by Ryan Kelly
It is difficult to hear a man’s phlegmatic explanations of the racial empathy gap over the taunts of an overzealous protester jeering at the explainer’s choice of footwear. The explainer is reading aloud from an article detailing research done at the University of Milano-Bicocca, in which participants were shown video clips of a needle touching the skin of subjects of varied ethnicity. The conclusion of the study was that the average viewer responds more dramatically to seeing a white person receive painful stimulus than other ethnicities. The explainer, having never heard of this phenomenon, attempts to listen but is distracted by the jibes at his shoes, and the man reciting is now on his fourth attempt to read the article from the beginning. When the fifth attempt fails the subject is dropped, and the conversation pivots back to the explainer’s clothes — this time focusing mainly on his Make America Great Again hat.
It is a hot day in Newnan, Georgia on April 21, 2018 and the crowd I am standing in at the city’s center apprehensively awaits a march of representatives from the National Socialist Movement that will never come. The demonstration by the neo-Nazi group has been contained in a small park on the west side of town, where members are celebrating the birthday of Adolf Hitler. Here in the city’s center counter-protesters have gathered looking to express a united front against racism and hate speech.
But as the day grows late and the neo-Nazis still have not shown, those desperate for their voices to be heard stage a last-ditch effort that results in an inter-party debate, then subsequently devolves to targeted ridicule. The man in the MAGA cap (whom I will refer to as MAGA guy) is there to protest the National Socialist Movement as well as to support both groups’ right to free speech. He is surrounded on all sides by a crowd of counter-protesters eager to photograph a racist in the flesh, and prove to the man that he himself is a Nazi. Cries of “fascist!” are heard at a consistent interval of approximately 15-20 seconds, interspersed with comments on his flannel shirt, flared jeans and cowboy boots. MAGA guy steadfastly deflects the baiting, proving unreactive and confident in his wardrobe choices. But he seems to relish the attention. “Anyone else have any more questions for a Trump supporter?” he asks the crowd.
Eventually, he is joined by two sympathizers. The first mounts an effort to decry the mocking rhetoric the crowd has utilized up to this point and condemns their vulgar language, yelling belligerently about the young children in the crowd that should not be hearing such words. A member of the crowd tells him to screw off (in harsher words), labeling him a fascist as well for his efforts to silence them. He obliges, and MAGA guy is down one sympathizer. The next joins in the midst of a debate on the merits of capitalism, showing her support for MAGA guy by laughing mockingly in the faces of members of the crowd. She stays with him until the end, through another hour of repetitive discourse cycling between claims of socialism and fascism, and ad hominem attacks on each other’s appearances.
The pyrrhic victory leaves me with a hollow, cynical feeling, and I can tell I am not alone. Neither side has been convinced and in fact, both seem more entrenched in their polarized views than when all this started. MAGA guy leaves the exchange vacantly with his hat tighter around his head than before. The mob of counter-protesters evaporates in the opposite direction, assured that the Instagram stories they have uploaded of themselves shouting down a “neo-Nazi” will garnish high favor amongst their followers. As my companion and I walk back to the car, I cannot help but consider that maybe we are all suffering from an empathy gap.
