Covington Catholic Students In Blackface Underline Race Issues At Private School
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By Andy Campbell, Huffington Post
An image from since deleted videos of a Covington Catholic basketball game. Several of the Covington students are in blackface. At this game, black players on the opposing team were verbally abused. Source: Huffington Post
On the weekend of a national holiday in celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. and his teachings, it was a group of white boys from an overwhelmingly white Catholic school in a 90-percent-white county in Kentucky who got the nation talking about broad themes in racism.
A confrontation between MAGA-hat-wearing students at Covington Catholic High School and a Native American sparked a nationwide conversation about racism, the symbolism of the “Make America great again” hat and what it means for a group of white kids to stand face to face with a dark-skinned man and mock, sneer and howl at him.
The teen most infamously involved in that scene, high school junior Nick Sandmann, hired a crisis management firm to pull him and his peers out of the deep end. He released a statement pointing to several black men who identified themselves as Hebrew Israelites and the Native American man, Nathan Phillips, as the real aggressors. A new, longer video of the incident went viral in tandem, and within hours, national media ― including HuffPost ― began walking back their takes, calling the incident “complicated” or characterizing Phillips as “confronting” the teens.
The backpedaling, too, would be short-lived, as new allegations of racism and intolerance from Covington Catholic students quickly surfaced.
No statement appeared to address, for example, a video showing students doing the “tomahawk chop” ― a chant and gesture adopted by the Atlanta Braves in the 1990s and decried as insensitive by Native Americans ever since ― toward Phillips as they surrounded him.
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