But later that day, the Times published a full-scale article — "Oberlin Helped Students Defame a Bakery, a Jury Says. The Punishment: $33 Million" by Anemona Hartocollis — and it's a little obscure but, reading it carefully, I understood Oberlin's argument for the first time. I had thought that Oberlin just got the facts wrong when it accused the bakery of racism. I now see that the argument is that even if the bakery stopped blatant shoplifters, the accusation of racism stands.
Let me show you how this argument emerges from the text:
Gibson’s bakery, a local establishment known for its whole wheat doughnuts and chocolate-covered grapes, became the target of a boycott by students who accused it of racially profiling a black student.... Oberlin maintained that college officials had gotten involved only to keep the peace, and that it was supporting its students, not their claims that Gibson’s was racist. But the jury found that Oberlin had clearly chosen sides without first examining the facts....Got that? It's irrelevant that the suspected shoplifters were real shoplifters. What the students called racist was the "chase-and-detain policy."
Oberlin tried to distance itself from the protesters in court papers, saying it should not be held responsible for their actions. It blamed the store for bringing its problems on itself.
“Gibson bakery’s archaic chase-and-detain policy regarding suspected shoplifters was the catalyst for the protests,” the college said. “The guilt or innocence of the students is irrelevant to both the root cause of the protests and this litigation.”
The store clerk seems to have suspected shoplifting not because of the person's race but because he could see 2 wine bottles hidden under his coat, but he "chased the student out onto the street and tackled him," and that's what's racist (in this view). If the chase-and-detain approach is racist, even when the shopkeeper is right about the theft, then it's not false to accuse the shopkeeper of racism.
Allyn Gibson, the 32-year-old store clerk, was trained in martial arts, according to Oberlin’s court papers, and his decision to chase down and tackle a student “beyond the borders of their store and into full public view of their customer base” opened him and the store up to public criticism....The larger question — barely gestured at in the article — is what is racism? It may be a good idea to consider each human individual "autonomous," but the school is part of the culture that shapes the concept of racism, and racism can be understood broadly, perhaps broadly enough to include a chase-and-detain policy, broadly enough to make the policy racist without regard to guilt or innocence.
Neither the college nor the dean ever said or wrote anything defamatory about the plaintiffs, the college said. In fact, it added, there was a split in opinion within the college community as to whether the Gibsons were racist or not, and it was their constitutional right to express their opinions on that score....
“Part of the narrative that has been built up is that Oberlin’s administration weaponized students against Gibson’s out of malice,” [Kameron Dunbar, who just graduated from Oberlin]. “I find that concept to be pretty insulting. We’re autonomous.”
When can you express the opinion that someone is racist? The term is thrown around a lot these days. Is it defamation to use "racist" in the broad sense? There are a lot of people these days who think anyone who supports Trump is a racist. If some shop loses business because people know the owner voted for Trump and that's their idea of racism and they go around telling each other not to shop in the store because it's owned by a racist, can the shop owner sue them all and win damages?
How does free speech work if we can't call each other racist for any damned thing we choose to imagine is racist?
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1 – 200 of 347 Newer› Newest»Then the same thing would apply towards calling people pedophiles, correct? Or rapists, wife-abusers, etc.?
You need to dig deeper. It wasn’t about free speech. The college punished the bakery by refusing to do business with them. And more.
For a while the internet seemed to promise a genuine neutrality of free speech. You can call someone a racist for any reason you choose, including voting for Trump, or noting that northern Europeans conquered much of the world, won Nobel prizes, etc. Trying to root out all traces of old racism and other old hates (sexism, homophobia, etc.) is good. Free expression for the new hate--the hatred of old hates--is good. What about people giving voice to the old hates, or advocating for Confederate statues, or Thomas Jefferson statues? Does freedom of speech mean people are free to express and arguably magnify hate?
Rationalization is the second strongest human drive.
How does free speech work if we can't yell "Fire!" any damned time we choose to imagine there's a fire?
Corollary 1 to It is racist is you chase shoplifters: If you shoplift it is cultural appropriation.
The elements of a cause of action for slander are:
1. A defamatory statement;
2. Published to a third party;
3. Which the speaker knew or should have known was false;
4. That causes injury to the subject of the communication
"the truth of a statement is a complete defense to any slander claim."
https://defamation.laws.com/slander
If it ain't true it ain't free speech, it's slander. And you don't get to use your own dictionary for your defense.
". I now see that the argument is that even if the bakery stopped blatant shoplifters, the accusation of racism stands."
Right. Gut a word of it's original meaning and wear its skin and expect it to have the same moral authority. They should come up with a new word so catching a shoplifter is not the same as refusing a person service based on race.
It took them all day to come up with a plausible angle to defend.
"How does free speech work if we can't yell "Fire!" any damned time we choose to imagine there's a fire?"
Or Shark! in a crowded Jacuzzi.
My comment about Oberlin repeated from yesterday’s cafe:
Over at National Review David French has interesting observations on the Oberlin jury award. Here’s the money quote, and I do mean “money quote”:
Second, the size of the jury award will create a legal market for litigation. There’s a relatively simple reason why campus free-speech codes proliferated well before there was a concerted legal counterattack — money. It takes money to sue universities, and First Amendment cases simply don’t yield eye-popping jury awards. It took the creation of large networks of nonprofit, pro-bono lawyers to turn the free-speech tide on campus.
Common-law torts are different. Plaintiffs can receive real compensation, and universities have deep pockets.
So I think your answer is right there, Althouse. If the university gets wildly out of line with community norms and elementary common sense then it had better have good lawyers and deep pockets.
“beyond the borders of their store and into full public view of their customer base” opened him and the store up to public criticism....
So we have vigilantism (chasing the criminal) clashing with mob rule (ruining the business)
The college students have confused autonomous, with automatons
How does free speech work if we can't call each other racist for any damned thing we choose to imagine is racist?
It’s the consequences what cost ya.
Everyone in a mob is autonomous.
wwww assures me this was just a local story unworthy of national reportage.
Plaintiffs' attorneys now see universities as giant piñatas** full of money.
Attorneys are going to discipline universities by whacking them with giant sticks know as lawsuits.
The market works.
**Fuck your claims of cultural appropriation in advance.
What the students called racist was the "chase-and-detain policy."
Those students are stupid.
Racism is black people trying to steal stuff from white people.
Would it be racist to chase and detain Elizabeth Warren if she swiped some liquor?
"How does free speech work if we can't yell "Fire!" any damned time we choose to imagine there's a fire?"
Fire is a real thing happening in the world exterior to the mind.
Racism is an idea. It only has meaning as it is created by the human mind.
"Shopkeeper Privilege" protects the shopkeeper from claims of false imprisonment if they act reasonably.
So 600 years of English Legal History is also racist.
The shoplifters tried to use a fake ID to buy the alcohol.
Then they tried to leave with the wine after the shopkeeper confiscates the fake ID.
The NYT doesn't know fuckall.
We live in a time where metaphors for things become the things themselves. That being the case, whoever controls the metaphor controls the thing.
Tackling a shoplifter who is black is racist because the act is a metaphor for racism.
The jury called bullshit on an institution that encouraged such thinking. I hope the movement to punish institutions that teach this kind of "enlightened" thought continues vigorously.
“Part of the narrative that has been built up is that Oberlin’s administration weaponized students against Gibson’s out of malice,” [Kameron Dunbar, who just graduated from Oberlin]. “I find that concept to be pretty insulting.“
So be insulted, Kameron. It’s exactly what they did and you let them do it.
Oberlin's "explanation" is just lawyerly gobblygook because they had nothing else to argue.
This is a story, and comment section, that screams for a universal symbol denoting sarcasm.
This is not about a misappropriated Racism charge. The Gibson family is White, so they are guilty of that. End of story. It is however about the scummy Gibson peasants' pretense to be citizens of a law abiding community entitled to respect. Oberlin's elite will NEVER admit to that heresy. Oberlin just haughtily refused to enter settlement negotiations with peasants, as if Juries had no power.Bad move.The Jury was mad at Oberlin because Oberlin hated town people for no reason. And a mad jury can do immense damage to a solvent Defendent.How about a helping of Punitives and attorney's fees.
"How does free speech work if we can't yell "Fire!" any damned time we choose to imagine there's a fire?"
