I just can’t. You can’t really believe this, can you?
It’s probably fair to say that the KKK-image email was probably not threatening actual racist violence. Maybe. Anti-abortion activists have been known to do and support a lot of violence against those who disagree with them, of course.
But it’s completely implausible that the email wasn’t intended to be offensively assholish and intimidating. As I said, there is no way that KKK imagery purposely displayed to a Black person in an adversarial way can be separated from its historical implications of intimidation and terrorism.
And as I also said, anybody who in sincere good faith wants to object to a Black lawmaker’s policy position on the grounds that it unwittingly gives aid and comfort to the Klan can do so by using their words. Gratuitous pictures of terrorists serve no purpose except to provoke unpleasant feelings in the recipient.
Clearly, discomforting the recipient with an allegedly “non-racist” gratuitous use of KKK imagery is more important to the sender than trying to convince the recipient to agree with their position.
The presumption that an act is not a threat of violence is the general rule, to which burning a cross is one specific exception on account of it being the prelude to numerous instances of actual violence. Compare with setting off a bomb siren, shouting “This is the police!”, or shouting “Fire!” in a movie theatre.
Sending a picture of a burning cross to someone does not fall under that exception. It would be different if there was a serial killer who sent images of burning crosses to his victims before the murders. If the email at issue here was similar in form to emails sent by a serial killer, and this was known to a reasonable person, I think that would be punishable by law.
~Max
This much I admit. But the lawsuit is brought under statutes that mention intimidation of public officials with threats of violence.
~Max
This is an unconvincing line of argument based on the untenable notion that nothing short of an unambiguous symbolic proclamation of immediate physical violence can be described as “threatening” or “intimidating” or having “threatening intent”.
We already agree that the KKK-imagery email sent to Rep. Walker is unlikely to have been intended as a symbolic proclamation of immediate physical violence. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that statues against intimidation of public officials are inapplicable to it.
That’s not the basis of my position. Yes, I have in mind physical violence (is there any other kind?). But no, it does not have to be immediate. It does not have to be explicit either, a true threat can be implied. For example this is a conditional threat, and the condition can only be met in the future:
A guy walked up on me and said to me, “Leave Trump alone. Forget the story.” Then he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, “That’s a beautiful little girl - it’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.” And then he was gone.
This is not immediate because the threat is conditioned on leaving Trump alone and forgetting the story. The victim is threatened with violence if, in the future, she bothers Trump by going public with the story. Neither is it an explicit threat. An explicit threat would have gone, ‘if you go public with this story I will make your daughter an orphan’. Here the threat is implied - ‘it’d be a shame if something happened to her mom’. Yet I think everyone will agree that this is a true threat.
Contrast with an email such as,
Subject: Your Plan
Body:
What do you think the coward hiding under his dunce cap and face mask thinks every time he hears about a Black child has been aborted?
[image of Klansman performing Nazi salute]
Be pro-life as if your race depended on it! It’s the American thing to do!
You have written that an objection made in good faith would have used words, but the email does use words. Those words indicate that Ms. Walker’s plan on the issue of abortion is tainted by association with Ku Klux Klan ideology. The logic is fallacious but not uncommon. The copy is adversarial, but not out of place in the realm of politics. The use of the image is gratuitous, shocking, and distasteful, but not useless. It serves an express rhetorical purpose, and possibly a practical one too (making sure the email is noticed rather than instantly trashed). If I thought the author was acting in bad faith, that the words were insincere and the true intention of sending this email was to scare Ms. Walker by threatening her with a lynching, I would say sending that email constitutes a threat. But, I don’t think that is likely.
Well, I go a bit further than you. I don’t think the email is likely to have been intended as a “symbolic proclamation” (threat) of conditional violence, either. Neither do I think it implies that violence against Ms. Walker is likely to occur, imminent or conditional. If the email is not explicitly or implicitly threatening or promoting violence against her, the email cannot violate the statute and the lawsuit is doomed. This is because, as I wrote above, the law deals with threats of violence, not mere intimidation.
