Covington High Schoolers: If You Don't Want To Be Seen As Racist, Maybe Don't Wear A MAGA Cap

Covington High Schoolers: If You Don't Want To Be Seen As Racist, Maybe Don't Wear A MAGA Cap

Polarized again. E pluribus duo! What a week. Viral videos of MAGA attired high school boys surround a chanting drum-beating Native American elder. The nation splits in two. Some go all in on Nicholas Sandmann being a good kid trying to defuse a situation. Others, including Nathan Phillips the Omaha elder, see racist hatred streaming from the boys’ smirks, chants and tomahawk chops. 

It’s easy to dismiss this as just another knife fight in Trump’s racially polarized America (or scissors fight if you’re Ross Douthat). Pick a side and stand with your people. And once the fight starts, well, we’re all just fighting. No need to learn anything; just stand with your people. But there is an important lesson to be learned, one that is crucially relevant for the parents of white teenage boys. 

Let’s remember that before the fight flared there was a beginning, back when the videos first went viral and before the Sandmann family hired a partisan-affiliated media relations firm, before the President himself stoked the fire. At this beginning what we find is confusion about how empathy works. And this avoidable confusion poured gasoline on the flickering embers.

Knowing whether someone has hateful or helpful intentions is an act of empathy. Sometimes empathy is automatic, clear and accurate. As the saying goes, and I share this as a dog-lover, even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and tripped over. Everything is clear. Other times it’s incredibly difficult and unclear. Empathy is a process filled with uncertainty, as anyone who has ever asked a loved one “what’s wrong” while trying to understand feelings and experience that remained opaque. Sometimes it's even inaccurate when we think we know the heart of another when we don’t.

When the situation is unclear, when ambiguity abounds, as is the case with any video snippet or complicated social interaction, accurate empathy requires taking in as much information as one can find. Everything about how the person is expressing themselves becomes important, things like tone, words used, body posture, facial expressions and the like.

But there’s more. Context also matters. Context sets expectations and defines possibility. As illustration consider the difference between someone thrown to the ground in front of your office versus the exact same behavior in the middle of a football game. Same behavior with the same facial expressions have very different meanings depending on context. And if you watched a short video snippet of both collisions you would definitely take into account how the people were dressed: business attire or football uniforms?

So, what is the context for understanding the split over attributing racist hate to Sandmann and his fellow students? Well, we are at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial where Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream Speech” in 1963. 4 or 5 black cult members had been hurling insults. An assembly of adolescent white faces, some wearing red MAGA caps, are cheering and shouting. Into those riled-up testosterone-fueled white boys wades a Native American elder banging a ritual drum. Then Sandmann stands in front of him and does not move. 

Now, whether or not you see racist hatred depends not on the ambiguities of facial expression and posture. It depends on how you interpret the context. One side is aware of the hateful meanings that have accrued to MAGA-wear since 2016 and the other side is not, or they are choosing to ignore that reality. 

In 2016 a MAGA cap was a political statement. Sure, it was already racially tinged but campaigns are campaigns. However, by 2019 that has changed. For more than half the country, anyone now sporting a red MAGA cap is either announcing hatred for people of color and immigrants or saying they stand with those who do. It’s a statement of support for the Charlottesville neo-nazis, for immigrant children in cages, for embracing and being embraced by white supremisists, for a history of birtherism and racist conspiracy theories. It announces solidarity with October's MAGA-Bomber and with the anti-Semitic anti-globalist rhetoric that fueled the Pittsburgh massacre. The Covington kids may not have wanted to be saying all those things. They might vehemently deny any belief or respect for any of those things. But intentional or unintentional actions have meaning. And sporting MAGA-wear at a political rally means that they are at the very least expressing solidarity with the most vile and violent anti-semites and racists our country breeds.

To further illustrate the centrality of the MAGA adorned context let’s do a thought experiment.  Imagine the teenage boys were African-American. Instead of MAGA hats they are fully decked out in whatever the latest trends are for inner-city kids. Instead of tomahawk chops and school chants there are hip-hop dance moves and songs, all with the accompanying facial expressions. Get that image in mind. Now imagine someone who looks like Mike Pence wading into the crowd shaking a tambourine. One of the kids strikes a pose right in front of him.

Would your feelings about the Lincoln Memorial episode be any different? Of course they would. If you said no then I fear you’re simply lying to yourself. That’s just how hate and otherness works.