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Desperately seeking relevance

NAACP issues 'travel advisory' warning minorities to avoid the backwater racist hotbed of . . . Missouri?



It can't be easy to be the NAACP these days. Oh sure, you've got Hollywood and the news media squarely in your corner. But when you're entire raison d'etre is the enduring scourge of widespread racism, what do you do when said racism has almost entirely been relegated to the non-influential fringes of society? Well. If I was on a mission to rid the world of something awful and I had largely succeeded, I would relish my victory. But not the NAACP. They have to pretend they have made no progress at all, because they're not sure they can think of a reason to exist unless America today is as racist as Bull Connors was back in the day.

So here we have the NAACP treating the state of Missouri as if George Wallace is its governor and it's bringing back segregated lunch counters

So how do this work in practice? You have to take things that are not racist and treat them as though they are. And if that requires you to act as though you're the State Department, and perfectly innocent U.S. states are Iran or North Korea, hey, go for it. So here we have the NAACP treating the state of Missouri as if George Wallace is its governor and it's bringing back segregated lunch counters. This is all completely absurd, but that's your modern-day NAACP for you:
NAACP officials say their recent travel advisory for Missouri is the first that the civil rights group has issued for any state. But the warning follows a recent trend of similar alerts issued by other groups for vulnerable people around the United States. The travel advisory, circulated in June by the Missouri NAACP and recently taken up by the national organization, comes after travel alerts began appearing in recent years in light of police shootings in the U.S. and ahead of immigration legislation in Texas and Arizona. The Missouri travel advisory is the first time an NAACP conference has ever made one state the subject of a warning about discrimination and racist attacks, a spokesman for the national organization said Tuesday.

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Missouri became the first because of recent legislation making discrimination lawsuits harder to win, and in response to longtime racial disparities in traffic enforcement and a spate of incidents cited as examples of harm coming to minority residents and visitors, state NAACP leaders say. Those incidents included racial slurs against black students at the University of Missouri and the death earlier this year of 28-year-old Tory Sanders, a black man from Tennessee who took a wrong turn while traveling and died in a southeast Missouri jail even though he hadn’t been accused of a crime. “How do you come to Missouri, run out of gas and find yourself dead in a jail cell when you haven’t broken any laws?” asked Rod Chapel, the president of the Missouri NAACP. “You have violations of civil rights that are happening to people. They’re being pulled over because of their skin color, they’re being beaten up or killed,” Chapel said. “We are hearing complaints at a rate we haven’t heard before.” At the same time, Chapel said, the state government is throwing up barriers to people seeking justice in the courts for discrimination. The travel advisory cites legislation signed by Republican Gov. Eric Greitens that will make it more difficult to sue for housing or employment discrimination.
Let's first deal with the new law concerning discrimination suits. The NAACP would have you believe the Missouri legislature and Gov. Greitens passed a law giving racist clods a free out when they engage in blatant discrimination. It does no such thing. All it does is require a plaintiff to prove racist intent rather than mere correlation, which is a perfectly reasonable standard to have to meet when you're suing someone and alleging racial discriminination:

The current law is a boon for trial lawyers

Sen. Gary Romine’s proposal, which would require people to explicitly prove their race, sex or other protected status actually motivated their boss or colleague to mistreat them to win an employment discrimination case, overcame a heated Senate filibuster in February. For about a decade, Missouri workers have needed only prove their status was a “contributing factor” to prevail in court. For example, if a black plaintiff was fired from a job for tardiness, but white employees routinely showed up late and weren’t fired, the black employee could ask a jury to compare the treatment and contend that race “contributed” to the boss’s decision. But if Gov. Eric Greitens signs the bill into law, such an employee would need to meet a higher standard: The worker would have to show that race explicitly “motivated” mistreatment through, for example, written documentation of racist comments.
The current law is a boon for trial lawyers, who are able to win massive settlements and judgments without having to prove that racism really motivated the action that's the basis of the suit. The change in the law merely affords the accused the same basic protections we would expect in our legal system. But that's a problem for the NAACP, which wants the mere accusation of racism to be the same as proof of guilt. If a plaintiff has to prove racist intent rather than just tossing the allegation around, litigants risk exposure as abusers of the legal system.


Racism: Yes, of course it still exists. It's practiced by ignorant morons on the fringes of society

As for the other factors the NAACP cites in its "travel advisory," these are the same anecdotal items you could gin up in any one of the 50 states if you want to. It's easy to accuse the police of pulling someone over for being black, and just like we see with the discrimination suits, you don't have to prove that's really the reason. Someone says it is, and that's good enough for the NAACP. Someone reports "racist graffiti," and even though this often turns out to be a hoax perpetrated by liberal activists, it doesn't matter to the NAACP. It's real! Here's the bottom line about racism: Yes, of course it still exists. It's practiced by ignorant morons on the fringes of society. It usually hides in the shadows where it can't do much harm, because once it's actually exposed it's so widely rejected and reviled that the perpetrator of racism has no hope of giving it any real effect. This is exactly as it should be, and to give credit where due, it's largely the result of the iconic civil rights movement from which the NAACP grew as a force. But the NAACP wants you to believe an entirely different version of reality. In this version, white racists run rampant over society and are able to perpetrate racist evil against minorities with little or no consequence, leaving black people helpless to travel freely or live their lives because they're liable to get beat up, arrested or killed at any moment by people who can commit these horrors with impunity, as the larger culture doesn't object and doesn't care.

Kind of sad when your whole identity is tied up in your own victimhood

There are a lot of otherwise reasonable black people who will tell you they live in fear every day of these things, and they will castigate skeptical whites for not believing these dangers actually exist. If only we could see things as they see them, they tell us, we would understand. But just because they have the fear doesn't mean the fear is rational or based in truth. If they fear this because they believe the NAACP, or the news media, or Colin Kaepernick, then they're embracing a vision of society that is terrifying to be sure, but isn't the way things really are. And this is what the NAACP is trying to do to Missouri - brand it as little more than an outgrowth of the slave-holding Confederacy, and get as many people as possible to believe this is reality. The sad irony in all this is that the NAACP, by perpetrating this nonsense, refuses to acknowledge its own success banishing racism to the fringes. I guess the NAACP never really wanted to succeed, because it realizes that success will put it out of business - as it has no idea what to do to promote the advancement of colored people beyond screaming about racism. Kind of sad when your whole identity is tied up in your own victimhood, but here we are. Enjoy Missouri. I'm sure they're happy to have you.

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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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