(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) I visited New Orleans recently for the funeral of a friend and, against my better judgment, got a hotel not far from the French Quarter so I could honor my buddy fittingly with a night of Bacchanalian revelry.
Fortunately for me, the reports of the city’s top tourist spot being overrun with crime appeared to be somewhat exagerrated. Having spent a year living on the bayou, I knew well enough where not to wander alone in the wee hours when visiting the Big Easy.
That’s not to say I didn’t encounter a few shady situations that, but for my good fortune, might have ended worse.
While ambling up Bourbon Street, I happened to drift just past the commercial area and into a more residential (read: darkly lit) section, where I stopped to get my bearings.
Within a few minutes, a red SUV with tinted windows pulled up, and the driver—a black woman in her 20s or 30s—beckoned me over.
I got closer but still maintained a healthy distance to find out what she wanted. I could see at least two other people in the car but could not make out what the person in the back seat looked like.
The driver said something like “What are you looking for?”
“I’m good,” I replied, while trying to scope out the situation. “Do you need something?”
I continued to rebuff her entreaties to get closer, unsure what I might be walking into.
She perceived that I was trying to see what was happening in the back seat.
“It’s a woman,” she tried to reassure me.
Then, out of the blue, “Quit being racist,” she chided.
With a jolt, I was released from whatever politesse had forced me to continue engaging with her. Instantly, she confirmed for me that this was a situation I had no business being involved with, regardless of what her yet-unknown motive was.
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” went my inner monologue, which speaks only in Shakespearean soliloquy.
Without another word, I began walking briskly back in the other direction, toward the bright lights.
A DREAM DEFERRED
Although New Orleans has largely remained its quirky, moderately unhinged self in the intervening years since I moved away, this was a moment unlike any I’d ever encountered.
To be personally confronted by such a baseless attack—normally confined only to the safe-haven of a screen and an anonymous user-name—underscored for me the paradigmatic shift in race-relations that has occurred over the past few years.
Before, “racism” was always a conversation-ender. It was the wild card for the Left to predictably pull out in a losing debate.
And, in that context, it came to be even something of a badge of honor to have reduced one’s intellectual sparring partner to such a cheap and clichéd parlor trick—or perhaps a tell-tale sign that one’s sparring partner was not so intellectual after all.
In that sense, it was weaponized long ago. But this encounter was different.
To see the race card played with such obvious design for malfeasance—in a situation where the intent was clearly trying to induce me to act against my interest—brought it outside of the abstract and theoretical world and made it dangerous.
Truly, we have reached the moment in time where the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, so justly honored today for his civil-rights advocacy, has become a nightmare.
Instead of sitting down together at the table of brotherhood, King’s principles of passive resistance have been distorted into a bizarre justification by powerful and corrupt leaders like New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell not to enforce the laws that keep our society running.
QUEEN OF MEAN
Two other recent examples stand out, not involving me personally, but involving the reckless abuse of racial guilt and good-will to escalate rather than ease tensions.
The first is the recently proposed bill by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, that would effectively make it a crime for any white person to criticize a nonwhite person.
The so-called Leading Against White Supremacy Act of 2023 would broadly classify antagonistic comments “between two or more persons” as a conspiracy—even on social media—and also seeks to designate it a hate crime.
Congressman Sheila Jackson Lee just introduced a bill that would make it a federal crime for White people, and White people only, to criticize mass immigration or to say anything that she claims would vilify "a non-White person or group." pic.twitter.com/WihNgX2ylL
— National Conservative (@NatCon2022) January 14, 2023
On its face, the proposal is as absurd as it is on-brand for the preposterous Jackson Lee, who is more than happy to antagonize others.
“I’m a queen and I demand to be treated like a queen!” she reportedly said once, according to the Daily Mail. And that was her being polite.
In 2014, she was voted the “meanest” member of Congress by The Washingtonian magazine, the Houston Chronicle reported.
After coercing an airline to give her a first-class seat in 2017, leaving another hapless passenger seatless, Lee offered no apology.
“Since this was not any fault of mine, the way the individual continued to act appeared to be, upon reflection, because I was an African American woman, seemingly an easy target along with the African American flight attendant who was very, very nice,” Lee wrote on Facebook.
THE BLM GAME
Another recent example to follow this familiar pattern is the unfortunate—but avoidable—death of 31-year-old Keenan Anderson on Jan. 3 while in custody of Los Angeles police.
Anderson, an English teacher in the Washington, D.C., area, reportedly was in L.A. visiting family for the holidays. Among his cousins is Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrice Cullors.
View this post on Instagram
According to witness accounts, Anderson was responsible for causing an accident and subsequently appeared to behave erratically, walking in the middle of the road, then briefly engaging police before trying to flee the scene.
During the conversation, he spoke incoherently about somebody trying to “add stuff” to his car.
After he was subdued, he yelled “They’re trying to George Floyd me!” and proceeded to escalate the situation.
We must not look away. And we must not shrink from the need for justice for Keenan Anderson.
Police must never respond with such force to a potential mental health crisis. Resources and care are the answer.
Accountability must be transparent and swift.https://t.co/6WQ4ZhkiBK
— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) January 16, 2023
The end result was that Anderson was hit with a Taser, causing him to suffer cardiac arrest.
LAPD released a video with radio dispatch and body-cam footage after Cullors became involved.
KNOW WHEN TO WALK AWAY
Will Cullors, who has considerably diminished the credibility of BLM with her own financial scandals, succeed in creating more public outrage?
Will Anderson’s own stated belief that he might become another George Floyd be fulfilled with another martyrdom?
To me, it seems unlikely.
Although leftist media has pushed out the narrative in its echo-chamber that he should be referred to as “Black English teacher” instead of “hit-and-run drug-abuser,” it is clear that Anderson reaped the consequences of his own actions.
There is a time to resist and a time to cooperate. For too long, reasonable Americans have been held hostage by the threat of the latter.
And they are now weighing the third option, as I did in my Bourbon Street encounter, to simply walk away.
For the shrinking number of black Americans who do still believe the specter or racism continues to define our history, clouding every aspect of our being, know that the danger is very real—not of whites rising up to oppress and enslave anyone, but that those whose attention you so desperately crave will soon stop listening altogether.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.
