The prevailing media narrative in the immediate aftermath of the incident was roughly as follows:
- A group of boys from Covington Catholic High School were on a trip to attend the March for Life rally.
- The rally happened to coincide with an indigenous peoples’ demonstration nearby.
- Motivated by white privilege and racism (rather than, say, garden-variety teenage obnoxiousness), the schoolboys began chanting to drown out the activists.
- Native American activist Nathan Phillips was then surrounded by menacing and entitled youths wearing MAGA hats.
- Phillips beat his drum and sang a tune intended to heal the boys.
- The boys responded by mocking him and yelling “Build the wall!” while one of their number smirked into Phillips’s face, an act of effrontery that apparently reflects the entitlement and racism of white Americans, the moral arrogance of Trump supporters, the malevolence of privileged high school bullies like Brett Kavanaugh, and so on and so forth.
Footage has since emerged that provides a fuller picture of the incident, and it now appears that this narrative is almost entirely untrue. It seems that it was Phillips who approached the boys, beating his drum while they were minding their own business, chanting their high school cheer and awaiting instructions from their chaperone. In every video of the event that I have watched, the boys’ behaviour is arguably rowdy and insensitive, but I have yet to see any evidence that supports the far more egregious charge of racism. That is, unless we are prepared to accept that any confrontation between a Native American and a white youth is ipso facto racist, no matter who instigated it or why.
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