Its really funny to me people are defending these guys. You mark yourself as a completely biased probably slightly racist yourself. Just say these guys are horrible people that are an embarrassment to anyone they’re around and move on. You hurt your favored party by supporting them. Stop sabotaging yourselves lol.
Also, the news media wasn’t targeted:
She was standing beside the Fox News desk at the time, and she was the only one targeted according to the interview, so if was the news media, wouldn’t they have attacked others as well as her ?
The racists haven’t signed a sworn affidavit of their racistness, so we have to be quiet lest we call some accidentally racist sounding behavior racist because… something!!!
She was there and we weren’t. That makes her a witness, sure.
But she doesn’t know what was going on in their heads either. Just being from the South and black doesn’t mean every single time you get pelted with peanuts it is a racist act.
And using the words of only one side of a dispute is a crappy litmus test.
Um, really? You think Republicans are going to attack Fox?
This fact just strengthens my case for a possible alternative.
If you’re talking about me, let me know so I can put you on ignore.
I’m a Democrat.
I think I’m protecting my favored party by refusing to make hasty judgements, and therefore protecting it’s credibility.
Of course it does.
You complained about a false accusation of racism. Now you’re saying I shouldn’t complain about it (on behalf of those who were accused).
No you don’t! You just called them racists! You’ve prejudged them.
The absence of evidence is not evidence.
I’ve never once heard you say that stomping puppies is wrong. Does that mean I can conclude without a doubt that you approve of stomping puppies?
Nope. You just never learned from your own experience. You should think harder.
I wouldn’t say that.
The action: Two people throwing peanuts at one person they don’t know and saying “This is what we feed animals.”
-
Throwing peanuts. No established symbolism there. Not like throwing tomatoes at a bad act on stage (or bagels). One can reasonably conclude that they wanted to throw something and this is what was at hand.
-
“This is what we feed animals.” Clumsy phrasing that doesn’t even really make sense (you feed animals peanuts? um…so?) but clearly meant as a ham-fisted insult, stating the victim is sub-human, less than a person.
**Conclusion: **Boorish and bullying behavior, regardless of victim or context. This alone should be enough to get them booted out of most civilized gatherings.
BUT there is nothing inherently racist or sexist in the action alone. The exact same attack could have happened, say, between male (of any race) fans of rival teams at a football game. Or I even between women, though I like to think our insults are more clever and devastating. 
So the only way to try to explain the motivation of the behavior is to look at the perpetrators, the victim, and the circumstances where the action took place.
- **The perpetrators. **Has any article conclusively stated that the perpetrators were white males? The OP and the cited Maynard Institue article say “two attendees.” So does this mean that the race and gender of the perpetrators doesn’t matter, or that the (admittedly reasonable) assumption is that they were white males, given the location?
If race is so clearly the basis of the attack, then why not definitively state that the perpetrators were white males? How would that change the context of the attack if this wasn’t so, however unlikely?
2.** The victim.** A black woman. Pelted with peanuts and being called sub-human. While “animal” may be too general to see as racist out of context, that slur is not associated with being female. Sexist insults are usually along the lines of “know your place, shut up and smile” types of things and not so much “you are less than human,” at least not in public. The “less than human” range of insults is much more likely to come from a racist outlook (notice I don’t say definitely). I have no cite, that is just self-evident to me but one could argue otherwise.
However, if – for the sake of argument – the perpetrators were not white (but let’s say not black either)? Would then the attack still be racist, based on word choice and behavior alone?
Let’s add to this that the victim herself indicates that the attack was racist - or more accurately she was the target because she was a black woman and a rare sight at the RNC:
She was there, she got pelted with peanuts, so that carries a lot more weight than any of our hypothetical wankage (and I mean that lovingly of course).
Conclusion: Attack was most likely to be motivated by racism, and specifically prejudice against black women than by any other factor, due to the word choice and context.
As for the argument that maybe the attack was against the “liberal media,” that seems less likely. While the victim IS a CNN cameraperson, she wasn’t operating a camera at the time, and she was standing next to the FOX News area. According to her interview, it doesn’t seem that there was anything clearly identifying her as being part of CNN.
I honestly don’t get the pile-on of lance strongarm. I applaud him for checking the knee-jerk response of “They were (probably) white and she was black so it’s OBVIOUSLY racism” without any reasonable argument. And even worse, with drawing the conclusion that asking for a reasoned argument (which I attempted above) was akin to defending racism or that he’s a conservative Romney-loving teabagger. Please.
What are you talking about? Upthread there’s a suggestion that throwing peanuts at the “media” would have been their comment on the media in general, but because the camerawoman was the ONLY one targeted and NOT doing any camera work at the time, she was only standing there and they had no idea if she was a media person or not, that’s what makes those old mens’ actions so untoward.
Sorry, but the truth is some people don’t want to look at racism and see it for what it is. You can push semantics around all you want, but look at the CONTEXT of what happened here and it’s straight forward: Patricia Carroll has known it all her life, and why should we deny her that? There were witnesses to the assault, and she herself “just wanted it to go away” because she knows things never change, how sad that it’s still alive and kicking:
“I can’t change these people’s hearts and minds,” Carroll added. “No, it doesn’t feel good. But I know who I am. I’m a proud black woman. A lot of black people are upset. This should be a wake-up call to black people. . . . People were living in euphoria for a while. People think we’re gone further than we have.”
So why on earth would she say those things if she didn’t recognize it for what it is? Moreover, unfortunately she hit on something very profound, and it’s a testament to people wanting to just shove their heads in the sand and not deal with it honestly.
If she was really wearing nothing identifying herself as a press worker(like a press pass) then I think that does totally change the situation, and it would have to be racially motivated. If it is reported a cop was attacked and called a filthy pig, but he was actually off duty with nothing to identify his profession then it changes the situation.
But you can go visit the Freeper’s and see how they ‘recognize things for what they are’. Some things are incontrovertable fact, some are wild speculation, and there is a huge muddy area in between, which calls for tempered interpretation.
Maybe there are some further facts established of which I am unaware about this incident, but I do not know for ‘fact’, for instance, that there was ‘no way for these old men to know she was a media person’. I think it’s at least likely she was wearing clothing or a badge identifying her with CNN. I doubt that was relevent to the behavior of these cretins, but I’m less than certain. In fact, it may well have been a combination of being female/black/professional that set these guys off.
One of my favorite sayings is “he’s frequently wrong, but never uncertain”. I don’t really understand why some of us are getting so bent over Lance and a few others being less than certain as the motives of these dunces.
That’s pretty much what I said. Are you implying I don’t agree with you?
And some people will insist that any slight done in a situation where race is present equals racism. That in and of itself is not helpful.
Nitpick: “This is how we feed animals”, not “This is what we feed animals.”
And that phrase means that you believe the person is ascribing those words to you. There’s no other reason to use them.
You seem to not be very good at knowing what words mean outside their literal definition. Or, at least, choosing to ignore other meanings for the sake of an argument.
What you say is only true in theory, not in practice. People don’t accidentally call black people animals. People don’t accidentally only throw peanuts only on black people. If it was just about the “lamestream media,” why didn’t they do it to the others that were there representing other members of said media?
By these crazy (probably racist) people defending the racists: Are we not entertained?
I hope you are not insisting that anyone not jumping on the ‘certainly racist’ bus is, therefore, a racist?
The word probably leaves plenty of room for some to simply be stupid, blinded partisans, and stupid. So there you go.