But what if everything that is to happen has already happened, and only the consequences are playing themselves out?
-Teju Cole
By the next morning, all of America knew Nicholas Sandmann’s smirk.
The various videos of Sandmann staring down Nathan Phillips while encircled by MAGA hat wearing white teenagers had made their way around the Internet multiple times. Each new video angle gave America new reasons to question Sandmann’s motives. Was he egged on by the Black Israelites who were yelling at them? Why did Phillips and his contingent of indigenous protestors place himself between the white high schoolers and the black religious cult? Did Phillip’s approach of Sandmann amount to instigation?
Black Twitter quickly made up it’s mind. They wanted the young man doxed, and quickly got about to figuring out who Sandmann was and what institutions created the smirk. Within days, it uncovered that he goes a school with very few—if any—black students. It uncovered photos of Covington Catholic High School basketball games where students donned blackface to harasses opposing teams.
Sandmann’s mother, in response, used her power and wealth as a vice president of an investment firm to hire a PR firm and get him an interview on national TV. Various mainstream media outlets changed their reporting, dredging up Phillip’s criminal record from decades ago in some attempt to balance out his service in the Vietnam War; he was, they said, no angel. The mainstream narrative suddenly turned toward Sandmann and away from the indigenous veteran. Such temerity from the old man for approaching this youth!
Black people know this playbook too well. White supremacy demands we be reasonable people in unreasonable times. The undercurrents of our history funnels though violence and oppression directed toward black personhood; it is difficult for mainstream culture, however, to articulate this because some of our most trusted news sources are products of white supremacy. How else do we explain the paucity of black journalists, columnists, and newspapermen and women producing the copy we consume? While we have a few bright voices who articulate the historical context of black thought, they are too few to actually influence the necessary shift in journalistic narrative.
Mainstream evenhandedness has been creating the “other side of the argument” since 1865. It has given voice to the white fear of running the nation equally alongside black personhood. Ida B. Wells showed that fear when she revealed lynchings were not motivated by the white fear of black rape, but to stymie black political and economic power. Walter White risked his life through the early 20th century to investigate white violence against black bodies on the behalf of the NAACP and revealed that lynchings were not motivated by crime, but to keep the lines of caste hardened. Malcolm X had to endure false charges that he was advocated black violence against white bodies. But what was to be the logical response to the police brutality endemic in Northern cities? What caused the narrative to focus on the anger of the victims instead of the depredations of their supposed protectors?
Even the world’s modern saint cannot dodge white supremacy’s tendency toward reasonableness. Martin Luther King Jr. campaigned under intense scrutiny and vitriol. In his life, he was told he was moving too fast; that he was pushing too hard; that he was making white moderates too uncomfortable with his agitation toward political and social equality. He was marked for murder. And then murder came. 40 years later, white supremacy continues to try to warp him into a black Santa Claus. We now have monuments about the clarity of his moral vision, and how he felt we needed to love each other to overcome. There is a continuing effort by the nation’s dominant culture to bury his true message of justice. King’s justice would require immense sacrifice from white people. His end goal was not to get white people and black people to like each other. King knew that there was a crime within the genesis of the American Experiment that needed correction.
There is a continuing effort by the nation’s dominant culture to bury his true message of justice. Look at how King was treated by his chief domestic adversary, versus how they see him now.
This is the core of the Sandmann controversy. The PR push, the mainstream culture’s attempt to have him seem like a thoughtful, reasonable child in the face of clear evidence that he is not; Sandmann and his enablers are trying to defend his worthiness for power. This defense is against an increasingly technologically savvy black personhood that will now dox him. They are afraid that our justice will feel like vengeance. It is not. It is simply making sure that all in this nation, when they make mistakes, are guided to the last arena of consequence—accountability—and judged by the same standards.
Sandmann’s smirk is simply the latest flashpoint between the reasonability white supremacy demands and the justice black personhood insists upon. We will use the tools of the 21st century to make sure that he cannot claim his power. But he probably will do so anyway, becoming a man who can stymie black personhood’s attempts of justice though decisions made as a politician, or a lawyer, or a doctor, or some senior executive at a brokerage firm or bank. That does not mean we should stop. Our freedom cast the dye. We are now simply going to insist that we finally let the consequences of his actions justly play themselves out.