Don’t take my word for it, read the statute yourself. The West Virginia Record reports that the lawsuit was brought under W. Va. Code § 61-6-21. Quote,
(a) All persons within the boundaries of the State of West Virginia have the right to be free from any violence, or intimidation by threat of violence, committed against their persons or property because of their race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, political affiliation or sex.
(b) If any person does by force or threat of force, willfully injure, intimidate or interfere with, or attempt to injure, intimidate or interfere with, or oppress or threaten any other person in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him or her by the Constitution or laws of the State of West Virginia or by the Constitution or laws of the United States, because of such other person’s race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, political affiliation or sex, he or she shall be guilty of a felony, and, upon conviction, shall be fined not more than $5,000 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
(c) If any person conspires with another person or persons to willfully injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate or interfere with any citizen because of such other person’s race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, political affiliation or sex in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him or her by the Constitution or laws of the State of West Virginia or by the Constitution or laws of the United States, and in willfull furtherance thereof to assemble with one or more persons for the purpose of teaching any technique or means capable of causing property damage, bodily injury or death when such person or persons intend to employ such techniques or means to violate this section, each such person shall be guilty of a felony, and, upon conviction, shall be fined not more than $5,000 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
[…]
Now something I don’t understand is how Ms. Walker can initiate a lawsuit for damages while citing a criminal code. Normally the State will prosecute crimes. Or perhaps she is only seeking a restraining order - that makes more sense.
Nevertheless I think public representatives have a higher bar for personal restraining orders than a private individual. I wouldn’t use the usual preponderance of the evidence standard because a restraining order obtained by a state legislator against a constituent implicates a person’s right to petition. If a restraining order were granted it should be very narrow, perhaps limited to prohibiting images of Klansmen. We don’t have a conviction, an arrest, an indictment, etc. And I don’t personally think there’s a threat of violence by any standard.
~Max
White people, as a group, have a history of actual racially-motivated violence against Black people, never mind threats, veiled or otherwise.
It’s got fuck all to do with the textual comparison, and everything to do with the imagery used.
You’re wrong.
No, they are made so by custom and context. So? This usage is not devoid of either.
Are you looking to delve into the “cartoons of picaninnies are not inherently racist” pit other posters have dug in the past?
That’s your privilege of not living under constant threat of systemic violence talking.
Said the not-a-Black-person.
I guess it’s your privilege to be able to pontificate about what is and isn’t likely when White supremacy directs threats at Black women… but your experience as a Black female public figure is what, now, that you can calculate these likelihoods?
Irrelevant. If your point is that I should assume an ulterior motive exists because a white person sent the email rather than a person of any other race, I will not assume an individual has an ulterior motive on account of his race.
The custom is that Klansmen and Nazi salutes are symbols of white supremacy, and the context (which includes the text accompanying the image and Ms. Walker’s political position) is that Ms. Walker is being compared to a Klansman throwing a Nazi salute.
I’m not familiar with the subject of racist caricatures but from my understanding of the word, if it isn’t racist or derogatory, it cannot be a piccaninny.
~Max
So it is. You are free as always to discount my opinion because I am not a Black woman. We could go back to the Rabbi example, and you could go back to implying I’m not Jewish enough to hold a respectable opinion. We could talk about Dr. Seuss and his depiction of Asians, but am I really Asian enough to hold an opinion? Maybe whenever a politician accuses someone of threatening them, I should just scroll on to the next story because it’s none of my business.
~Max
Not irrelevant.
No, the context is that she’s a Black woman receiving KKK imagery.
That’s some ridiculous denying the antecedent going on, there.
Well, not often people are so happy to just own it without the least amount of shame, I guess.
We can go back to it when you answer the questions.
I don’t know, how Asian are you?
Or, you know, you can believe them when they say they were threatened.
