The encounter generated a wave of outrage on social media less than a week after President Trump made light of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre of several hundred Lakota Indians by the U.S. Cavalry in a tweet that was meant to mock Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D), who Trump derisively calls “Pocahontas.”
Oh did he. I missed that.
Yes he did.
If Elizabeth Warren, often referred to by me as Pocahontas, did this commercial from Bighorn or Wounded Knee instead of her kitchen, with her husband dressed in full Indian garb, it would have been a smash! pic.twitter.com/D5KWr8EPan
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 14, 2019
Some of the teens in the video wore sweatshirts from Covington Catholic High School in Park Hills, Ky., which sent students to Washington to participate in Friday’s antiabortion March for Life event, according to an archived page of the school’s website that was taken down on Saturday.
Well, you know, they were probably on a high from marching to take women’s rights away, so they felt like celebrating by threatening another subordinate group. Kid Smirk thinks he’s going to inherit the world and maybe he will, maybe he’ll be another Brett Cavanaugh. Cavanaugh too is a woman-humiliating boy from Catholic school. They go far.
Anticipating the inevitable “don’t be too hard on them; they’re just kids!” cries: fuck that. In the next year or three, these kids are going to fill out college applications where they brag about what good character they have because they served as Treasurer of their local Christian Students Association and ladled out soup in a kitchen once or twice. Seems to me entirely appropriate for college admissions officers to be able to learn the truth.
Their lives won’t be “ruined.” There will be schools and employers and girlfriends who won’t give a shit, or who will see this as a plus. And if years from now they regret their actions and clean up their act, that will become apparent too.
They’re just racist aggressive domineering bullying kids.
Ha:
https://mobile.twitter.com/tim_nicolai/status/1086666843950145537
“Those christian boys” Tori said it. It’s my mantra during these moments.
You’re 17 or 18 and attending political rallies, you’re old enough to take some responsibility for your actions. That said, where were the adults from that school party? Do they not actually supervise students under their care? Maybe they were off looking for some slutty sex-aged women to browbeat about morality. Also, it’s hardly surprising that if you raise kids to think they are superior and have a right to dictate how other people live their lives, then rile them up to attend a march where they get to do just that, that they then turn around and behave in exactly that way with the next bunch of people wandering past.
Sigh, weird autocorrect on my email means I have a post in moderation.
I just don’t understand what point Smirkboy could possibly think he was making aside from “I am a total asshole.”
I am boggled the school isn’t frantically reining this in. If this had happened here in Australia, it would be viewed as catastrophically bad and the school would be doing everything to save its reputation. It would be advertising on all forms of media what the consequences for the students have been, how this contravenes the school’s values, etc etc. They would be desperately trying to get the photos removed. The panic of the school admin would be palpable. We had a story about 5 male students from an elite Catholic school cause problems in the streets around the school on muck-up day. They weren’t allowed to sit their exams in the school and they left with a tag marked “caution: dickheads”. The school drastically changed their rules for muck-up day, and there’s been no issues since.
The smirk on that boy’s face suggests he is secure in the knowledge there will be no backlash from his community. The school sent them to an anti-woman march. It’s probably the kind of place Karen Pence would be comfortable teaching, if they weren’t Catholic.
The divide between Republicans/Trump supporters and Democratic supporters couldn’t be more stark.
I’m all up for that wall. Around those assholes, of course.
I think that was a good part of the point. “I’m an asshole and because I’m with a bunch of other assholes, I can do this and they will let me do it. I do this because I want to and I can.”
He might not have thought this through much farther, though. Not everyone with a camera phone was on his side. Not everyone who will see the footage will be on his side. That will likely result in unforeseen and unintended consequences for his self. Bullies like him seem not to have thought beyond the immediate situation, where supporters are present and numerous to the potential for near instantaneous, global blowback on social media.
I am not a fan of Cult of Dusty, but he makes excellent points here. There seems to be a lot of misinformation in the popular narrative.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=jVvpVRJ-NH4#
It seems that much of the reporting has been very unfair to the kids. For a corrective read:
https://reason.com/blog/2019/01/20/covington-catholic-nathan-phillips-video
“Journalists who uncritically accepted Nathan Phillips’ story got this completely wrong.”
Ugh, Coel, I hate when people post incredibly misleading things, and that seems to have been done with this story by the original posters based on the video posted by Cult of Dusty. I’ve never hear of CoD, but the video speaks for itself.
For those who haven’t watched, the kids are all bunched together in a group, and Nathan Phillips, the drummer, walks right up to them. He has plenty of space to move in, but he goes up to the tightly packed school group. He continues drumming (there is a cut here) while looking right into the face of one boy, who smiles and sort of bops along to the drumming, then he moves on to the kid everyone hates, who smiles but doesn’t move. I interpreted this as an asshole smirk as almost everyone else did, but CoD may be right that it’s more the awkward smile of someone who doesn’t know what to do when someone else has walked right up to them and is drumming and singing at them.
(What is the right reaction? The first kid bopping along sort of looked better but could be seen as disrespectful. Just smile? Might have been what the second kid was trying to do. Walk or turn away? Probably not going to get you any points. Stand there looking solemn? That could be misinterpreted as well.)
Before he walked up to them, the ones closest to him were facing away, as all the kids were facing the center and doing school chants. Phillips clearly walked up to their group. They didn’t surround him.
Apparently this was a gathering place for the students before they got on a bus, so that’s why they were all together doing school chants.
I’m not thrilled CoD uses chopped together video fragments. It would be nice to see all the unedited video. But what he has clearly shows there was no surrounding of Phillips, that Phillips approached the group, and that Phillips was moving in front of them singing and drumming rather than having been blocked and trapped.
So what we’re left with is the kids were still jackasses wearing MAGA hats who didn’t react well when someone approached them singing and drumming, and that they were there to protest abortion. That’s not the story we were sold.
I encourage everyone to click through to the Reason article to which Coel links and then click through to the full unedited video from there. It’s almost 2 hours long, shot by the Black Hebrew Israelites, with commentary by some of their members.
Jump an hour and 12 minutes in, and you will see Phillips approached the students, who were all bunched together, etc. There is no intimidation. After a while, they or other people do surround him, but it seems like people just watching the scene. Unfortunately the video doesn’t show him leaving, so it’s possible after marching into the group he did get blocked or feel he was being blocked. But it’s clear he initiated the interaction with them, which is not what had been reported.
The students join in dancing and chanting, which could be seen as mocking, but another drummer who is with Phillips has a big smile on his face when he sees that, so apparently at least he didn’t take it that way. Phillips’s actions in approaching them could be seen as him trying to get them to join in.
The supposed smirking is not really visible, unfortunately. Perhaps the person who had the great shot of it could release more of the video if they have it?
I’m one of those who interpreted young Nick Sandmann’s expression as a superior smirk and was calling for expulsion or worse.
Another good reminder not to fall for simple narratives that reinforce our own biases.