Addressing Important Social Issues Still Requires Caring About What is True

The Case of Kaylee Gain and Maurnice DeClue

Photo by Hassan Pasha on Unsplash

A few weeks ago, video emerged of a fight between two groups of Missouri teenagers centring on the altercation between two girls, now known to be Maurnice DeClue (15) and Kaylee Gain (16). The two girls are seen to square up to each other and a female voice shouts “Get her, Kaylee!” before Kaylee, who appears to be taller but of significantly slighter build than Maurnice, lunges at the other girl swinging wildly. Maurnice swings Kaylee around and onto the ground where she is seen to rain blows on Kaylee’s head shouting “Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!” as Kaylee strikes out ineffectually at her with both hands and feet. Maurnice then pushes Kaylee onto her back, straddles her and strikes her head into the concrete road approximately three times. The fight is over in 12 seconds. Maurnice then jumps up and is seen to attempt to pull a boy away from another he was fighting, saying “Get off of him!” then attempt to separate another fight and is finally seen to be ushering the first boy away from the main scene of fighting. Meanwhile, Kaylee appears to be unconscious and convulsing and was taken to hospital where she was found to have a fractured skull and brain bleed. She was in a coma for three weeks but is reported to have regained consciousness and be able to have short conversations but require assistance to walk. Maurnice has been remanded to a juvenile facility and is facing assault charges.

Typically, narratives immediately sprang up around the incident with social media users being absolutely certain that they knew from this one minute long video that one girl was a vicious bully and the other simply defending herself. These narratives were frequently racialised because Kaylee is white and Maurnice is black. Missouri Attorney General, Andrew Bailey, has claimed that DEI policies which promoted racial divisiveness and a radical social agenda at the expense of proper discipline and had resulted in inadequate security at the school were to blame even though the fight took place half a mile from the school and outside of school hours. Meanwhile, St. Louis County Police said, “We’re not seeing any kind of racial motivation in this fight” and the school district issued a statement about the need to address bullying and violence across the entire community for the sake of the children. Many outlets reported the incident to be one of enmity between two warring friendship groups and, in the video, a girl seen to aim blows at Maurnice from behind in defence of Kaylee is black while, of the two girls who drive her back, one is black and one white.

The narrative around Kaylee being the bully and aggressor from whom Maurnice, an innocent girl, was simply defending herself calls upon evidence that Kaylee had been suspended from school for fighting the previous day (which may have been what led to this incident). A video which catches the end of the fight and shows her continuing to strike at another girl who is shielding her head while school security pulls her away and a female voice again says “Get her ass, Kaylee!” has been circulated along with a video of Kaylee gloating about winning a fight saying “Your friend got beat up. How do you feel?” Kaylee went willingly to the altercation despite being suspended and having no reason to be there and she threw the first punch egged on by friends. Maurnice, on the other hand, had never been in any trouble and was an exceptional student who had been moved ahead a grade, selected for college level classes, played violin in the school orchestra and volleyball for the school as well as learning four languages, two of them in her own time. She also, it is alleged, had not known she was walking into a fight but had been attempting to board a bus home when she was waylaid by fellow students and lured to where Kaylee and her friends were waiting for her and was forced to defend herself. Kaylee is a malicious trouble-maker, this narrative tells us.

The narrative around Maurnice being the bully and aggressor whom Kaylee, finally standing up for herself, had little chance of being able to defeat relies mostly on the strength difference between the two girls. Maurnice, it is argued, should have realised how much stronger than Kaylee she was when she was quickly able to get the upper hand and swing Kaylee to the ground where the latter girl’s attempts to continue fighting were largely ineffectual. It was reasonable for her to subdue Kaylee but not to strike her head into the concrete hard enough to fracture her skull, many commentators have rightly observed. Had she done this in a state of fight or flight panic, given that Kaylee had won a fight with a girl of a similar build to Maurnice the day before, she should have stayed by her once she realised she had rendered her unconscious and immediately called an ambulance rather than jumping up and involving herself in other fights, once stepping over Kaylee’s twitching body to do so. Maurnice is also alleged to have gloated about the incident and joked that she she should join the MMA or WWA but then deleted the post, although this claim is denied by a source I cannot access. Maurnice is a remorseless monster, this narrative tells us.

