Originally published at Red State

Joyce Carol Oates represents the worst of white liberal culture. She is a sanctimonious, race-obsessed grievance monger who pompously lectures others on their personal failings with little insight into her own. She presents herself as a serious thinker and intellectual, but as her recent forays into social media (and most of her writings) prove, she simply bleats out whatever opinions the urban liberal herd accepts.  She reached an absurd new low recently as she smugly suggested that most NRA members are whites and only want guns because they remember the riots of the 60s (even the ones born after the riots, I assume). So their desire to own guns … is racist.

Let’s accept her premise that the NRA is predominantly white and holding on to the memory of riots in the 60s, for the sake of argument. We’ll pretend there have not been other race riots in our recent history, or non-race riots like the ones we saw from OWS and Lakers fans. Even if her premise is correct that white people (except for the enlightened few who agree with her, of course) are afraid of rioters assaulting their houses and families, how is her conclusion — that defending your family is racism — acceptable in a free society?

I grew up in the 70s as the only biracial child in a predominately black area when Black Nationalism was at its height so I feel comfortable opining on this particular idea of racism as the refusal to be violently victimized. I learned about this the hard way and one of the main lessons I learned was that this demand for martyrdom was part of a backward morality foisted upon the black community by white Marxists through their bought and paid for bootlickers. These proxies for Oates and her ilk, people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, helped redefine racism as any activity that white radicals don’t like, self-defense against mobs being an example.

Oates was careful to use the 60s riots as an example rather than the Rodney King riots for a reason. The L.A. riots proved that people need to protect themselves during civil unrest. Many of us remember that the LAPD pulled out of Los Angeles for several days during the riots, leaving the citizens to their own devices while hundreds of thugs and criminals rampaged through the city. More than 60 people died in the rioting, many murdered by the mobs; 2,400 people were injured and almost 7,000 rioters were arrested.

According to Oates those that tried to defend themselves, their families and their property were racists and those that put plans into place to do the same in the case of future civil unrest are racists. For collectivists like Oates, the mere desire to not be at the mercy of a mob is racism.

To understand how backward this is, think about what Oates and her ilk don’t consider racist.

Hate crimes against blacks are up due to Latino gang violence and even the SPLC has been forced to admit that gangs made up largely of  Mexican nationals are “ethnically cleansing” many cities. This is allowed to continue because people like Oates can’t be bothered to mow their own lawns or pick their own lettuce. But sacrificing dozens of black lives for cheap labor isn’t racist?

Teachers in our country are rewarded and applauded for presiding over a public education system where blacks have a 40% drop out rate nationally. The fact that almost half of black teens don’t graduate from high school is not considered an abysmal failure of the public schooling system and teachers would seem like racism to me. But not to Oates.

Robert Byrd recruited people into the Ku Klux Klan and obviously many of those people went on to assault and murder blacks. White liberals kept him in political office for decades after that. Isn’t overlooking his personal hand in ethnic terrorism aimed at his fellow Americans evidence of racism among his supporters?

36% of abortions are of black babies though blacks only make up 13% of the population, leading some to estimate that up to 13,000,000 black Americans were never born. Since there are only about 40,000,000 Blacks in America, this is a huge, planned, population decrease advocated for by the white liberal establishment. But this is not racist?

Oates’ own theory about gun owners and their racism implies that rioting is something unique to black Americans. Yet we have seen in our recent history this is not the case. OWS, the WTO riots in Seattle and the disastrous Woodstock ’99 prove that rioters, rapists and thugs come in all colors. Oates’ theory is overtly racist at its core, but her inability to be introspective, or perhaps her dishonesty, leads her to project that racism on gun owners.

These theories of gun owner racism are a byproduct of white liberalism’s fetishized vision of black Americans as non-humans. They see blacks (and Latinos, frankly) not as individuals, but as a swarming mass that will sweep through the America they hate so much, washing away the sins of this so-called white race (made up of dozens of different ethnic groups) and leaving the enlightened few to lead our country to the Utopia leftism promises. Sound familiar? It’s the same scheme Charles Manson came up with in the 60s.

The “racism” of wanting to protect your family from mobs is not about your feelings about race — it’s about your unwillingness to martyr yourself in the race and class struggles that occupy the lurid fantasies of the armchair revolutionary.

No gun owner cares what race potential assailants are. No one who takes the threats of mob violence seriously, whether they are race rioters or union thugs or gang rapists, makes plans contingent on what the ethnic makeup of those mobs might be. This is not a minor issue for us. The Left will use the racism argument to sway young city people and create a generation of people who equate the ability to defend your home from multiple, determined attackers with bigotry and prejudice. If they are successful, the long term consequences to our personal liberty are incalculable. That is why it is important that we stop this strain of thought from infecting more people through unchallenged media saturation.

One of the ways we can do this is to point out the overt racism of the people promoting this nonsense. If gun owners hated black people, they’d support Planned Parenthood’s depopulation of the black community, they’d support a school system that condemns almost half of black students to a lifetime of poverty and they’d support unfettered immigration by the Latino gangs that murder blacks in droves. By and large, gun owners don’t support those things. But Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Moore and all the other self-appointed gun control spokespeople on the Left do. They are the racists and need to be exposed as such.