"Fire is a real thing happening in the world exterior to the mind.
Racism is an idea. It only has meaning as it is created by the human mind.'
Fire may be a real thing, but its effect is subjective. Can I yell fire in a crowded room if I see someone light a match?
“Gibson bakery’s archaic chase-and-detain policy regarding suspected shoplifters was the catalyst for the protests,” the college said.
Maybe Oberlin College could enlighten us as to what the new and improved policy should be.
I don't think there was a real fire in that famous case. The idea of a fire was sufficient to cause panic.
In Madison, there's a big controversy about whether to keep "Educational Resource Officers" in schools. There is a vocal faction that sees a racism problem in having a police officer visibly present in the school. Whether the ERO does anything racially biased or not, it gets called racist. I'm not going to try to detail why the faction that sees it that way thinks the way it does. I'm just saying it does and it speaks out adamantly expressing this belief. It is contributing to and developing the meaning of the idea of racism. It may be wrong, but I think it's protected free speech.
I think there can be neutral rules about disrupting school board meetings, so I'm not talking about letting the opinion be expressed anywhere and in any way, just saying that the opinion that something's "racist" is a matter of free speech and it would be a disaster to try to make everyone pay for daring to speak in those terms.
People can say what they wish, but they must accept the consequences. If a man has no legal recourse for being falsely accused of being a racist, rapist or what-have-you, then the law must permit self-help in the form of a good old fashioned beat down. Worked in my old neighborhood.
Legal Insurrection had a reporter at the trial. All details are there laid out every day of the trial. Oberlin did a lot to damage the bakery.
Your Trump store owner analogy is a poor one.
My formative years I listened to the hippis, yippis, and enlightened protesters tell me the "establishment" was evil and keeping the common man down. Now those yippis, etal are the establishment,in power, and telling me the common man is racist, sexist, homophobic, and nativist. (evil)
NB: if they are smart, the Marxist-Feminist thugs running Academia will start going after the 6th Amendment harder than they have gone after the 2nd Amendment. A right to trial by Jurors done by a good Trial Lawyer is the sole reason Americans have even a smidgen of freedom left.
There are a lot of people these days who think anyone who supports Trump is a racist. If some shop loses business because people know the owner voted for Trump and that's their idea of racism and they go around telling each other not to shop in the store because it's owned by a racist, can the shop owner sue them all and win damages?
Sure, why not? Isn’t that practically the definition of tortious interference? And I’m not a lawyer (though I did do IT consulting for the DOJ back in the day).
Iowa2 has got it, she’s not really autonomous, she’s automatonamouse.
"I don't think there was a real fire in that famous case. The idea of a fire was sufficient to cause panic."
First, that famous example isn't about defamation. And in fact, there is a free speech right to lie. The problem in the fire situation is incitement to violence, and by the way it was really about sedition, criticizing the government in wartime.
Defamation is about hurting a person's reputation by lying about them. Shouting "fire!" when there is no fire isn't lying about a person and hurting a reputation.
But my point in distinguishing yelling "racist" versus yelling "fire" is that it's an opinion. There are probably some ambiguities about what is a fire (but the problem in shouting "fire" is entirely defined in terms of causing a panic), but the question of what is "racist" is fraught with ambiguity. It's a subject to be debated and it shouldn't be at the risk of liability.
Oberlin couldn't find any actual, real racists. So Oberlin did the best they could, picked their victims and set out to destroy them. Then Oberlin joined the mob. Once they became part of the mob, Oberlin actively used University resources to support the mob.
The idea that this is a turning point, sounds nice.
It just ignores the consequences University of Missouri is suffering as we speak. Massive reduction of freshman enrollment for several years. A couple of people may have lost their jobs. But not for what they did, but by not being smart enough to successfully obfuscate their actions. The new hires are just smarter at not getting caught. Academics are blind to their own failing ideas.
"Chase and detain" sounds like an invented phrase, intentionally made to sound akin to "stop and frisk." I'm very curious about who first used the phrase and in what context.
Furthermore, did Gibson's actually have a "chase and detain" policy or was this simply a "chase and detain" incident?
Should they have had an "ask politely to not steal" policy?
Maybe Oberlin College could enlighten us as to what the new and improved policy should be.
It looks like Oberlin is saying that Blacks are SO MUCH LOWER on the scale of humanity, that we HAVE TO allow them to shoplift? So, remind me; which side are the racists?
“Gibson bakery’s archaic chase-and-detain policy regarding suspected shoplifters was the catalyst for the protests,” the college said.
Three thoughts here. First, Gibson’s paid someone — a liquor wholesaler — for those bottles and so the shoplifting is theft, plain and simple. Second, let’s consider a hypothetical. Suppose the students drank the wine and while inebriated injured themselves or others. If Gibson’s did not make an effort to retrieve the bottles, would they not be exposed to legal liability? Third, the position of the university seems perilously close to another form of racism, the one that posits multiple sets of rules depending on skin color. This country cannot tolerate that.
Of course, calling "racism" is not an incitement to violence. You are so disconnected from the street. Happens all the time. More have been hurt and killed under the guise of racism, more property destroyed. But, I forgot... crackerland, Madison.
Althouse,
You're just plain wrong.
Sandra Fluke and Columbia thought rape could be subjectively defined too.
Didn't they lose lawsuits, too?
Your definition of free speech to support lies that damage people by pretending words don't have fixed meaning is stupid.
But maybe that depends on what the definition of is, is, in the "is stupid" phrase.
Your bubble is showing.
Fire is both an idea and a real thing happening in the world exterior to the mind. People can be reliably expected to react in a certain way to yelling "Fire!"
So it is with racism. It is an idea and a real thing that happens in the world exterior to the mind. People can be expected to react in a certain way to yelling, "Racism!"
The bakers were attacked for an action, chasing and detaining. That action, which otherwise may have been considered admirable, was made reprehensible by ascribing racist motives, evidence of which was not found. The crowd reacted. The bakers were trampled.
It's also interesting to see corporate personhood on display, the college said.
Calling someone racist is an incitement to violence in some situations. In those situations the victim should have a remedy available to them.
If I understand Oberlin's definition of racism correctly, it sounds like it is a good thing. Way to go, Oberlin.
Good point, Henry.
The very same Leftist Collectivists were assuring us that corporations don't have speech right when Hobby Lobby was before the Court.
And now they want to hide behind a corporate veil.
We see them.
Two severely overused and overstretched words are "hate" and "racism." Both words are used in place of "disagreement." Defining someone as Racist means we can do any damn thing we want - you're subhuman, you no longer have any rights. And what is "racist?" We'll tell you after we decide you're guilty of it. But here's a hint: if you're a shopkeeper, "racism" includes trying to protect your store from theft.
I agree that Missouri was a kind of turning point and this is just kind of a confirmation.
“It's a subject to be debated and it shouldn't be at the risk of liability.”
Has anybody here been in a swamp where you see little bubbles float to the surface from time to time? The reason we have juries is so that the elite can’t simply impose their will on us normies on account of its a democracy we live in, at heart.
It would have made a lot more sense to note the bakery's racial insensitivity and invited a discussion, in your world. In the real world they used a term with horrific associations of slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, well all know the history, and smeared a local business with it and incited their students against it.
Not to mention the subtext about private property and theft. We have a cultural agreement about private property that the college is also doing its best to undermine. We have seen where that road leads, and have to have a way to stand athwart this trend colleges like Oberlin are trying to make happen.
The only real racists today are geneticists.
There is a vocal faction that sees a racism problem in having a police officer visibly present in the school.
I think what Althouse is trying to say is that black people routinely make so many obviously false claims of racism that nobody should care about being called a racist.
Colleges likely believe everyone should have to swim in the same swamp of racism accusations they do on a daily basis. To them it's the status quo and the new normal.
No wonder college administrators and others might think they can use that to their advantage and manipulate emotions to either:
(1) deflect the on-campus mobs away from themselves and college and toward a third party, or
(2) actually turn that mob into freelance foot soldiers for their own purposes of intimidation and retaliation.
I was working in a small corner store a few weeks ago. It is a block away from an elementary school, and when the kids come out they have a crowd.
To control shop lifting they let only two kids in at a time. There is a line up at the door. If they all were let in at once it would be out of control and a good number of the kids would take advantage of the situation and steal.
