When unarmed teen Mike Brown was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson, he was called "no angel." Tamir Rice was 12 years old when police shot and killed him as he played in a park; it took police only two seconds to make a judgment and pull the trigger because they thought he was carrying a gun. These two young people were essentially indicted and sentenced to death without any court involvement, not because they had committed a crime, but because police made snap decisions about who they were. Countless other boys and men of color have died this way, and rather than getting a fair trial, they are often posthumously vilified in the court of public opinion.

But when a white teenager does something bad, he seems more likely to get the benefit of the doubt.

We're seeing this racist double standard play out in real time, thanks to Nicholas Sandmann, who has been given the chance to explain viral images and videos of him and his classmates laughing and chanting face-to-face with Nathan Phillips, an Omaha elder, who stood beating a drum in prayer. The combination of Nicholas’s physical stance, his smirk, and the group wearing MAGA attire sent the story into a viral tailspin, and a he-said-he-said debate ensued. No matter which video you watch — the longer one, or the shorter viral clip — the teens appear to be disrespectful, at the very least, taunting and harassing at worst.

But many have been quick to jump to the defense of Nicholas and his classmates. In a statement released after the incident, and now through his appearance on the Today show, Nicholas has been given opportunities that many white men benefit from: He can rewrite history from his point of view.

According to Phillips's account of the situation, a group of Native people involved in the Indigenous Peoples March approached as teens from Covington Catholic, who were attending the anti-abortion March for Life in Washington, D.C., were being yelled at by another group, identified as part of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement. (A wing of this movement has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an "extremist fringe" group that's "growing more militant.") They were yelling obscenities at the teens, which Nicholas described in his statement after the incident.

"They called us 'racists,' 'bigots,' 'white crackers,'" Nicholas wrote in his statement. That much is true. Videos show it happening.

The Covington Catholic students rallied together as the insults were hurled at them, chanting and yelling together, as Phillips and a group of Native marchers approached in what Phillips said was an attempt at peace.

"When I started singing our songs, our prayers to God — that drum is an instrument we use to communicate to God. When I started that drum beat it was, 'God look at us here now,'" Phillips told MSNBC. "I'm praying, 'God, we're at the end of our Indigenous People's March and we want to end this in a good way, but look at my America here.' We're at a point where we can't stand by and watch this. You've gotta do something, you've gotta stop it."

In a different interview on CNN, Phillips said he quickly realized he was in a potentially risky situation.

"Here's a group of people angry at somebody else and I put myself in front of that," he told CNN. "All of a sudden, I'm the one who's [the target of] all that anger."