Jonathan Schroder’s investigation of the social media imboglio between a group of prep school kids from Catholic Covenant, a native American demonstrator, and a crazy fringe group on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial is a deep dive–to paraphrase a line from last night’s Summertime–a profoundly shallow incident. As someone who spends an inordinate amount of time writing about the way that very narrow moments in art and pop culture have wider significance in our politics (occasionally here too, maybe?), I have to give Schroder credit for his persistence and focus. The overall sense of his documentary is a tidy reframing of the moment into a discussion about historical institutional wrongs (like lingering traditions of black face and physical abuse at Catholic Covenant), white privilege, and the polarization of media.
I think there’s maybe a little too much made of the rush to judgement by mainstream news media. Schroder’s documentary sort of assumes that you’re all caught up with the media firestorm around this, and as someone who only ever approached this in retrospect, I can appreciate how hard it must be to dramatize 48 hours of a news cycle, when it really blew over relatively fast, if not conclusively. It’s satisfying to listen to alumni and member of the public school board in Catholic Covenant’s district talk about how frustrating it was to listen to media completely forgive the boys at CC for their behavior even as they demonstrated no lack of circumspection or ambivalence about what had happened. Schroder is good about finding recent historical analogs for white supremacist violence in the Age of Trump, as well as file footage of racially insensitive blackface at CC rallies. His foil for the young man at the center of the controversy (described variously by a professor of journalism at USC and a writer at the Root as a distraction and a newly moved goalpost in order to avoid a more substantive critique of white privilege and white nationalism in the US) is a friend Brian Williams, who seems to take a lot of the sting out of criticisms of how the boys who graduate from CC are “socially maladjusted” and culturally conditioned to be little shits.
In some ways, I think this might be too narrow a subject to really be relevant to a lot of viewers, and in other ways it feels like required viewing along with TFW NO GF for anyone trying to understand how it feels to be a young white man in America from the white man’s point of view.
