Last night, I went out to eat with a friend. We arrived at the restaurant right after an altercation had occurred on the street outside. A man & his girlfriend had just been jumped & then pursued by their attacker. They had sought refuge in the restaurant.

We were seated next to the couple on the patio while the police chased down the assailant. The male victim was icing both sides of his face. He appeared to be in his early-20s, while the girl appeared perhaps a few years younger. Both were clearly weary post-adrenaline rush.

One of the officers checked to see if the man was dizzy or bleeding inside his mouth & needing medical attention. He was fine, just bruised & stunned.

"I've never been hit in the face before," he told the officer.

The other two officers returned minutes later w/ the assailant in handcuffs. They asked him whether this was the couple he'd had an altercation w/. He said "Yeah."

Then he said something startling.

"You're going down," he said to the victim. "Black lives matter & y'all arresting me in the white part of town."

I'm unsure of his precise words, but he made it clear he intended to accuse the victim of racism. He then shouted "Black lives matter" as they led him to the cruiser.

Several witnesses to the assault were present to confirm the victims' account. As the officers took down statements, a voice on the radio announced that the assailant had recently assaulted & injured another person in a neighboring county.

Several things disturb me about this episode. In our cultural moment the assailant's accusation might be taken seriously in many quarters. More importantly, the assailant seems to have discerned a way to instrumentalize the zeitgeist. I doubt he'll succeed, but it's plausible.

The victim, upon being accused, was clearly bewildered by the accusation. I imagine he also felt a surreal sense of dread at the prospect of being made into a villain after getting beaten up.

Most disturbing of all is the prospect that I'm completely misinterpreting what happened thanks to being overly involved in Twitter discourse. E.g., my normie friend assumed the assailant was threatening further violence & only invoking BLM in a plea for sympathy from onlookers.

It's also possible that he genuinely feared what might happen to him & meant to draw attention for the sake of safety. My reflexive sympathy for the man who had been assaulted & emasculated before his girlfriend temporarily foreclosed my ability to empathize w/ the assailant.

The assailant was clearly addled, likely mentally ill, so if I should be confident of anything it's that I'm over-interpreting this episode, assigning to it undue (or perhaps overly-determined) symbolic baggage.

As the event unfolded, I felt intensely that I was witnessing a living condensed symbol for our perverse, convoluted cultural moment. Now I suspect that that symbol has no fixed referent—which is to say I need to approach America's racial crisis w/ much more epistemic humility.