Other stores that I work in have processes to deal with shoplifters. One has a person looking like a shopper watching. I've seen them follow someone out and stop them, then call the police. They take it seriously because it is serious.
Gibson's Bakery took measures to control the impulses of the students by necessity. The fact that they were in business for a long time meant that they did it effectively.
Oberlin didn't. They actively fomented the large group of autonomous students who had collected together into a mob. They were responsible to take reasonable measures to keep a lid on the group of autonomous students, but in fact did the opposite.
The jury is who decided what was slander. The College and student body thinks that normal loss prevention strategies are racist and said so vigorously. The jury disagreed.
Did the NYT describe what the police found when they got there? Three students beating on the bakery employee?
I have given up on the racism accusation because it has been made to mean anything at all. Interesting that a jury in Ohio disagrees. It is a serious accusation because racism is serious. Used frivolously is libellous. That is a good decision.
As far as I can tell, Oberlin denied that its employees did the things that they seem to have done, and as a matter of policy refused to deal with Gibson's on it to right the damage when it was a smaller legal matter.
So they're paying for doubling down.
It seems to me that if Oberlin had a problem with Gibson's shoplifting policy, they should have opened their own "shoplifter friendly" supermarket and liquor store. To show the rubes how civilized people do things.
Basically in this little drama, the students are NPCs controlled by those responsible to “educate” them who have chosen to indoctrinate them instead.
If the precious little snowflakes find that insulting, maybe they should dig a little deeper, except their expensive university education has denied them the tools to do it. They are really the ones who should sue.
Remember this story: "Texas DA Announces He Won’t Prosecute Theft Crimes Valued Under $750"?
That was understood by some people as a matter of racial justice:
“We are part of a national social justice movement that is rooted in realizing racial and economic justice for communities of color, in part by reimagining our criminal justice system. We believe that Dallas County deserves a district attorney that shares our counties’ values of building solidarity across difference and an insatiable commitment to the pursuit of justice,” wrote Brianna Brown, Texas Organizing Project deputy director.
That is, there seem to be some people expressing the idea that treating thieves as criminals is a problem of racism.
An interesting counter-argument to being accused of criminal activity.
Seems akin to calling someone a name and having them reply "I'm rubber and you're glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks on you."
Adulting gets harder every day.
Treating thieves as criminals has a disproportionate impact of blacks because blacks steal stuff at a higher rate than others.
The observation is certainly racist literally but also true. So perhaps somebody should argue that only false racism is bad.
Althouse is surprised that a jury of her peers does not mean 12 law professors who have their heads in the clouds or in books, as the situation warrants.
As a white public school teacher in an inner city school I was occasionally accused of racism in disciplining my African-American male students. One of my fellow faculty members - an Af-Am female - showed me how to short circuit that entire accusation promptly. She told me to join the NAACP. I took her advice and did just that. Several months later in a parent conference with the principal about a discipline issue the parent casually accused me of racism. I opened my wallet, pulled out my official NAACP membership card, slapped it down on the principals desk and said to parent "I'm a member. Are you?" My principal - also Af-Am - tried but failed to stifle his laughter. I had literally played the race card. Best professional insurance policy I ever took out.
It looks like Oberlin is saying that Blacks are SO MUCH LOWER on the scale of humanity, that we HAVE TO allow them to shoplift? So, remind me; which side are the racists?
Soft bigotry of low expectations. (credit Bush 43)
So we have SAT using a adversity score. From there it's into the abyss
When I went to Oberlin everything was honor code. Cheaters were expelled. I imagine shoplifting was pretty low too.
“It's a subject to be debated and it shouldn't be at the risk of liability.”
In this debate I declare a boundary and it is this, only the little people shall suffer an economic loss.
Telling people they can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater has not inhibited the advancement of fire science or stifled innovations in fire prevention.
That is, there seem to be some people expressing the idea that treating thieves as criminals is a problem of racism.
Black people like the Texas DA routinely make so many obviously false claims of racism that nobody should care about being called a racist.
Correct?
but the question of what is "racist" is fraught with ambiguity.
@Althouse, not when it is a catch-all insult that means, at bottom, “anyone whose politics I disagree with.”
It's a subject to be debated
If you think it will be debated honestly by anyone left of center then you are simply wrong.
and it shouldn't be at the risk of liability.
I believe that financial liability has the potential to add a measure of honesty to the “debate.” Obviously you haven’t paid attention to honest efforts over decades by more sensible people to bring rationality to issues such as “what is racism?” If an eight figure award can help alert the other side to the need to square themselves around, then that’s a good thing.
“When I went to Oberlin everything was honor code.”
I originally went to college in the ‘70s, a state school, and cheaters were held in extremely low regard. I never saw anybody admit to it. I went back in the ‘90s to learn computer programming, and the cheating was so rampant it was just disheartening. I had to tell myself that learning the material was more important than the grade when there was a curve involved.
Oberlin, in order to pacify a bunch of screaming campus garbage babies, concocted and promoted a defamatory theory that the family members (hardly public figures) who ran a 100 year old family-run bakery were racists and had a racist history, actively discriminating against blacks, etc. That same administration actively and successfully encouraged a mob to destroy this business - a campaign that at one point lead to a near riot where people could have been maimed/killed. What the Oberlin administration did was despicable - I was shocked by the internal emails - and they refused to undo the damage after multiple/reasonable requests by the Gibsons. To pretend that this is akin to a case about one person making an off-hand stupid remark about someone else being racist is disingenuous. I do agree with something I read yesterday - maybe at National Review - that extreme cases like this often lead to bad law. But that these assholes at Oberlin thought they could do what they did with impunity shows that at least some correction was needed. I fully support the jury award.
If the policy of 'stop and detain' is racist per se, then it follows that Gibson's act of chasing down the shoplifters would have been racist even if the shoplifters had been white. Don't piss on my boots and tell me it's raining.
Supposing you run a store and employ somebody to watch for shoplifting. If there are whites and blacks both shopping, who do you watch? The best employment of recources is watch a black, in the absence of better information.
Not that whites won't shoplift but you can't watch everybody and your losses are less if you watch the blacks.
You still lose stuff but not as much.
Racial profiling aka Baysean prior information.
I believe that financial liability has the potential to add a measure of honesty to the “debate.”
True that. It’s like the effort that goes into poker for money vs when playing for plastic chips. In which scenario does the real quality thinking get done?
Fire is a real thing happening in the world exterior to the mind.
The mistaken idea that there is a fire or there 'could be a fire' or that I heard that there is a bomb in the theater....may be ideas without foundation, but the expression of those ideas has real world consequences on OTHER people.
Expressing ideas that you don't know to be true or which are false, to suit your own perceptions and which cause harm to other people....but you do it anyway. This is not 'free speech'. This is slander or libel. Yelling fire in a theater to purposely cause panic is the same thing as yelling racist at a person in order to cause harm, physical, mental and financial harm. This is what Oberlin participated in.
I can stand around and speculate all day the idea that UFOs exist or that aliens are cutting organs out of cows to create human looking androids (in fact there are popular TV shows about those ideas). I can tell people that the end of the world is nigh because I believe in my mind that the alignment of the stars. I can speculate that cow farts cause Global Warming and maybe THAT'S why the aliens are killing the cows.....etc....etc.
Doing those things doesn't target a particular individual or individuals. Yelling that the Jews are the root cause of all evil in the world and should be exterminated (FIRE!!!!) to incite other people to do harm is not free speech. (IMO as a totally not lawyer and as a potential juror who can wield the financial hammer.)
1. Tuition and fees at Oberlin are $56,668 this year. How does that compare with the income of a cash register jockey at a convenience store?
2. What if the shoplifter drank the two bottles of wine, got in his car and caused an accident that injured another person? Whose insurance would be dinged for the settlement? Oberlin's? Probably not.
3. The student in the case copped to a misdemeanor and acknowledged that he wasn't "racially profiled." In the same circs -- and this is by no means an unusual event in little stores near college campuses -- most of the rest of us would take that deal. Best guess is that the student would prefer not to have this matter rehashed in the national press for the rest of his life.
4. Maybe there's a Principle involved here somewhere -- something like treating all people, including petty shoplifters, the same. If the elites who run a college devoted to social justice can't figure this out, there will be more court actions. In retrospect, it's surprising it took this long.
