Covington Kids Exonerated from Wrong-doing

[_Jersey Girl]

You don't give the high school students credit for thinking like the adolescents that they are. Executive function, EAllusion.

Come on.

Do you think Ralph Northam intended to express contempt for black people when he dressed in blackface for fun?

How relevant do you think the answer to that question is to whether we describe what he did as wrong and expect him to be contrite about it?

Was Ralph Northam an adult when he did so?

[_canpakes]

Take from it what you will, the idea that he was confronting Philips r exhibiting dick-like behavior is not supported by the full scope of evidence. I'm a dick and know it. That kid did not behave like one.

I don’t believe that pulling a dick move is absolutely synonymous with being a dick in general, or even being intentionally confrontational in that particular situation. Sometimes people just do stupid things with no underlying agenda. He could just be that socially unaware as to have stepped into this not realizing how his action might be interpreted by anyone else observing, and in fairness, very few people waste that much time self-assessing their every move. But it can be a dick move regardless, and social interaction requires folks to consider that conclusion and impact.

I’d assume that some folks understandably take a next step and interpret what happened here as ‘dick in training’. Seems that enough people perceived dickish behavior enough to let that set off the alarm bells on social behavior (which is why it was easily exploited through Twitter and whatnot - “perception is reality”, as some folks here would say, which can explain how it caught so much traction and riled up so many.

[_Jersey Girl]

How relevant do you think the answer to that question is to whether we describe what he did as wrong and expect him to be contrite about it?

Executive function again. Your expecation is that high school students should have the foresight to recognize that a behavior or symbol holds deeper meaning, and if they engage it, they should be contrite about it (tomahawk chops for example that are offensive to some and for others used to root for their sports team) as should an adult.

Listen to what I hear you saying.

When I was a kid I watched Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, Amos & Andy (and others) on television--all in black face. They were fun. One of my favorite childhood story books was Little Black Sambo I kid you not. I liked the part with the pancakes. See how I remember it? I have professional photos of myself reading it at age 3-ish in a pink pinafore dress.

I never once perceived those as racist. They were fun. They were interesting to me.

Should I be held to contrition on account of what I found entertaining as a child or the surfer cross that I wore as a teenager on the beaches?

Are you asking kids to rise to adult level cognitive function?

Hell EA, many of us who reacted to the video when it was initially posted didn't rise to adult level cognitive function myself included.

You can beat the horse until it's bloody. The horse will still be a group of kids who think and behave as kids.

[_Jersey Girl]

On some Halloween's it was typical of us (who gathered up our own costumes back in prehistoric times) to use coal from the coal pile out back to blacken our faces and dress up like "bums".

I suppose I should be begging for forgiveness for that crap.

Right.

[_Jersey Girl]

Take from it what you will, the idea that he was confronting Philips r exhibiting dick-like behavior is not supported by the full scope of evidence. I'm a dick and know it. That kid did not behave like one.

Yeah but you're the very best kind of dick. It's rather glorious in it's execution.

The kid behaved like a kid.

Thought experiment: Put a female student in the position of Nick S.

What are her intentions?

[_EAllusion]

How relevant do you think the answer to that question is to whether we describe what he did as wrong and expect him to be contrite about it?

Executive function again. Your expecation is that high school students should have the foresight to recognize that a behavior or symbol holds deeper meaning, and if they engage it, they should be contrite about it (tomahawk chops for example that are offensive to some and for others used to root for their sports team) as should an adult.

Listen to what I hear you saying.

When I was a kid I watched Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, Amos & Andy (and others) on television--all in black face. They were fun. One of my favorite childhood story books was Little Black Sambo I kid you not. I liked the part with the pancakes. See how I remember it? I have professional photos of myself reading it at age 3-ish in a pink pinafore dress.

I never once perceived those as racist. They were fun. They were interesting to me.

Should I be held to contrition on account of what I found entertaining as a child or the surfer cross that I wore as a teenager on the beaches?

Are you asking kids to rise to adult level cognitive function?

Hell EAllusion, many of us who reacted to the video when it was initially posted didn't rise to adult level cognitive function myself included.

You can beat the horse until it's bloody. The horse will still be a group of kids who think and behave as kids.

Glossing over some nuanced distinctions in what different minstrel performers were doing, if you were into Sambo and blackface as a 16 year old, yeah that’s bad and something you should apologize for. If you didn’t perceive it as racist, it was still racist. We can explain your bad behavior in terms of your cultural milieu, but understanding it doesn’t make it ok. We can forgive you in your limitations, but forgiveness implies recognition of something wrong in the first place.

