Posted on 12/01/2014 3:42:48 AM PST by lifeofgrace
I don’t have to drive too far from my home to find real racists. Within an hour’s drive, I can find true white-sheet-wearing KKK members, and I can find Black Panthers. Their mutual, seething hatred of each other based on skin color would, in a simple physics equation, cancel each other out. But in matters of race, these groups simply feed one another’s fire, and build each other up, in an unwinnable, atrocious war.
Being white, and brought up in New Hampshire, I never saw race relations in any forum other than one-on-one. There were three black kids in my high school, and I knew all three. I was friends with two, close friends with one. None of us thought anything of it. Nobody in my school ever got beat up for being white, black, Chinese, or Hispanic (I am not sure there were any Hispanics at my school when I was in high school). Our divisions were more of the jock/nerd variety (I was definitely not a jock).
A black kid growing up in the south, who is now about my age, would have a completely different perspective on race relations in America. Going through desegregation and prejudice as a kid deeply affects who people are as adults. Motivations that I would never even consider become the norm for people who have witnessed first-hand, or been subject to, overt discrimination. Color means something, sometimes it means everything to such people. From my perspective, they may be wrong, but should I condemn and marginalize them for believing it?
For those who see it that way, Michael Brown’s death signifies America’s tilt against the black man. It conjures up images of the cross and the lynching tree, when bands of white men ritually hung a black to instill fear and terror, and hold on to the power which was stripped from them by the 13th Amendment, which abolishes slavery. It is not ancient history. The last two holdouts to ratify, Kentucky and Mississippi, waited until 1976 and 1995, respectively. Mississippi didn’t officially certify the result until February 7, 2013. In 2013, we were still hearing about a state which had rejected the 13th Amendment—this is an intolerable insult for many.
American judges talk about the Constitution as a “living document” with rights and “penumbras” and “emanations”. Sometimes our pursuit of fairness creates tilts which could be far worse than the perceived unfairness they seek to redress. The U.S. Supreme Court is particularly guilty of this.
One of the most controversial tilts is the Brandenburg test. This test prohibits the government from restraining advocacy of criminal activities, unless two conditions are satisfied: (1) the advocacy is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action,” and (2) the advocacy is also “likely to incite or produce such action.” Since 1969, the bar is set very high for the the government; they practically have to catch people in the very moment of committing the violent act before it can be proscribed. This decision overturned state laws which made groups like the KKK illegal.
Can we explore the question: which is worse, outlawing groups whose very existence is an insult to America, and whose purpose is clearly to subjugate and destroy others, or allow them to exist and in fact protect their existence because it’s “free speech”?
For a long time, this was a taboo question for me. I said, “I may disagree with what you say, but I’ll defend with my life your right to say it.” It’s not really true though. I won’t defend your right to say “all Jews should go to the ovens”, at least not if you mean to carry it out. And that doesn’t mean you can carry it out. It means you are publicly declaring your intention to attract others to your cause, and they might be able to carry it out.
Groups like the KKK and Black Panthers exist for no good purpose, at least no purpose that deserves a platform, no matter what test is applied. You might say that the power of the government to suppress free speech is too dangerous to grant, but Congress has always had that power. Not all speech is protected, and it never was. The Alien and Sedition Acts date back to 1798. You can’t advocate the overthrow of the republic, or aid and abet its enemies.
Then again, who’s to say that the government would use the authority of “prior restraint” wisely?
They haven’t always. The Alien Enemies Act enabled the Roosevelt administration to intern thousands of Japanese Americans. But have we swung too far the other way?
I think, perhaps we have. Congress has the authority to act, and the President to sign, legislation to ban the KKK as a seditious group. It in fact could ban any group based on racial hatred, making their very existence illegal. RICO does this for criminal organizations, who can be prosecuted or even sued in civil court if found to be “racketeering-influenced”. Why not make that protection extend to race? The Supreme Court would certainly have to decide this as a case, but it’s not more unconstitutional than what the EPA has already tried.
We should at least ask the question. Why should we allow public insults to exist, which further inflame and divide us, when we could show those who feel marginalized that we’re at least listening? Because for some, the cross and the lynching tree are only too real.
Not for nothing, the problem isn’t the new black panthers or the KKK it’s average black criminals who commit murder and mayhem on a daily basis, which is generally ignored; and the “leaders” of the black community who want the world to stop every time some random black guy has the ill luck to be killed by a non-black guy.
It’s BS and everyone is sick of it. Everyone except the pundit class and the aforementioned “leaders”.
Bill Whitte examines the numbers involved:
Ferguson and the Real Race War
http://youtu.be/iGTUcS-yQtQ
Whittle
The burning cross and the lynching tree are all too real for some who cling to slights, perceived or real. Usually perceived.
The author re-enforces what we have all known instinctively - racism is born of ignorance. In the Deep South, ignoring those who have a fiscal interest in fostering division, racial relations are just fine. My ‘adopted’ Indian daughter, beautiful and highly educated and with whom we just spent Thanksgiving, is shunned because she is ‘brown’. This in the midwest. Shame on them.
