Jaylin Smith and Mike Ezell don’t have much in common.
Smith is a liberal-leaning, 24-year-old Black woman from the heavily Democratic Mississippi Delta just getting started in a journalism career after completing her master’s at the University of Mississippi. Her sympathies are with the Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, who have become the collateral damage in the Israel-Hamas war.
Ezell is a conservative, 65-year-old white former sheriff and now congressman who represents the heavily Republican Gulf Coast of Mississippi. He is a defender of Israel’s right to respond aggressively to the brutal, horrific attack on its civilians by Hamas on Oct. 7 that got the war started.
What Smith and Ezell do share is being goaded recently into losing their temper by those who disagree with them about the war and the U.S. response to it.
I can’t say, though, that I blame either of them for saying or doing things that, with calmer reflection, they would have been better to avoid.
Smith, who graduated from Greenwood High and Mississippi Valley State University before winding up in Oxford, was targeted by whites who were counter-protesting against the much smaller group of pro-Palestinian students that Smith had joined.
The racist insults by the Ole Miss student who made monkey noises and gestures at Smith were certainly deplorable, but the efforts of others to belittle Smith for her weight were just as bad.
It spoke poorly of the level of education and maturity at the university that several of the student counter-protesters thought the way to respond to those with whom you are having a political disagreement is to degrade them. It’s a major problem with the political discourse in this country today that so many people have lost the ability to disagree civilly. It’s also a bit astounding that a university that has tried so hard since the 1960s to shake its image as a place this is unfriendly to African Americans still can’t quite get past that reputation.
Although Smith’s emotional reaction was understandable, it did make an already bad situation worse. She should have stayed behind the barricade that university officials had set up to separate and protect the protesters from the counter-protesters. By engaging in a heated exchange with her tormentors, she lowered herself not quite to their level but enough that she lost some of the support and sympathy she would have otherwise received for the insulting manner in which she was treated.
Also, although Smith afterward tried to distinguish her role as an activist from that of an aspiring journalist, she will need to learn that she can’t do both. Journalists are supposed to cover the news, not be part of it. That rule applies not only when they are on the clock but also when they’re off of it. Otherwise, they lose the presumption of objectivity, and their work is discounted because of a perceived bias.
As for Ezell, the two anti-war activists that hounded him as he walked down a hallway at the U.S. Capitol were obviously hoping they could goad him into doing something on camera that would be embarrassing and receive media attention.
They succeeded.
Although Ezell tried at points during the brief encounter to ignore the harassing, he let his temper get the best of him, angrily telling one of the female antagonists to “get away from me” and the other to “shut up” before reaching out his hand and knocking from her hands a cellphone being used to record him.
It was exactly what the two were hoping for, instantly accusing Ezell of assault and warning him “you’re gonna pay for that.”
It’s unlikely he will pay for it either in a criminal court or in the court of public opinion. Most of Ezell’s constituents will conclude that he was the aggrieved party. His popularity will go up, not down as a result of the widely distributed video of the confrontation.
Still, it would be well for the freshman congressman — and anyone else who tends to get exercised by political differences — to think about what Smith wrote on Facebook after the incident at Ole Miss. Though she did not apologize for how she reacted in the heat of the moment, she said that she wished she had handled the situation better.
“I know that I stooped down to the agitators’ level when I responded the way that I did,” she wrote. “I won’t apologize for that, but as I mature I will find better ways to manage conflict.”
What hopefully she will find is that the best way to respond to the hecklers and harassers is to ignore them. Just because they lose their dignity is no reason to lose your own.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