If a difference of opinion is used to cause losses to someone else, it becomes a subject of litigation.
An accusation is a serious thing in law and in reality. This accusation was very public, backed up by protest and actions by the College to cut off business ties.
Oberlin's definition of racism can be debated, but it becomes a subject of litigation when someone has standing. Gibson's Bakery had standing in the debate because it suffered costs as a result of the accusation.
This is pretty basic stuff.
If Oberlin had actually stood on it's principles, they would have argued that the black kids were not stealing, they were appropriating what was theirs because of a history of systemic racism starting with enslavement, and Gibson's acted inappropriately, something akin to those who hunted down slaves for recapture. I suspect their legal counsel would have discourages that line of argument in court.
This case is a fundamental challenge to many of the commonly used tactics. Fomenting a mob to flood advertisers to shut down someone based on a libel for example.
Lynchings are a real thing exterior to the mind as well.
Wouldn't that argument only make sense if there was an underlying belief that the black students, through no fault of their own, are going to be criminals? So a policy that harshly affects criminals will more harshly affect black people.
Or in other words, Oberlin believes both that black people are inherently criminal and that *you* are racist.
Racism is an idea. It only has meaning as it is created by the human mind.
Thoughtcrime.
I think that calling a business racist because the owner voted for Trump is also slander. It’s slander because just saying the guy voted for Trump doesn’t get the level of incitement you wanted, so naturally you have to ramp up the level of rhetoric.
"Nobody move or the bakery owner gets it."
Not in Blazing Saddles but it could be nowadays.
Althouse said...
Remember this story: "Texas DA Announces He Won’t Prosecute Theft Crimes Valued Under $750"? That was understood by some people as a matter of racial justice...
Others see it as a the result of a concerted effort of George Soros to elect DAs of a certain bent.
"How does free speech work if we can't call each other racist for any damned thing we choose to imagine is racist?"
If it's libel or slander, it isn't free speech, is it?
Racism to normal, sane people means a belief that others are inferior humans, due to skin color.
The Social Justice definition of "racism" is itself a hatefully distorted and racist claim that only white people can be racists, weaponized and used to libel and slander white people in order to bully them into submission.
The 33 million dollar judgement against the true purveyors of this type of SJW fascist bullshit, which is a well off privileged academic institution, is true "Social Justice".
Reparations by any means possible
There's also slander per se, where you don't even have to prove damages. So if racist is bad, don't go around expressing the opinion.
"DA announces they won't prosecute crimes under $750."
Here's the thing. We the people have a right, the power, to protect our property. As a civilized society we delegate that power to assigned law enforcement persons. If they are not going to protect our property, we the people are forced to do so.
The West Virginia shooting has produced stories of several employees who feared a dangerous situation was brewing and considered taking their lawful arms with them to work, but agreed to follow the rules of a "gun free" work place. That instinct to follow the rules, put them in danger, because the people they delegate their power to, failed to take the responsibility seriously.
Are Judges and Juries going to honor a persons right for self protection as a matter of law and refuse to convict them when they exercise obligations required, because those we delegate the power to, refuse to act in the citizens interests.
"...chase down and tackle a student “beyond the borders of their store and into full public view of their customer base”"
Maybe Allyn is an active member of Bakers Without Borders.
Racism to normal, sane people means a belief that others are inferior humans, due to skin color.
Confused with the belief that people are different owing to race.
Quoting myself>
Doing those things doesn't target a particular individual or individuals. Yelling that the Jews are the root cause of all evil in the world and should be exterminated (FIRE!!!!) to incite other people to do harm is not free speech.
The fact that the Administration of Oberlin even wrote in some emails about "unleashing the students" or using them as a weapon against the Gibsons personally and against their bakery as a business, reinforces the idea of malice and incitement to do harm.
Oberlin can try to hide behind free speech but they are just as guilty as a 'Hitler" of inciting to do harm. Unleash the Hitler Youth!!!
beyond the borders
Borders are bullshit man!
Would have been punchier if I had typed
"Nobody move or the bakker gets it."
“Racism is an idea. It only has meaning as it is created by the human mind.”
One of the interesting things from Oberlin’s statements was that the school community couldn’t come together in defining what racism was, as the left so vigorously redefines the word for their own purposes. Is apprehending and arresting shoplifters if they are black (or presumably otherwise possessing sufficient intersectionality points to make them unarrestable) racist? The good little progs on campus, likely, it seems, led by the dean, found it obviously racist. Some of the rest of the school community wasn’t so sure. So, apparently whether it was or was not racist was considered a question of opinion, and open to debate, by, for example, the more Woke members of the Oberlin campus calling them Racist, and the less Woke responding that that behavior (having blacks guilty of shoplifting arrested for it), while vile, doesn’t arise to the level of racism.
If the discussion had remained purely speculative and on campus, then the Oberlin community might have been fine. But they took it off campus and tried to kowtow the bakery and the public into their redefinition of the word “racist” through boycotts, plus’s a lot of yelling, screaming, and good old fashioned protesting, so beloved by the left. And that is where they ran into Real World consequences. When the rest of the greater community hear the world “racist”, they think Klan, burning crosses, and lynchings. (And, of course, the left is attempting to appropriate the collective dislike of racism and racists for their own SJW purposes, so that we will recoil at blacks being arrested for shoplifting, just like we do for the Klan lynching them). Unfortunately for the school, their redefinition and attempted appropriation of the term “racist” holds minimal sway the second that you step off campus. The citizens of the town, and more importantly, the county (whose residents formed the jury pool), didn’t appear to give the school’s redefinition any weight. They, as the larger community, know what the word means, having black shoplifters arrested for their crimes isn’t racist, and therefore calling the Gibson’s racist was not a serious question of opinion, but rather of fact, and since it wasn’t true, by community consensus, it was defamatory.
As I said yesterday, this was an example of the Woke world colliding with the Real World, and losing badly when reality is imposed over SJW aspirations.
But why go slandering Jim Bakker this many years after his infamy passed?
By the way, you aren't shoplifting until you leave the premises with stolen goods. The NYT is being disingenuous with that comment. It is a line that makes you question the whole premise of the article.
Ms Althouse, you are a lawyer, you should have caught that obvious muddling of the issue.
I have followed the Oberlin/Gibson case and I have done a little web searching on my own.
When the police arrived the Gibson employee was on his back being kicked by multiple people. Three were charged with crimes and pleaded guilty. Part of their punishment was to pay the employee's medical bills from that night--but only his cost after his medical insurance paid the rest. So I think that the fact crimes were committed by the students is not in question.
The shoplifter said that the fact he had a fake ID was his proof that he intended to buy the wine. He went on to be elected to some leadership position. I think it was treasurer of the junior class or something. (The student paper has some interesting articles from student journalists who blurt things out.)
Oberlin saw that the problem was with Gibson's actions, kind of like a kid saying "The trouble all started when he hit me back."
I am glad I now understand Oberlin's core values and the president intends to continue living them. I would hate to think a college president was a hypocrite.
Ann,
It isn't just that they called them racist. It is that the college helped organize protests and created leaflets stating that the bakery was racist and had a long history of racial profiling and discrimination. The leaflets listed other places to shop at.
Additionally, the school was making it all about the shoplifting. They tried pressuring the bakery to drop the shoplifting charges in order to continue to do business with them.
Emails used as trial evidence have the faculty saying "Fuck 'em, they've made their own bed now." because the bakery was arguing the validity of Oberlin's accusations and demands on dropping charges. How is that about free speech?
Please read up on the actual trial.
The point at which it is not acceptable is when the accusation is false, as it is in the vast majority of cases. And the point at which it is actionable is when it affects someone financially. It's not ambiguous.
Freedom of speech for conservatives is being crushed by leftists, and this is what seems out of sorts? Try arguing for biologically-restricted girl's sports.
The "Chilling Effect" of not being able to openly libel and slander people in order to destroy them in the name of your bullshit ideology is a good thing.
Althouse is in the position of having read the newspaper and being misinformed.
As I said yesterday, this was an example of the Woke world colliding with the Real World, and losing badly when reality is imposed over SJW aspirations.
I don't think that's quite right. This is an example of the real world colliding with the legal world.
In the real world a mob can pick a target and destroy it. It is the legal world that provides redress, via the civil law suit.
Wow - thanks for the advice! Only $30 a year for NAACP membership.
