“Progressive” Racism

“Progressives” really need to let this concern troll trash about race go. Have a look!

What if large groups of African-American men carrying shotguns and semi-automatic rifles started moseying into stores across America to tout their support of open-carry gun laws?

Would they be greeted by the same anxious looks shoppers gave groups of armed white men who did the same this summer at Target stores and chain restaurants like Chipotle? Or something more lethal?

For Charles Gallagher, a sociologist who studies race, the answer to that “what if” is easy.

“Whites walking down Main Street with an AK-47 are defenders of American values; a black man doing the same thing is Public Enemy No. 1,” says Gallagher, a professor at La Salle University in Pennsylvania.

Interesting hypothetical, bro. Imagine the pandemonium if that ACTUALLY happened! Oh. I guess it DID happen. Also it wasn’t the cleanest story either:

Police monitored the black-clad demonstrators as many chanted “black power” and “justice for Michael Brown,” the black teenager shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri, the Dallas Morning News reported.

The club is named after one of the founders of the Black Panther party, no word if the members were Panthers themselves, but the dress code does seem to have a bit of an implication. Of course the sick racist state of this country, the chants of “Black Power” are not considered equal to chants of “White Power”, still as a white man being near such a protest would make me uncomfortable enough that I’d rather just watch the news coverage rather than be near them.

Of course we have “Public Enemy #1” according to this “brilliant” Sociologist, chanting racial and controversial things in TEXAS! And what happened?

The march came to a peaceful end about 90 minutes after it began at a car wash at Malcolm X Boulevard and Marburg Street, the Morning News reported.

Ok so we have some hand-wringing bullshit already. Heck remember the black man with the rifle at Obamacare Protest who was cropped to avoid showing his race?

Let’s see how deep they can dig this hole:

You can’t talk about guns in America without talking about race, Gallagher and others say. The panic that would ensue at the sight of armed black men in public, they say, derives from the same racial fears that can be traced to the conquest of Native-Americans and the institution of slavery.

The United States has the most armed civilian population on the planet, they say, because some of its white citizens have a history of confronting racial anxieties by “gunning up.”

OK so we’re deeper. Not only is there NO panic when peaceful blacks exercise their rights, but he cites the racist gun control laws passed in the Jim Crow South! The people who “gunned up” were the Klan Riders, and the blacks who defended their communities from them. Now this seems to be presented on an even playing field, but it isn’t. The Klan armed up to kill and oppress blacks, the blacks armed up because there were people out to kill them and their families. The Klan was reacting to race, the blacks were reacting to violence!

Now the middle of the article is filled with a good run-down of racist gun-control in America, and then quotes from modern gun-rights activists who point out that the 2nd Amendment is for EVERYBODY, and that arming blacks is a GOOD thing, not something to fear.

Then that goofy Sociologist comes back:

Gallagher says those arguments are misleading.

“There’s a difference between gun culture and hunting culture,” he says. “They’re talking about hunting in Montana. They’re not talking about walking into a Wal-Mart with a 9-millimeter strapped to their back.”

Ahh, the good old “Ducks and Deer” 2nd Amendment argument! Is this dude stuck in the 90s?

Gallagher says he’s not accusing every white person who buys a gun of being a racist; he’s accusing them of being human, of unconsciously absorbing stereotypical attitudes about black men and violence that are as old as America itself.

“Do I think that people who own guns lie in bed at night thinking about shooting a black man? No,” Gallagher says. “A lot of this is about the bogeyman, the fear that a young black man is going to come and get me.”

Yeah, he’s not calling ALL armed whites racist…but they’re totally racist! This guy is a textbook case of Psychological Projection!

These old racial fears don’t just lead to shootings; they lead to racist public policy, says Lisa Corrigan, professor at the University of Arkansas who has studied the black power movement.

She says the passage of “stand your ground” laws, especially in the South, are “absolutely” fueled by white legislators who conjure the specter of a “non-white bogeyman to justify legislation that allows them to intimidate and kill” without repercussions. The nation’s first bogeyman of color was the Native-American, she says.

“White people have been motivated by fear of the ‘brown other’ since the nation was founded,” she says. “When they get afraid that brown people are going to take their stuff, they gun up.”

The racial paranoia over the “brown other” isn’t confined to America’s past, Corrigan and others says. They point to recent headlines.

Protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, when an unarmed black man, Michael Brown, was shot to death by a white police officer this summer.

Except the story says the officer who shot Brown was assaulted by him before the shooting. Was it a clean shoot? I have no idea. Was it a racially charged shoot? I highly doubt it!

When so many Americans disagree about the links between gun and race, well-meaning people look at the same videos and draw far different conclusions.

And the people who talk the most about race are talking the most about gun control.