Twisting Facts To Suit Theories

A critique of Umair Haque’s “The Face of Supremacy, the Face of Patriarchy”

The story of the Covington Catholic High School students from the March for Life drew plenty of controversy, and revealed a great deal about media bias. There were plenty of individuals on both sides of the political spectrum who admitted to jumping to a rash generalization, and apologized for falsely condemning the students. However, there are those who insist on their defamation, openly in spite of the evidence to the contrary. One such commentator was Umair Haque of Eudaemonia & Co.

You can read his full take here. A full video of the scene can be found at this link.

To put it bluntly, Haque interprets, from a single frame taken out of hours of footage, symbols of patriarchy and white supremacy. That symbol is “the smirk.”

Haque’s analysis is constructed from an objectively wrong understanding of the circumstances. However, to make matters worse, he adds onto this incorrect perception layers of intersectional theory which permit him only to the figures in the photograph as representatives of a much larger narrative. He refuses to see either Nick Sandmann or Nathan Phillips as individuals, and rather imposes his own image of white and native american people on to the situation. In this…