Both of these accounts come from a single minute-long video, the views of biased family members of both girls and a few scraps of information of dubious origin and is then padded out by racialised narratives. Ones holds that any sympathy for Kaylee and failure to proclaim her as the bully is an indicator of white supremacy and assumption of white innocence and black criminality. The other claims that any suggestion that Maurnice was defending herself and went too far in the heat of the moment is anti-white wokeism that fails to recognise Kaylee as a vulnerable racial minority within the environment of the school and her physical disadvantage. Meanwhile, there continues to be no evidence that the war between the two friendship groups was racially motivated at all as both included both black and white adolescents roughly proportionate to the predominantly black area.

We simply do not know the background story. All we see is a single chaotic incident of teenagers fighting that is now being used to fuel the racial element of a culture war despite there being no evidence to support this interpretation. It is possible that one or both of the girls had racial animus against the other but, if so, their friends seem to be unaware of it. It is possible that Kaylee is a disturbed and malicious bully who liked to start fights and, egged on by friends who were also trouble-makers, forced a fight on the studious and well-behaved Maurnice whose strength she underestimated. Maurnice may not have been either intending to cause serious damage to Kaylee nor indifferent to her injured state but been acting instinctively fuelled by adrenaline and concern for her friends and unaware of the severity of the injuries. It is also possible that Maurnice had been part of a group of “mean girls” who had been bullying Kaylee for some time and that both this incident and the one that got Kaylee suspended were out of character for her. Kaylee may not be a malicious trouble-maker with a penchant for violence but an impulsive child making a misguided and desperate attempt to stand up for herself (as some friends have alleged). It could be yet another tragic case of impulsive teenagers thrill-seeking and showing off to their friends that got horribly out of hand due to the lack of judgement typical of adolescents especially when operating in groups. We do not know the dynamics between these two girls or these two groups or the cause of the fight and yet so many people are certain that they do and their explanation just so happens to fit their pre-existing political bias. Unfortunately, this includes the Attorney General of Missouri whose account of events is riddled with errors.

The warring narratives about this incident all over social media are another example of a worrying and seemingly increasing tendency for people to decide what is true based on their political allegiances rather than any solid information about what is true. I have written about this here. There has always been and always will be a tendency for humans to interpret events according to their existing biases, but there has also been, in my lifetime of observation, an expectation to at least appear to be trying not to do this and to be awaiting the facts before making any definitive truth claims. This increasingly seems not to be regarded as a virtue by many culture warriors. Instead, what is virtuous is to confidently assert one’s knowledge of the reality of any situation in a way that affirms allegiance to the narratives of one’s cultural tribe much akin to reciting a religious creed. If a black man is shot dead by police and this is all the information there is, there will be people ready to immediately assert that this was an incident of racist police brutality and others that it was a conscientious officer of the law protecting the public from a dangerous criminal. If all we know is that a teenager who identifies as non-binary has been involved in a fight in a school bathroom after which they died of unknown causes, there are those immediately confident to assert that this was another case of transphobic bullying claiming another innocent life while others are equally confident that a disturbed child whose identification as non-binary was a manifestation of a personality disorder had been behaving violently and self-destructively as another manifestation of it.

This tendency to go straight to narrative spinning whenever an event occurs that facilitates it seems not to be merely a matter of political convenience, but understood as a moral duty to one’s tribe. Perhaps most worrying of all, it appears to be becoming an unabashed epistemology. “I am someone who is concerned about racist police brutality. Therefore, I must assert that this latest shooting was an incident of it, even though I cannot know this to be the case.” “I am someone who is concerned about mentally ill teenagers identifying as trans and being affirmed as such. Therefore, I must assert that this latest incident is explained by this, although I cannot know this to be the case.” There is no need to fear embarrassment if and when clear evidence emerges that proves one’s confident assertion to be wrong because the primary aim was never to be factually correct but to steadfastly affirm one’s allegiance to an ideological narrative.

But Kaylee Gain and Maurnice DeClue are not tokens to be moved about to suit one’s ideological narrative. Kaylee is not a symbol of white supremacy or white innocence. She is a 16-year-old girl who seems to have initiated a fight she could not win and may well now have permanent brain damage. Maurnice DeClue is not a symbol of failed wokeist DEI initiatives or black criminality. She is a 15-year-old girl who reacted excessively in that fight and may well now have a bright and brilliant future permanently derailed. Neither of them can be helped by being spun into grand political narratives and cast as villain or martyr to fuel a culture war and neither will using them in this way provide any resolution to that war. An objective reality exists about this incident and the two girls can only be helped by responsible adults caring about what is true, investigating that reality seriously and responding to it justly, proportionately and compassionately. That same attitude is needed to address the culture wars.