In the Image of Jonestown


At first glance, there does seem to be something a bit out of touch, even menacing, about the scene. A small gathering of white people kneel before a Black man and woman seated on a park bench. Some of the white people appear to be washing the man’s and woman’s feet. A white woman in a red shirt strolls around with a megaphone intoning, “Repent on behalf of, uh, Caucasian people.” She then pulls over three people in what appear to be first-responder and police uniforms, who take a knee in what looks like an act of deep penitence. From the pavement, a man with a British accent leads the group through a prayer. “We stand here confessing…repenting for our aggression, repenting for our pride…for thinking we are better, that we are above.”

The captions tell you that the Black people are “protesters” and the white people are white people, and that this is happening in Cary, N.C., which doesn’t mean much to the vast majority of the audience watching this minute-long clip on their phones. The protests are national, which means this scene could happen anywhere, and what it shows reflects not on specific cities or people but rather on “the movement” as a whole. By the time it becomes clear these are church people and this ritual is a religious tradition and not some inevitable metastasizing of identity politics, wokeness, or critical race theory, the clip has already projected a vision of the future filled with bizarre rites, inversions of the social order, and a multicultural coalition of weird people acting out an expression of white guilt.

The obvious points of comparison here are the icons of the burned-out radical ’70s, whether the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Weather Underground, or, most dramatically, Jonestown. In these viral fantasies, the foot washers of Cary become the congregation of Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple. The water is always Kool-Aid, even when the metaphor doesn’t quite fit.

History on the Internet gets deliberated in two ways: Someone is always telling you that nothing like this has ever happened before, while someone else says that actually, this thing happens all the time. (Right now, I can hear people protesting, “But that’s how history has always worked.”) There’s no reason to litigate whether this compulsion is a good thing or a bad thing—for better or worse, it’s where we are—but we can, at the very least, trace the paths these types of argument take. Whether it was a bizarre ritual or a perhaps clumsy and too earnestly stated commitment to anti-racism, this event has certain symmetries with other things that happened in the past.

Those who say “This is how it’s always been” are right about one thing: The visual history of dissent in America has always been carefully edited. From a young age, we are indoctrinated through images that separate the good—the Boston Tea Party, Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington, Gandhi sitting cross-legged in the dust—from the bad. These categories are under a slow but constant negotiation. In my lifetime, Muhammad Ali and Harvey Milk went from being lightning rods for controversy to achieving a type of American sainthood. Their iconography comes in the form of stirring photographs and video clips that gesture toward the ideals we say we hold.

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