A Champions’ Tale

They encircled him, dressed in their former Jeopardy! contestants’ robes. They pointed their index finger at him and began to chant: Sinner, sinner, sinner.

They possessed a breadth of knowledge, state capitals and mountain ranges, song lyrics and literary references. And they believed with all their heart and soul that they were the good one, which made their cause not merely just, but beyond reproach.

They had seen a contestant on that night’s show, a big white guy with a red tie, Kelly Donohue, make an odd gesture with three fingers of his right hand. “Based on the evidence we’ve seen being bandied about elsewhere, there is a real possibility he was giving either a white power or a Three Percenter hand gesture,” wrote one moderator, a middle-school teacher who was on the show about five years ago, according to screenshots provided by another group member. And though “we can’t know his intent,” he continued, “we’re not here to provide safe harbor for white supremacists.”

Snopes said no, it wasn’t a white supremacist hand single. It was just him signaling his third win, as if they would believe this apologist.

But he used his pointer & middle for “1” and “2”… No one does this and then changes to this hand formation to count “3”.

No one.

Maybe not exactly “no one,” but that wasn’t the point. Did he? Did Donahue? They saw it with their own eyes. How could there possibly be any doubt?

Mr. Donohue had tried to explain himself after the episode aired and accusations of covert white supremacy began turning up on his personal Facebook page. “That’s a 3. No more. No less,” he wrote. “There wasn’t a hidden agenda or any malice behind it.”

Exactly what one would expect a white supremacist engaging in secret hand signals to say.

His fellow former contestants responded harshly in their letter to his attempt to explain himself. “Most problematic to us as a contestant community is the fact that Kelly has not publicly apologized for the ramifications of the gesture he made,” they wrote. That prompted him to “reject and condemn white supremacy” in a second statement.

Sinner. Sinner. Sinner. TESTIFY!

If something has been misconstrued, an apology and a total disavowal of any connection to white supremacist doctrines is called for. We saw that gesture air on television. We are among the public it affected, and we are a diverse group of people. People of color, religious minorities, and other marginalized groups already live in a United States and a Canada that have structural and institutional racism, sexism, antisemitism, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia embedded into their history and function. These people deal with microaggressions nearly every day of their lives, through words, actions, and assumptions that remind them on a constant basis that they are not the default, they are not the mainstream, they are not “real citizens.” And that is hard enough. That is enough for them to bear and enough for us to keep trying to recognize, to address, and to fight.

Donahue issued a statement condemning white supremacy which, to no one’s surprise, made no difference whatsoever. A letter was also sent to that bastion of hatred, the Anti-Defamation League calling for condemnation.

Then, two weeks later, the group finally heard back from the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish civil rights group that is usually quick to call out anything with the faintest smell of bigotry.

“We have reviewed the tape and it looks like he is simply holding up three fingers when they say he is a three-time champion. We do not interpret his hand signal to be indicative of any ideology. However, we are grateful to you for raising your concern, and please do not hesitate to contact us in the future should the need arise.”

Rather than calm the perpetually outraged, this evoked yet further hysteria.

The A.D.L.’s response provoked fury among former contestants who had signed the letter.

“Is anyone else feeling gaslit?” asked one two-time champion, according to the screenshots. “We saw it. We know we did. But a lot of people (including the goddamned ADL) are telling us we didn’t. That’s some classic gaslighting.”

Apparently, knowing the phylum of algae does not enable one to engage in rational synthesis. If you see something, which you obviously saw just as everyone else can see it in the still image that is available for all to see, does that mean your interpretation of what it means is either valid or unassailable? The hip term “gaslighting” means “manipulate (someone) by psychological means into questioning their own sanity.” Apparently, being wrong isn’t a possibility for the 595 former Jeopardy! contestants to entertain, leaving their sanity exposed as dubious.

Social media turns just about everything into a kind of team sport, including analyzing the ills of social media. But we’re all easy to fool when a photograph, say, confirms what we already thought, and all our friends are sharing it. And the people who benefit from allowing instinct to stand in for evidence were, in the “Jeopardy!” case, the exact people the letter signers hated most, the trolls who first tried to turn a different innocuous hand gesture into a racist symbol, and now have us all seeing secret Nazi code on prime-time television.

From the perspective of the outraged contestants, they are not only believers in their own  superior intelligence, but the fact that they are on the side of goodness, righteousness, history. When they condemn conduct for either being white supremacist, which is so obviously wrong as to provide a near-perfect justification for any consequence that follows, it doesn’t matter whether it is, in fact, or merely appears that way to people searching for things to be outraged about. Concerns about intent, or even fact, are so very white as they ignore the impact on others, mostly the allies of the marginalized who feel the duty to destroy for the sake of others.

Kelly Donahue was a guy on Jeopardy! who won a few games.

As people whose lives have been largely beneficially impacted by this show and its community, we really hope to see a statement and a disavowal of both of this week’s events, and we would like to see “Jeopardy!” address Kelly’s behavior.

Jeopardy! did. They gave him over $80 thousand dollars. Now his fellow contestants demand he be put on the wall.