Nathan Philips of the Omaha Nation speaking on what happened from @/ka_ya11 IG. pic.twitter.com/XBf1kTf8a5
— Unceded Clothing (@UncededClothing) January 19, 2019
Apparently there is a volk custom where busloads of milk-fed suburban high schoolers are shipped into Washington DC every year to bulk up the numbers at the “National Right to Abuse Women Life March.” The teenagers, of course, treat this event with all the seriousness they accord every field trip. It’s up to the chaperones to ensure the kids, in their youthful exuberance, don’t forget the moral codes and social boundaries their parents have done their best to instill.
By that standard, the adults around Nick Sandmann and his peers seem to have failed in their duty of care.
When you don’t need to shave but Gillette already made a commercial about you. pic.twitter.com/Edl9eEeP28
— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) January 20, 2019
Self-respecting adults don’t go into a public place and treat strangers this way. And if the Covington Catholic parents haven’t been able to get that simple concept across to their offspring, for whatever reasons, they need to provide better supervision than that of Monseigneur HereForTheGrift and Coach StandsWithAThumbUp.
Most succinct summary I’ve seen so far, from Josh Marshall at TPM:
… A Native American group (The Indigenous People’s March) had marched to the Memorial earlier earlier in the day. Later a group of teenage boys from a Catholic High School in Covington, Kentucky were also there. They were in town for the March for Life, an anti-abortion march. They had apparently congregated at the Memorial as a staging point to wait for buses to leave. While these two very different things were happening, there was a third much smaller group of so-called “Black Israelites” – maybe half a dozen men – who had been there seemingly for most of the day haranguing both groups…
In any case, at some point late in the afternoon, the Black Israelites are yelling at the High School kids and vice versa. The more aggressive language, at least at the start, is coming from the Black Israelites, using homophobic slurs and using the N-word directed at one of the High Schoolers who’s African-American (seemingly the only one.) It’s not totally clear to me who started what here. But you’ve got the hyper-aggressive black supremacist group and this crowd of white high school boys in MAGA hats. So I’m not sure much of a spark was needed.
It’s this situation Phillips described as getting out of control when he decided to intervene to settle things down or at least try to put himself between the two groups. Phillips walks between the two groups and into the group of students. The group of students parts around him and pretty quickly he’s surrounded by high school students who are variously laughing, jeering and chanting. The one student whose face you’ve no doubt seen doesn’t move aside like the others and that’s where you have the standoff captured in the original viral video.
As this is happening, the kids surrounding the two are taunting Phillips and laughing and variously goofing off like high school guys do. The entire tableau is defined by the fact that Phillips, the Native American elder with a dark complexion, is surrounded by lily white teens probably half of whom are wearing MAGA caps. They’re all laughing, taunting and doing ‘tomahawk chops’ in response to Phillips. I’ve seen various people claiming in the light of the new videos that the kids might simply be milling around or laughing uncomfortably or even chanting in unison with Phillips’ drumming. That’s a stretch by any definition and the ‘tomahawk chop’ hand motions put any such claims to rest. It’s already a pretty riled up situation. But it’s crystal clear their reaction to Phillips is one of jeering and racial taunting…
MAGAt Scions vs. Peace Warrior Nathan Phillips: I Blame the ParentsPost + Comments (100)