And censorship gives birth to tyranny as well as ignorance.
I thought RICO was already used in the 80s or 90s to strip the Klan of their money.
The Democrats post civil war “insurgents” (KKK) don’t command any influence these days. Their political power and violence lasted roughly 100 years but today?
If Congress thought Congress could do that it would ban the KKK but would not touch any Black organization at all. Th definition of Racism is too restrictive. It is too ingrained that only white people can be racist and that any suggestion that Negroes can be racist is racist. If the KKK were to be so banned the Westphal Baptist Church and then the John Birch Society would follow and then quickly hated conservative organizations and then those progressively less disdained by the Left. 60 years ago when this sort of thing was debated and demanded, the Communist Party would probably have been the sole organization so banned. The attachment to the Constitution is so tenuous now that once the breach is made on that front the trickle would quickly become a flood.
Amen, brother.
Yes, it seems so. He glosses over the fact that the internment for which this act was used by Roosevelt and justified by the Supreme Court then as “wartime necessity”. The action was later apologized by Congress and victims were awarded a cash payment.
His argument is nothing more than specious diversionary blather.
Lastly, I was born in 1950 in Georgia, except for my 8 years overseas in the military, I’ve been here all my life. I have NEVER seen nor heard of directly witnessed KKK meetings, cross burnings, etc. other than the newsy items about marches and lawn cross burnings and graffiti (many were later proven to be victim perpetrated). I live in north Georgia now and there are many areas up in the hills you can drive on dirt roads and one lanes where you’ll see signs against the government and rebel flags, etc. But you don’t see Klan meetings, notices or hear-tell of them or any cross burnings.
Frankly, I think the man is lying when he says he has.
The number of white people lynched was small, around a thousand, according to the NAACP. Why were those whites lynched? They were trying to register Black Americans as Republicans.
That is the secret the media will not publicize - that the KKK was lynching white Republicans - and it had nothing to do with racism, but naked politics.
home
I’m calling Bee Ess on this article.
I refuse to accept imparted guilt just because of my skin color or ethnicity.
To the author from our Watch What You Wish For Dept.: Islam and the Communist party are TRUELY seditious groups.
Because it is not the business of the law to make people feel good especially not at the expense of others when that expense encroaches on the Bill of Rights. To make people feel good by force of law is to chase an impossible goal, the subjective feelings of those to whom the framers of the law pander. Once the subjective feelings of any group are exalted into the force of law we have abandoned law for the rule of the mob. Every time you sacrifice the right of free speech to spare the perceived feelings of some minority or other, you will never cease sacrificing my rights because that majority will never cease contriving ways to have hurt feelings.
Nearly as bad, to do so would be to institutionalize hypocrisy on a national basis. When you can show me white people (or black people, in reverse) who do not daily practice discrimination, I will assume they have passed on to a better place. When we choose a neighborhood to buy a house, or to rent an apartment, we consider school system, whether it is white enough. When we go for a walk we avoid black areas because they are more dangerous. When we go shopping, we pick whiter areas in which to shop for the same reason. Every day in a million ways we make conscious and unconscious decisions based on discrimination. It is beyond the capacity of law to control the way think. It can try, it can resort to unbelievable totalitarian brutality in the effort, it can construct and even use ovens, it can construct and consign millions to gulags, it can expropriate media and bombard the people with propaganda but at the end of the day the wall always falls. Even if it were a worthy goal, the cost in human suffering, as history has proved, is exorbitant and not worth the illusory goal.
Every day, I discriminate on the basis of race and so do you. I discriminate on the basis of a lot of things which may or may not be irrational but that decision remains within my own personal sovereignty and not to be disturbed by law. Just because the law has taken other rights to discriminate away from me, for example the right to rent an apartment only to people of a chosen color, does not mean the law should or can compel me to vote for or against a candidate because of his color. There are limits to the desirability as well is the power of government to control the way people think. There is a vast difference between depriving me of my right as a landlord to discriminate on the basis of color and taking away one of my bill of rights to indulge in "hate" (an ultimately undefinable concept) speech. If we can do that, can you compel me to worship a black Jesus, can you compel me to worship in a black church? Why not? Think of the greater good!
The ultimate purpose of laws of censorship are to control the way people think, the ostensible justification is always some alleged public good.
I strongly disagree. To the extent that the Klan is engaged in a conspiracy to commit criminal acts, their conduct is already illegal. To the extent that they are merely engaged in ignorant speech, their speech is and ought to be protected under the First Amendment. Once the federal government steps into the position of regulating the content of speech, that regulation will grow to an oppressive level.
The "it's not more unconstitutional than . . ." argument illustrates the fundamental flaw in your case. Obamacare's abortion mandate is an unconstitutional violation of a fundamental God-given human right. Speech codes on campus are an unconstitutional violation of a fundamental God-given human right. Most existing gun laws are an unconstitutional violation of a fundamental God-given human right. The fact that the federal government is operating outside the strict limits imposed by the Constitution is not a justification for more violations of that founding document. The widespread violations of our constitutional rights are a justification for restraining the federal government and cutting it back to its proper scope of operations.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.