I have seen enough “You’re the REAL racist!” idiocy from the far right to think they were trying to pull that kind of argument. In the mind of a delusional anti-abortionist, they might think, “If I just show this Black legislator something offensive enough to them, they’ll see the light and realize how wrong they are! I know, I’ll show them pictures of the Klan and tell them that they’re just like the Klan! I know Black people hate the Klan, that’s sure to make them see how wrong they are!”
This is one of those cases where I think profound stupidity might explain the actions. It is not in any way to excuse the actions, and obviously this train of thought was profoundly racist. And obviously the impact was that the legislator felt threatened, no matter what the intent was.
But there may not have been an intent to make a racist threat, if the email sender was actually stupid enough. And I think they may have been.
The latter quotation was in respect to actions taken by the same individual (or organization); that is, such history is individualized. The former quotation referred to actions taken by other members of a race; in other words, the history is racial. It is reasonable to use an individual’s history to conclude he is acting in bad faith. It is unreasonable to use the history of a person’s race to conclude he is acting in bad faith. To do so would be to discriminate against them on the basis of race.
So on the one hand, if the race of White people have a history of racially-motivated violence against Black people, it would be unjust to take that into account when determining if a White individual’s violence against a Black individual was racially motivated.
On the other hand, if a juror believes Black people have a history of dealing drugs, it would be unjust to take that into account when determining whether a Black individual is a drug dealer or merely a consumer.
The captions above and below the image are part of the context. I’m not going to budge on that. The article describes the words as part of the graphic itself - I’m imagining it’s your standard meme caption, like this:
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It follows from the premise that all piccaninny caricatures are racist or derogatory, which is another way of saying racism is an essential, an inherent element of picanninny caricatures.
~Max
Note that the image was originally posted to a pro-life group’s Facebook page by the head of the local chapter, who has since resigned. It “tagged” the legislator in question on Facebook, and the post was probably public, but the intended audience would have been the pro-life community. I’m not sure if the same person sent the email or if that was a random member of the public.
From the Vice article,
The day after the email landed in Walker’s inbox, the head of a local chapter of West Virginians for Life, an anti-abortion group, admitted to posting an identical graphic to the group’s Facebook. In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, Walker sued West Virginians for Life over both the email and the Facebook post, accusing the group of being behind both messages.
~Max
I believe her when she says she feels threatened. When she accuses another person of threatening her, contrary to law, that is not something I will blindly agree with. There’s an important difference.
~Max
It would not, however, be wrong to take that history into account when determining if the Black person felt threatened.
But they don’t absolve the image itself of its own context.
Not to the threatened person. If she was unreasonable to feel threatened, then yeah. But her perception of threat was entirely reasonable.
Yes, but don’t you see, because the white person doesn’t perceive the same threat, that means the threat doesn’t exist, because the POC perspective is specific to the POC, but the white perspective is generic and broadly correct across all objective realities, or at least the ones that matter. Quod erat demonstrandum. Right?
I don’t know if Max considers themself White. As far as I can tell based on their non-answers to questions, they’re a half-Asian non-Holocaust-affected Jew, or something like that.
Wait, you believe she felt threatened? Then, um, do you believe that the person sending the image might have reasonably predicted it would feel threatening to her? And if so, how it that not an intentional threat.
Communication never exists in a vacuum.
It’s irrelevant whether the victim of an alleged threat is reasonable in feeling threatened.
I am allowed to believe that she really felt threatened regardless of whether she is within reason to take the email as a threat or not. To feel threatened is to feel a form of fear, and you must agree that not all fears are reasonable - rational. I make this point for the sake of completeness. Neither the jury nor the public should not be second guessing whether Ms. Walker had reason to feel scared. To do so would be blaming the victim for her feelings, when it’s not the victim who is standing trial.
Here’s another perspective: if Ms. Walker received an threat but didn’t feel scared by it (maybe she decides to mock it on social media), that shouldn’t stop the prosecutors from building a case.
That is why I say the question is irrelevant.
The important question is whether the sender is likely to have deliberately sent the email with the specific intent of threatening the recipient with violence.
There are crimes without a mens rea element, but threatening violence is not one of them.
~Max