Accusations of racism by Black students playing the race card was one of the most upsetting things I ever experienced as a substitute teacher.
One really good teacher I met, spent a lot of her own time tutoring a student, and then was accused of racism by the Mother.
It’s a shame how many students and adults play the race card.
>Blogger Heartless Aztec said...
Derek Kite said...
By the way, you aren't shoplifting until you leave the premises with stolen goods.
That's not correct.
"Ms Althouse, you are a lawyer,...”
Everybody drink!
Whether the ERO does anything racially biased or not, it gets called racist. I'm not going to try to detail why the faction that sees it that way thinks the way it does. I'm just saying it does and it speaks out adamantly expressing this belief.
I speculate that your reluctance to detail why the faction has its beliefs has to do with exposing them as piss-ignorant twits.
Back in the 1939s, 1940s,1950s, and early1960s there was a substantial number of citizens who held racial beliefs at least as abhorrent as the views of your Madison “faction” and they were equally adamant. Let’s not forget that, Professor.
Someone calling me a racist may indeed be Free Speech.
But if it causes me real, discernable (and provable) damage, it rises to Slander or Libel as the case may be. And I will seek a remedy. From a jury.
THEOLDMAN
Still Preening After All These Years
Emails used as trial evidence have the faculty saying "Fuck 'em, they've made their own bed now." because the bakery was arguing the validity of Oberlin's accusations and demands on dropping charges. How is that about free speech?
Seems more like extortion to me. Oberlin acting like mobsters with a protection racket :-)
"Hmmmmm,.... (finger to the side of the nose).....nice little bakery you have here. It would be a shame if some students rioted and ruined it. You wanna ever sell donuts to us again?....? "
I have not seen much information on the shoplifter.
He went to a prep school in NJ, so I assume the family has money and is still attending Oberlin.
Legal Insurrection only covered the trial, which is very safe territory from being accused of racism.
Sounds like the students could have also faced charges of assault, but Gibson’s did a plea deal to get a statement of not racist.
The underlying problem here appears to be society's refusal to legally sell wine to college students. The raising of the drinking age continues to eat away at the social fabric.
Wal Mart is typically in the local newspaper everyday for apprehending shoplifters. They have more cameras than the FBI. People are stupid.
I once witnessed an elderly lady in a wheel chair detained outside the exit door hiding a collection of goods under her lap blanket. I do not recall a claim of handicap abuse.
Lloyd W. Robertson: Trying to root out all traces of old racism and other old hates (sexism, homophobia, etc.) is good. Free expression for the new hate--the hatred of old hates--is good. What about people giving voice to the old hates, or advocating for Confederate statues, or Thomas Jefferson statues? Does freedom of speech mean people are free to express and arguably magnify hate?
Any criticism or disapproval can "arguably magnify hate". That's the favorite shtick of lumpen-progs everywhere right now - *any* criticism or expression of disapproval "magnifies hate" and in itself constitutes incitement to violence, denial of rights, etc., etc., etc against the criticized party and therefore must be banned. But that logically cuts both ways.
By their own (crap) logic prog's relentless demonizing of whitey "magnifies hate" and causes violence against whites. Hatin' on "old haters" is still hate, and we all know where "hate" leads, right?
So everybody must STFU.
I see hate and all kinds of name calling from the left, but I posted a Hitler was a Socialist meme on FB, and got banned for 7 days. Tell me that the left supports free speech?? For themselves only.
What if the shopplifters were white?
Chase and detain is a good idea. So many of these pussy prog stores like Whole Foods tell their paying customers to shove it, and let the thieves and mouth drooling shoplifters do whatever they want.
Diversity.
From watching the police camera videos currently available on YouTube, I’d say those facts aren’t even established. Perp is a likely student with two girls, trying to leave store or make exit after diverting attention/paying for other items with two bottles of wine under coat and a possible 3rd bottle stashed/stashed and abandoned on a shelf.
Store clerk is likely confrontational, and holds camera in his face near the register. Claimed first contact is perp not liking this enough slap the camera away. Confrontation then gets more physical in store with perp being cornered and/ partially detained, then spills out into street and two girls with perp start hitting clerk in head. He’s in flight or fight, probably mostly flight.
Police soon arrive on scene where perp is charged with robbery and girls with assault.
Owner is present and gives statement about one girl trying to block him from clerk/perp conflict but corroborates most facts. Dorm RA is there and says totally the clerk’s fault and doesn’t corroborate most facts. Perp is acting really guilty (bully/coward complex) and continuing to not handle the consequences of his likely decisions very well. Maybe clerk could’ve chosen less confrontation but he was well within his rights.
Robbery is serious and this escalated quickly. Don’t know if it’s entirely great to have robbery on his record, but he made his choices. Make this a lesson.
After that the Oberlin Hall Of the Seven Sisters Victim Cult probably started in. Such beliefs and actions will likely succeed in reversing ‘race relations’ Good job, cultists. Facts, personal responsibility, and individual choices were ignored in favor of group solidarity and moral grandstanding.
Pay up. Make this a lesson.
***Even on video, owner present says words to the effect of not wanting to piss students off too much, because that’s his bread and butter.
Also, this is a reminder to academia that they are occasionally subject to the same laws as the rest of us. Academia is not a foreign country.
And considering the physical assault of the store employee by the criminals, the only real injustice here is that any thugs who attacked him were permitted to plead down to a minor, nonviolent crime.
Given the blockades and threats of violence against customers and the store by protesters, the administrator involved and the college president herself should also be arrested and charged with inciting violence.
The real winners may be defamation insurance underwriters.
This also reveals, for the zillionth time, the systemic racism on the progressive left.
Skin color determines the crimes you are allowed to get away with. That's racism -straight up.
I posted a Hitler was a Socialist meme on FB
According to Google, that’s “toxic content,” per Wired magazine anyway. Nowadays its big tech setting the bounds for debate, but the fact that Hitler was a socilaist is not even debatable. It’s true, then you have the deniers.
If I understand Ann's point correctly, it's that the word "racist" has lost much of its former meaning. Today, calling somebody a racist is often much like calling somebody a jerk, which wouldn't be actionable. And I think that's largely right. The only problem with that argument is that it still ought to be defamatory to accuse someone of being a racist in the old-fashioned sense of hating and/or mistreating people because of their race. How to distinguish the two senses is not an easy question.
You know who was really poorly served by the university? The kid they led on to believe that shoplifting was justified.
"Legal Insurrection" has a stunning Twitter thread:
https://twitter.com/LegInsurrection/status/1139886390706130944
Another for the "Althouse trolls her commenters" tag.
Since the progressive left are into lying and stealing, and big governmetn waste, It is understandable why the collective mob left would want to harass a local business after they tried to thwart shoplifting at their own business.
Stealing and lying are the backbone of progressive ideology.
Alan,
When 1 out of 4 women on college campus are (defined-down) raped, has "rapist" also lost its value?
I already made this point but here comes the same stupidity so tell me how you or Althouse know when the devaluation has occurred.
Since you can't let's all just agree that it's defamatory and should be expensive, lacking proof.
“But my point in distinguishing yelling "racist" versus yelling "fire" is that it's an opinion. There are probably some ambiguities about what is a fire (but the problem in shouting "fire" is entirely defined in terms of causing a panic), but the question of what is "racist" is fraught with ambiguity. It's a subject to be debated and it shouldn't be at the risk of liability.”
But that isn’t the question in my mind. Both “fire” and “racism” have accepted definitions in society, at large, and, in this case, in the minds of the the citizens of the county, from which the jury was selected. That definition of “racism”, at a minimum, for most of us, probably means Jim Crow separation of the races, but also contains the overtones of Klan lynchings, etc. While Oberlin and its SJWs seem to believe that the question should be on what the word means, esp to themselves, the surrounding community looked at it that the term was well defined, that the behavior asserted to be racist, wasn’t even close, by community definition of the term, and was thus defamatory.
Something else that should be considered - there has long been a concept in defamation law of “per se” defamation. For example, at one point in the past, falsely asserting lack of chastity for an unmarried woman was considered defamation per se. You didn’t have to prove the definition of chastity, or that a false accusation was bad, because everyone knew how vile that was, potentially making the woman unmarriable in polite society. Most of the classic examples of per se defamation have fallen by the wayside, as our societal mores have changed. For example, allegations of unchastity typically don’t make a woman unmarriageable now, with probably a large percentage of brides now arriving at the alter in what would, previously, have been considered a fallen condition. At least in this country. Not so much in the Muslim world. Some legal scholars have suggested that per se defamation still exists, but the places where it operates have changed, as the mores and morals of this country have changed. And leading the list of per se defamatory terms these days is “ racist”.
