Here’s the video of the exclusive interview:
Here are some highlights from the interview:
“I see it as a smile, saying that this is the best you're going to get out of me," Sandmann said in reference to the smirk that’s gone viral. "You won't get any further reaction of aggression.
"I’m willing to stand there as long as you have this drum in my face,” Sandmann told Guthrie. “People have judged me based off one expression, which I wasn’t smirking. They’ve gone from there to labeling me as a racist person, someone who’s disrespectful of adults. They’ve had to assume so much to get there without doing anything to get the other perspective.
"As far as standing there, I had every right to do so. My position is that I was not disrespectful to Mr. Phillips. I respect him. I'd like to talk to him," Sandmann said.
There’s a lot to unpack here. Yes, he’s still a teenager. Maybe an adult would have had the sense to walk away, or to politely engage with Phillips. But are brown and black teens given so much freedom to make mistakes or use poor judgment? Not without fearing for their lives, a result of police brutality, or, at minimum, white people calling the police on black people going about their lives at the drop of a dime. Only young white men, it seems, are given the opportunity to reclaim the narrative when they’ve done harm.
At no point does Sandmann use the interview as an opportunity to examine his privilege as a white male. At no point does he admit that he may even be ignorant, that he (in the best-case scenario) regretted not empathizing with Phillipps and was perhaps uneducated about the multi-layered marginalizations Native Americans historically have faced, and face today in the U.S. That maybe he should have yielded and shown respect.
Of course, his numerous peers who surrounded him, laughing, jeering, and recording the situation on their phones (which Sandmann claims to not have noticed at the time), could have also pulled him away from Phillips and moved the group along. Sandmann sticks out because he’s positioned directly opposite Phillips, but his peers behaved in a similarly horrible fashion.
Most of the interview on Today feels like a deflection. There’s a lot of discussion about how the alleged behavior of the Hebrew Israelites made Sandmann and his classmates feel, but very little about how their own behavior may have made Phillips feel. Instead, Sandmann focuses on how frustrated he feels in being misunderstood or labeled as a racist (all while wearing a MAGA hat) and argues that his smirk was not, in fact, a smirk. The obvious tensions aren’t dissected; there is no discussion of racism, ageism, or positionality and privilege. What, at the least, should have been a learning opportunity and a wake-up call doesn’t seem to have taught the students anything at all.
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