From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:
The thing you learn in a city with diversity or various viewpoints is that not everything is about you, concerns you, or needs you to confront it. You can be called a blue-eyed devil whore, and that’s just some shit someone has to say about you because they are working out their demons in public, where about a hundred other people can also see them being ugly, and you not listening. There is no reason to call out or call back. The Covington Catholic kids were confronted by the Black Hebrew Israelites, and had no reference for how to not confront them. They weren’t ever told this kind of provocation existed. These kids never took a downtown subway somewhere, I guess. They were going to be unnecessarily confrontational, and it looked like there were no adults who would tell them not to do this.(Not to turn the other cheek? Even if there was a pretty solid Christian basis for not starting shit, the chaperones weren’t trying to be about it.) Nathan Phillips thought he was peacefully intervening because from his point of view, these young people needed their attention turned away from the negative energy the BHI were bringing and hoped they would be respectful of his prayerful positive energy.
But they didn’t know how to confront that, either. These were, to them, just other people of color acting weird at them, and they could not determine if this was a threat or on their side, and not knowing how to just not react, they behaved with ignorance, because that was what they had.
I’m not going to say they were necessarily behaving hatefully right there, because I don’t think they knew how they would be seen. They didn’t react as if they would be seen, even though many phone-camera angles captured them. I think they behaved ignorantly, because this is what they had. A lot of crappy white behavior (me just speaking as a white person) probably boils down to ignorance. This is sometimes called “Hanlon’s razor”: Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. Because I work for the government, I have had to make myself very much aware of how this variation on Occam’s Razor really works.
But there is ignorant, and there is ignorant.