@Chris N. The clerk -- actually a family member -- must have known that even accepting a fake ID can get HIM arrested and charged with a pretty serious crime if it's a cop sting. This happens all the time, and especially in places like college towns with lots of underage drinkers. All retail workers know this. So when somebody tries to use a fake ID, it's reasonable to want to get a photo. Ditto for shoplifters. If the thief slapped his hand away, that is simple assault. The clerk's attitude is irrelevant. It's not against the law to be pissed off when people commit crimes against you.
Yet.
Did the leftwing paper of record discuss MEREDITH RAIMONDO's actions?
Tackling a shoplifter should be something we all recognize as admirable. I do!
Instead, on the corrupt morally degenerate left, it's considered racist. and yeah - I don't give a crap what color the perp's skin is.
"blacks steal stuff at a higher rate than others"
Interesting theory. Given the way you phrased it, safe to assume you beleive this is a problem inherent in the DNA rather than something taught/learned?
Tina Trent, got it.
The expression "Night of the long knives" comes from the time when Hitler had his friends and associates of the S.A. (Sturm Abteilung) assassinated Corleone style in a single night when their insistence on adherence to socialism became a problem for him.
That is, there seem to be some people expressing the idea that treating thieves as criminals is a problem of racism.
Shoplifting is becoming endemic among "youth" gangs in Chicago where they will congregate in mobs as large as 500 kids, then groups will run into the high end stores on north Michigan Avenue, grab merchandise and run out to join the larger mob. The first warm Saturday night, a month ago, was the first such event this year. Then, last week, the New Leftist Mayor who is a POC, announced that the police were plotting to ignore crime.
Appearing on a local cable news show on May 30, Lightfoot made the astonishing allegation that the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, the union representing rank-and-file officers, had instructed its members to be passive when dealing with crime over the Memorial Day weekend. “But you know,” she told interviewer Ken Davis, “there were rumors floating around about — and I didn’t verify this — but rumors floating around that they were telling their officers, ‘Don’t do anything. Don’t, over Memorial Day weekend, don’t intercede. If you see some criminal activity just lay back, do nothing.’ I hope to God that wasn’t true because, man, oh man, if that happened, there’s going to be a reckoning.”
Everybody in Chicago knows who commits the vast majority of crime. Every weekend there is another story.
It's racist to try to prevent crime, or to punish it.
The closest thing thing to racism in the entire event is the assumption that since the bakery people were White they must have racist motivations. It is the only idea based on the color of anyone's skin. They see White people and blindly attach negative characters to them. They assign a negative thing to some people based on nothing more than the color of their skin. That is the definition of racism.
Progressive Left: Don't call the police when you see shoplifting.
Progressive Left: You should wait for the police. You don't need a firearm to protect your family and your property.
Althouse, successfully distracted by NYT squirrel.
"If all Oberlin College had done is say, hey, students are students they can do what they want, there would not have been a case. But it was the alleged active participation of the college and its senior administrators in spreading the defamation that gave rise to the law suit. That’s a nuance that’s getting lost in some of the media coverage.
The New York Times covered this today and promoted this as an issue of free speech rights on campus. It’s not. This is not the college being held responsible for what students said. It’s the college being held responsible for its own conduct in distributing and what we call in the law, publishing, defamatory statements about the bakery."
...but apparently, in the United States of Althouse, if you can't defame someone, then the terrorists will have won.
When can you express the opinion that someone is racist?
You must be fucking kidding. This is black privilege.
wendybar: I see hate and all kinds of name calling from the left, but I posted a Hitler was a Socialist meme on FB, and got banned for 7 days. Tell me that the left supports free speech?? For themselves only.
Progs push for laws against lèse-majesté, and prohibit and punish it wherever and whenever they can. The majesté in question, of course, being that of anointed sovereign progressivism.
Any speech abrading progs' thin skins gets banned. Innocuous "NPC" or "learn to code" jokes are denounced in the most hysterical terms as dangerous dehumanizing hate speech, and their authors censored or banned by the enforcers of respect for the sovereign's dignity.
It's all very feudal - or Third World.
The PARTY hack liars who write for the NYT care to mention how Meredith Raimondo made a flyer accusing the store of regularly racial profiling its customers.
Who is Meredith Raimondo? ? ?
She's the Jew hating leftwing nut bag and The DEAN of Students at Oberlin. You know - autonomous faculty.
The left cannot handle free speech, or a mirror.
“Part of the narrative that has been built up is that Oberlin’s administration weaponized students against Gibson’s out of malice,” [Kameron Dunbar, who just graduated from Oberlin]. “I find that concept to be pretty insulting. We’re autonomous.”
I like how they "autonomously" acted in lockstep with the Dean's specific desires with respect to the bakery, just like they "autonomously" acted in lockstep in redefining racism to mean whatever it needs to mean to use it as a weapon. Nothing says "autonomous" like everyone behaving exactly the same.
I also like that her complaint with the narrative is not that Oberlin lacked malice against Gibson's, only that the students could be led by the nose to do the school's dirty work.
Let me add the obvious, that it is the opprobrium of the word “racist” that is driving the (mis)appropriation of the word to the purpose of Social Justice. Most everyone anymore in this country doesn’t want to be called a “racist”. So, the left have attempted to redefine the term to essentially mean anything even vaguely race related that they don’t like to be racist. And, thus, reviled by the general public who don’t want to be seen as “racists”. Thus, Trump is obviously a racist, for no good reason than they don’t like him. He has long had a strong Black following, and if anything, it seems to be growing. And, of course, Black unemployment is now at a record low. Etc. Yet, he is somehow a “racist” and his obvious racism is grounds to oppose him to their dying breaths, or at least until the 2016 election is reversed.
Legal Insurrection's huge thread on their coverage is worth reading. Of particular note, relative to the racism claims, most shoplifters referred to police have been white, almost mirroring the demographics of the area. On the other hand a highly disproportionate percentage of the shoplifters have been students.
Oberlin wanted the bakery to drop the charges regardless of their validity and set up an extra-legal system for student crimes.
Legal Insurrection Coverage
Diversity breeds adversity. Don't indulge color judgments and judges.
Corleone style in a single night when their insistence on adherence to socialism became a problem for him.
All that over a simple dispute regarding titles of the people who ran things.
How does free speech work if we can't call each other racist for any damned thing we choose to imagine is racist?
Freedom of speech doesn’t guarantee freedom from consequences due to whar you say according to libel and slander laws. Meanwhile, “God may help those who help themselves, but this store prosecutes shoplifters.”
Are there any examples of White shoplifters being permitted to steal? The bakery's goods are free if you are White? That's the ridiculous logic required to support the charge of racism here.
Exactly, Tommyesq.
The progressive students "autonomously" harassed the the store in lockstep, encouraged by Oberlin faculty.
THe reason this verdict received scant national coverage is simple. It makes the Iron Triangle (media, academia, progressives) look bad. That is not an acceptable result. The pattern is unmistakable -- a member of one of those groups does something insane and it is confined to local coverage except for citizen journalists. Happened with Kermit Gosnell, and most recently with Omar's tax returns and her tax fraud based upon weird marital history. Heck, Barr is looking at allegations of unleashing intelligence and law enforcement apparatus to spy on a campaign. Pretty big story. THeir response? Attack Barr, and never ask if there is any basis to investigate.
The biggest story out of Wikileaks is how the national media closely coordinated development and execution of political strategy with the DNC and Clinton campaign.
bagoh20,
Wait here and give me a few minutes.
I can create what you need.
/Leftist
/sarc
"It's a subject to be debated and it shouldn't be at the risk of liability."
How about someone whose professional reputation (and therefore livelihood) rests on them being impartial? For example, how about a university professor? IIRC, some years back, Volokh wrote a post about how such accusations which damage a person's professional reputation (and I think he used university faculty as an example, but I'd have to dig that up; it stuck in my mind for future reference) are actionable.