Importing this argument in to the present you are both underestimating the sophistication of late adolescents and how much cultural opportunity there is to be better than that. That isn’t central here because even if we grant all that, it’s still a bad thing that needs to be forgiven and improved upon. You of all people should know that it’s not wise to react to poor behavior by teens by saying their brains are still developing and therefore no contrition or alteration of behavior is needed.

[_EAllusion]

My highschool had a Native American mascot. While I attended, there was a hoopla because some students were doing a mock "war chant" at football games and an unrelated parent complained on behalf of a single Native American in the school district.

The "war chant" was an absolute embarrassment that other students clearly understood, but bros gonna bro. The fall out from this was a push for the school to change its mascot, followed by a counter push back from the community that brought out all sorts of racism and naïveté. The final agreed upon solution was that the mascot would be kept, art around it would be less caricatured, the "war chanting" stuff would stop immediately under threat of discipline, and every student had to undergo "sensitivity training." I remember the training being painfully awkward. At the time, my thinking was that anyone not put off by the delivery enough to hear what was being said probably already understood it anyway and anyone who didn't understand it wasn't going to be persuaded by something so schmaltzy and forced. As an adult, I've read research indicating that workplace harassment training isn't really effective, can actually increase incidence of harassment, and is mainly a corporate butt-covering exercise. That has reinforced my opinion of that sensitivity training that, as far as I know, probably still goes on.

Thinking back on that time, it's quite clear to me that lots of teens absolutely appreciated how racially disrespectful the behavior was. I remember discussing this in AP political science for an entire period with the consensus being the students responsible for the offending behavior were being complete dicks with divided opinion over whether the compromise solution to their behavior was sound. Most of that class, myself included, just wanted to change the mascot.

[_huckelberry]

When I was a kid I watched Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, Amos & Andy (and others) on television--all in black face. They were fun. One of my favorite childhood story books was Little Black Sambo I kid you not. I liked the part with the pancakes. See how I remember it? I have professional photos of myself reading it at age 3-ish in a pink pinafore dress.

I never once perceived those as racist. They were fun. They were interesting to me.

Should I be held to contrition on account of what I found entertaining as a child

Jersey girl , your comment made me me refresh my faint memory of Al Jolson. He seems to reflect the problematic ambiguities in the role of black face in American culture. At this time he appears quite distasteful in black face yet he intends no insult in its use. It is however a reminder of a pathological condition in American culture. That condition causes us now to jump to seeing the negative implication before any other possibilities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5Tm7bMUhUw

[_EAllusion]

What Al Jolson was doing was intended to and functioned as a tribute to the social station of black people in America that he saw parallels with in his own Jewish experience. He was operating within an artform that had wide acceptance at the time to accomplish this. It's not really proper to equate what he was doing to all of minstrel performance. The term "problematic" in is proper context is supposed to refer to things like this where things of artistic value is complicated by dated or errant cultural beliefs that caused harm.

On the flip side, because what Al Jolson was doing had merit, that doesn't make black face Ok. Yes, people delighted in racist stereotyping of black people without intending to express racist contempt towards blacks. Blackface performance wasn't usually meant to be mean-spirited. It was a prejudiced caricature. That's generally how racism works.

[_honorentheos]

EA and Honor,

It looks to me like most of your disagreement flows from how each of you defines racism. Honor defines it more narrowly, requiring some degree of intent. EA defines it more broadly, not requiring intent. Because Honor defines it more narrowly, he sees it as significant moral failure. Because EA defines it more broadly, it will encompass behavior that is less morally objectionable. But you seem to me to be pretty close on the important questions here: what should have happened? What, if anything, should have happened to the participants in the incident?

Hi Res,

I would like to think it isn't about how we define racism so much as if there is a spectrum of behavior that deserves different responses depending on their severity. I'm in no way arguing that a kid doing a tomahawk chop is not exhibiting racially insensitive behaviour. But it seems like the sort of behavior best dealt with through explanation of why it might be seen as offensive to a Native American. It certainly isn't anywhere on the same side of the spectrum as what the BHI demostrated. My read of EA, and apparently others such as Lemmie, is they take issue with my leaving open the possibility it could come from ignorance rather than racist intent.

By your way of framing it above, you may also agree that I'm arguing it isn't "racist" to exhibit cultural insensitivity whether out of ignorance or otherwise. I disagree that allowing for a spectrum of racist behaviors deserving a scalable approach is minimizing racism per se. Cultural insensitive certainly arises out of a historical context that ignored the perspective of the people being reduced to offensive stereotypes or mocking symbolism. But you don't fix that by applying the same response as you would to an avowed White Nationalist engaging in violence.

Honestly, it's bizarre to me that this is such a controversial view.