Is This Racist? State Bar Can't Tell If This Is Racist.

After honoring a story written by a man associated with a hate group, a state bar flies into embarrassing damage control.

Consider this: A short story about a mild-mannered, straight-laced defense attorney whose daughter is murdered by a gang member covered in tattoos and described at points as drooling, slouching, and jeering. After realizing that prison isn’t enough for this “man-animal,” the lawyer, finally pushed to the limit, kills his daughter’s murderer.

The State Bar of Michigan is in a public relations pickle right now after its biennial fiction contest handed out accolades to this story, identifying it as an “Honorable Mention.” Is this story racist on its face? Would it change your perception to learn the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies the author, Kyle Bristow, as the former chairman of a hate group or that he’s also written a book about the “White Apocalypse” (featuring the same attorney as in this story)? These are all matters of interpretation.

But the answers are “yes” and “it shouldn’t.”

Alert tipsters flagged this contest and Bristow’s award a couple weeks ago, but we’ve sat back and waited to see the Michigan Bar’s response. Frankly, the better story wasn’t the award itself, but what a bunch of lawyers would do once they found out they’d unintentionally set off an optical nightmare. They could have owned the story as a work of fiction, quietly removed any record of Bristow’s story and hoped we wouldn’t notice, or publicly apologized.

The organization jumped on the last option, canceling the contest and apologizing for its public recognition of this story.

Bristow responded to the news with trademark aplomb:

“If the State Bar officials are now getting their panties in a bunch over a mere fictional story, then I submit that it is probably a good idea that they canceled the annual contest so that they are not triggered in the future by politically incorrect thought-crimes.”

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One gets the sense this whole effort was a set-up so Bristow could blast the Michigan Bar when they inevitably figured out what happened. The only thing an attention-seeking causehead wants more than a platform for his ideas is a platform to complain that his ideas are being censored.

As for the story itself, while neither principal character’s race is explicitly identified, the story makes every effort to make their identities very black and white, as it were. The poor daughter was the victim of “polar bear hunting” by “Tyrone Washington.” Beyond these cues, the story hangs every weak-sauce racist stereotype on Tyrone to dog whistle (or klaxon call) the reader.

But let’s get to the real question: what were the judges of this contest possibly thinking? The scary thing is they probably thought nothing at all. After all, is this story any worse than the hundreds of police procedurals over the last 30 years that lazily created two-dimensional gang members to run amok stabbing people at random? Or those abominable Death Wish movies that people lapped up in the ’70s and ’80s? The fact that a neutral panel of judges selected this story above other submissions illustrates how normalized people are to the “evil black man uses his agency to harm innocent white girl” trope as a narrative frame.

And they probably would have stood by their ranking until they learned who wrote the piece. As though that changed any of the words on the page or transformed innocent clauses into obvious metaphors.

That’s why the State Bar’s response is so embarrassing. While preening like they’ve done the responsible thing by canceling their contest, all they’ve really done is announce to the world that they can’t trust themselves to spot racism without having a hate-group designation slapped on it, and they’d rather end the competition than risk getting caught with their pants down again.

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State Bar apologizes for story ’embedded with racist cues’ [Detroit Free Press]

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