How about a judge? What if they are wrongfully (not necessarily baselessly, the difference being what I think you're trying to get people to think about) accused of being prejudiced against a race? Is that still protected speech?
Will the democratics finally free the shoplifters?
Make shoplifting free! In fact, pay shoplifters a living wage.
Remember, it is a basic tenant of Leftist Collectivism that property rights are antithetical to the Cause.
The problem with redefining the meaning of “racism” (etc) to include anything vaguely race related that SJWs dislike is that the term loses its opprobrium, its strong negative connotations.
If you go back a half century or so, there was still a lot of racism against Blacks in this country. They were still referred to as “Negros” in official government publications (such as the Moynihan Report: “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action”) and less formally using the N word. It took a lot of protests, a lot of work, and even some deaths (such as MLK) to overcome this. Right now, no one really wants to be known as a “racist”, but if the SJWs have their way, in redefining it to mean anything that they don’t like, like Trump or arresting shoplifters, that won’t be the case for much longer.
Calling someone racist is an incitement to violence in some situations.
Case in point: the White Hispanic, where social justice ruled speech, publication and the nation for a time.
Closer in time, the witch hunts and warlock trials, still in progress. And, of course, reducing a human life to a fetal label, which has aided and abetted color judgments and violence based on age discrimination and the "cuteness" factor.
The Second Amendment is under attack because self-defense is intrinsically an act of vigilantism, an archaic patriarchal expression, and is presumed be motivated by diversity.
Althouse needs to read more articles at Legal Insurrection. The college made numerous factual claims about Gibson's that were false. Take as an example the claim the guy who gave chase did so only because the perp was black. That is more specific than “racism” . There is good evidence it is false, and the perp stipulated it was false.
Lots more.
Bad day forAlthouse admirers.
The argument seems to be that since the store employee 'raced' outside of the store boundaries to stop the shoplifter, that was clearly showing racist actions.
The Left, including the major media, see no issue with lefties grouping themselves around Republicans dining out on the town, or giving a speech on campus (back when they were allowed to do so), showing up at their homes to terrorize their families, or their work- getting them fired, all because of thought differences.
Yet stepping up to stop someone stealing is racist. If they had, on the other hand, allowed the thieves to steal without chasing them, would they (Gibson's) have been seen as woke? Enlightened? I suspect so. Want evidence: San Francisco. LA. Seattle. New York.
I just watch our society and shake my head now. As was stated by Gen. MacArthur as he left his service to this country: “History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse, or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster.” We are well on our way to finish, unless civilized people of all stripes start standing up for a civil world. One in which stealing is stealing and there are consequences for it. One in which a difference of thought or opinion is simply an opportunity to learn from each other, or to convince the other side- not a time to silence those with different thoughts.
"blacks steal stuff at a higher rate than others"
Interesting theory. Given the way you phrased it, safe to assume you beleive this is a problem inherent in the DNA rather than something taught/learned?
I'd say it's a secondary effect.
1. American blacks have an average IQ of 86 (DNA)
2. American blacks on the average don't get the same numbers of high visibility jobs
3. Blacks are told the reason they're not getting high visibility jobs is that whites are holding them down, and that's easier to believe than its being fair.
4. Blacks steal in retaliation.
It starts with DNA but the problem comes from psychology. Good character is the thing to aim for, not resentment. There's a wide range of IQs regardless or race and the good character people are the ones that wind up happy.
So the left is favoring the one thing that makes it worse.
Thomas Sowell: "I am so old that I can remember when most racists were white."
Stopping Black people from shoplifting is pure and simple racism.
The diversity racket is on notice. This latest exhibition of bigotry will not be easily dismissed in a black hole (h/t NAACP) or under the semantic plays of the twilight fringe. The social justice activism targeting the "White Hispanic", relatives, friends, and color relations, was another milestone, one of many, over the past several decades, in diversity.
Suppose that two groups each sincerely condemn racism but there are two different definitions of racism: KKK / lynching vs. some common action which, it is said, has been weaponized against blacks such as charging blacks with shoplifting. Then suppose that these definitions collide in a town-gown battle. Is it OK for college students led by college administrators to harm a small business if the actions of the business fit the college-taught theoretical definition of racism but not the definition held by the business or by society at large in terms of the law or of common sense?
One of the interesting things from Oberlin’s statements was that the school community couldn’t come together in defining what racism was
Having a clear and unambiguous definition of racism is racist.
"blacks steal stuff at a higher rate than others"
Interesting theory. Given the way you phrased it, safe to assume you beleive this is a problem inherent in the DNA rather than something taught/learned?
I'd say it's mostly a product of a dysfunctional Black culture.
A way to show AA's point is wrong.
A restaurant serves both blacks and whites. They assign tables first come first served. Althouse claims that it is racist to do so, because it’s a white neighborhood and whites get better tables.
The restaurant refuses to seat black customers. I claim they are racial profiling.
See the difference? My claim is specific in a way hers is not. It is a factual claim and is subject to evidence.
Oxford
English
Dictionary
Three of the most offensive words to non-racists.
Ann wrote,
"Fire is a real thing happening in the world exterior to the mind."
"Racism is an idea. It only has meaning as it is created by the human mind."
But being accused of racism has real adverse consequences for the accused, especially when the accuser knows that those likely to cause those consequences (the general public) uses a completely different definition of the term.
In that way, I would liken the charge of racism to something closer to fighting words. The speaker knows or should know that the charge will result in if not imminent violence, at least imminent economic damage and/or property damage to an accused business.
The Oberlin students were not debating what is and is not racism. The students had decided on their unique definition of racism (or relied on the faculty to make it up after the fact) and advocated that the store suffer the adverse economic consequences of the commonly understood definition of racism.
By singling out the bakery, instead of all the stores in the town (all of which surely stop shoplifting) the students were conveying the message that the bakery was racist in a way that the other stores were not.
I think that something that has been alluded to here is significant. Blacks are now expected to steal and engage in at least petty crimes with impunity. How racist is that, a two tier justice system based on race? Part of the tragedy is that the shoplifter appears to have prepped well, suggesting that he came from a two parent household with both parents likely significantly involved in his upbringing. Likely, his parents would have told him, growing up, that their kind doesn’t do things like shoplifting. That is something that only Ni$$er$ do (being black, they can use the actual term). He goes away to college, his parents aren’t looking over his shoulder any more, and learns that it is racist to arrest Blacks for stealing, apparently because they are too weak and uncivilized not to keep from doing it, and sees that it is almost expected that he engage in that sort of behavior, that sort of petty criminality, because of his race. Indeed, it is likely that he has been told, on a number of occasions, that he was too “White”.
nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline
Morality (i.e. behavioral protocols) has been supplanted by ethics or relative morality (e.g. Pro-Choice) that engenders liberalization, progressive corruption, and a dysfunctional convergence.
Thus, Trump is obviously a racist, for no good reason than they don’t like him. He has long had a strong Black following, and if anything, it seems to be growing. And, of course, Black unemployment is now at a record low. Etc. Yet, he is somehow a “racist” and his obvious racism is grounds to oppose him to their dying breaths, or at least until the 2016 election is reversed.
Before he ran as a Republican, Trump used to get awards from Black civil rights organizations.
Oberlin's argument is that morality is color conditioned, and that black people cannot help themselves, but need to be incubated like an immature human life that is not yet viable. Typical diversitists.
@ Birkel
Remember, it is a basic tenant of Leftist Collectivism that property rights are antithetical to the Cause.
Right you are.
Private property ownership is colonialism, and late stage patriarchy. We must submit to the collective. we are at late stage private property. All property belongs to the government.
*Except Hollywood.*
Your definition of free speech to support lies that damage people by pretending words don't have fixed meaning is stupid.
But maybe that depends on what the definition of is, is, in the "is stupid" phrase.
Althouse has repeatedly said she doesn't believe that words have fixed meanings.
"blacks steal stuff at a higher rate than others"
Ah, statistics, that have been exploited as evidence and a defense of diversity, but are generally a reflection of individual choice.
@ Temujin
The Left, including the major media, see no issue with lefties grouping themselves around Republicans dining out on the town, or giving a speech on campus (back when they were allowed to do so), showing up at their homes to terrorize their families, or their work- getting them fired, all because of thought differences.
Leftwing hate is speech.
Non-leftwing speech is hate.
Or what if one definition of racism in a store is: refusing to serve blacks, sending them to the end of the line and demeaning them with the N word, and another definition is: confronting them over shoplifting.
Gahrie,
Right you are and I am roundly mocking Althouse's bubble.
If words have no fixed meaning Althouse cripples every argument she might make.
Her argument for free speech is crippled.
She is out kicking her intellectual coverage.
Althouse is interviewing secretaries. A Black applies and she says “I don’t hire Blacks.” The man accuses Althouse of racism.
Althouse is hiring secretaries and a man applies who cannot type. “I dot hire non typists.” Chuck decides that this non-typist policy is racist. He says she is racist.
Althouse's position is that these claims are legally indistinguishable.
“Blacks steal in retaliation.”
Maybe some, but a good part of it is very likely a result of growing up without their father in the household. It is fathers, in particular, who teach their kids, and esp their sons, to obey society’s laws. Back a half century ago, when Patrick Moynihan was explaining this problem, only 1/4 of black children were being raised out of wedlock. Now it is 3/4. And back then, those fathers were telling their kids not to engage in criminality, because the law would be even harder on them, than whites, for the same offense. Esp for boys, many, if not most, women cannot adequately domesticate their boys. Loving them unconditionally is often insufficient. What they need, and are searching for are limits, and they will be imposed by society, through the police, if not done before that is necessary by their fathers and older male relatives.
If I understand Ann's point correctly, it's that the word "racist" has lost much of its former meaning. Today, calling somebody a racist is often much like calling somebody a jerk, which wouldn't be actionable. And I think that's largely right
Calling someone a racist is a way of delegitimizing their point of view, sort of like being a deplorable.
It is also the intellectually bankrupt way of saying, "Shut up. I don't want to hear what you have to say because I don't know how to argue against it."
The Left is becoming increasingly lazy and stupid.
I posted a Hitler was a Socialist meme on FB. According to Google, that’s “toxic content,” per Wired magazine anyway
The mistaken association of Hitler and Nazis (and fascists) with right-wing ideology (e.g. libertarian, anarchist), has been politically congruent for left-wing interests and defense for a long time. Unfortunately, most people will bend their minds to operate within the consensus's frame of reference and box. Well, they did, as long as that transhuman, trans-social, translegal, ethical alternative was tolerable.
Was it VMI before the Supreme Court in which the majority said something like:
Women are not allowed to go there.
But it has a unique environment.
Therefore, we must allow women in so they can experience the uniqueness of a single sex military school.
Althouse abides.
Egg heads gonna make some omelettes.
If Oberlin is saying that it is racist to chase and detain shoplifters, aren't they implying that they expect most shoplifters to be people of color? That sounds racist.
“Blacks steal in retaliation.”
Retributive change? Hutu vs Tutsi. Mandela faction lynching competing blacks. The African slave economy and trade.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2019/05/gibsons-bakery-v-oberlin-college-trial-its-make-or-break-week/
The important part of the younger Gibson’s testimony is the scrap that took place outside the store in the park across the street, as the shoplifters allegedly tried to leave: the social justice warrior community claims Allyn D. Gibson was beating up the shoplifters, while the police report and testimony from police who answered the call on Nov. 9, 2016 –along with many other witnesses — say just the opposite.
Here is the part of the police report that will likely become the central point of discussion from the witness stand:
“Allyn stated once they were across the street from the store, he again attempted to detain [the Oberlin male student] Aladin but again Aladin became violent knocking Allyn to the ground and began punching Allyn again. Allyn stated once he was on the ground the two females also began punching and kicking Allyn in the head, face and body. Allyn stated at one point, Aladin stated, “I’m going to kill you.” Allyn stated the next thing he knew officers were on scene and pulling the individuals off of him. Allyn had several abrasions and minor injuries including what appeared to be a swollen lip, abrasions to his arms and wrists and a small cut on his neck.”
One of the first Oberlin police officers arriving at the scene, Victor Ortiz, backed up that report in testimony last week. He told the jury that “When we got there, we saw two young ladies standing over [Allyn D. Gibson] and throwing haymakers at him. The two women would stand over him and kick him, and then crouch down and throw punches. As we got closer, we could see him on his back, with the male [shoplifter] on top of him and punching him.”
Was the store targeted out of racism? Or maybe it's a case of informal reparations.
Get rid of the label "socialist" and "capitalist" because that language was crafted by your enemy.
Speak clearly and with purpose.
The dichotomy is freedom versus coercion.
It is free people versus Collectivism.
It is free markets versus government control.
Imagine a debate in which the conservative acknowledges favoring freedom for people and markets.
What would the Collectivist response be?
Win the argument using liberal, enlightened, classical terminology.
Not Marxist dog shit words.
If Oberlin is saying that it is racist to chase and detain shoplifters, aren't they implying that they expect most shoplifters to be people of color?
The double-edge scalpel of NYT's close association style guide.
Ann needs a rewrite on this piece. I think she was being fairly neutral about her comments then confused the issue at the end by saying (perhaps) that we can call anything we want to racist (implied: without fear of retribution).
There is no question that Oberlin failed in their role of in loco parentis. They failed to discipline kids who were criminal offenders, they aided in instigating an uprising that harmed to the plaintiffs business and reputation; they have tried to coerce the plaintiffs into dropping their suit by ceasing to do business with them. The jury did a much better job of seeing through the fog from the defense attorney and the school than Ann has - at least as she seems to have expressed it.
This seems an instance where Ann's neutrality bent has fogged her writing.
Calling someone a racist is a way of delegitimizing their point of view, sort of like being a deplorable. It is also the intellectually bankrupt way of saying, "Shut up. I don't want to hear what you have to say because I don't know how to argue against it."
It's much more than that. It is a weapon used with intent to harm the target. To destroy the target.
bagoh20 said...
Are there any examples of White shoplifters being permitted to steal?
The majority of the police reports made by the bakery for shoplifting involved white thieves.
The school was upset, in part, because they had asked shop owners in town to call them instead of the police for first time shoplifters. I haven't found out if other stores did this and what punishment the college gave to those students. If the college was just as effective at stopping repeat behavior as reporting it to the police was, I can see their argument. (But I have my doubts that it was as effective.)
"I now see that the argument is that even if the bakery stopped blatant shoplifters, the accusation of racism stands."
I like to think that what the jury of my peers punished Oberlin for was not the harm they did to some bakery, but the harm they do to our society every day, with their pernicious lies and noxious ideologies. Burn the fuckers to the ground. Let not one stone stand upon another. Salt the God-damned earth they stood upon.
I'm with Jupiter.
The "higher *ahem* ed" industry needs to be destroyed.
It causes net harm to society.
Jimmy Carter inflicted the Education Department on the country.
It needs to be abolished.
And the student loan business should be run by private entities, not guaranteed by the government, and more easily dischargeable.
"If the college was just as effective at stopping repeat behavior as reporting it to the police was, I can see their argument. "
Bullshit.
University efforts to create/impose their own versions of laws/justice need to be shut down, not embraced out of some sense of agreeable outcome.
@Hari
Accusations of racism = fighting words is something we've been thinking about while working on ways to create a defense organization for conservatives being purged from the internet. Free speech doesn't exist when people are persecuted daily for speech they didn't even commit, while others are excused for literally assaulting people accused of harboring the "wrong" ideas, and it's toxically frivolous to diminish the problem.
There are some discrete blogs publicizing these problems, and relatively small legal foundations, but we need a robust, ethical, conservative alternative to the ACLU in every state.
And we need a federal legislative agenda.
One thing to add - the public versus private target issue is pretty important here. SCEN. ONE - Jane Doe, a student of Ann's writes on twitter that she has taken Ann's classes and Ann is both a racist and actually likes Trump, and other students should avoid her classes. SCEN. TWO - Ann writes on her blog that she has had Jim Smith in classes, he is a racist and employers should avoid hiring him.
Ann is a well-known public figure. Ann sue Jane; motion to dismiss granted. But can Jim successfully sue Ann? I think his suit may survive a motion to dismiss even given the vague allegations - I think courts will dismiss vague slanders against public figures more readily than against private ones, and it's the Jim Smith cases we're going to see more of.
This seems an instance where Ann's neutrality bent has fogged her writing.
Funnily enough, this only seems to happen when someone of the Left behaves badly. See CBF and Phillips.
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