People in Minneapolis have been protesting the murder of a black man, Jamar Clark, near the police where the shooter worked (but of course the killer was a police officer — that’s how these things work). And of course there have been white people counter-protesting, and some of them have been white supremacists, out-and-out racists, and just generally the kinds of terrible people who embarrass us all. And, unfortunately, some of them are strutting around with guns.

So last night, some of the armed racist assholes opened fire on the protest, and then fled, as cowards do.

Jie Wronski-Riley said angry protesters moved the counter-demonstrators away from the encampment at the police station. Wronski-Riley heard what sounded like firecrackers and thought, “surely they’re not shooting human beings.” Two young black men on either side of him were hit, one in the back and leg, the other in the arm.

At least two of the three men who had been taunting protesters were firing guns, said Wronski-Riley, who described the incident as “really chaotic, really fast.”

Minnesota is one of the more liberal states in this country, and that that can happen here, and be unsurprising, tells you how deep the racism goes. It doesn’t help that the Republican party brownshirts have been fostering an atmosphere of resentment and hatred on the national level, either.

It’s strange and sudden. The problems have been here all along, but now we’re seeing this pattern of unrest on campus…with both a good and bad side. The bad side is that racists are doing their thing, but the good side is that people are fighting back.

At Harvard this morning (ironically, in light of these comments here, where Harvard is presented as the shining beacon to which all minorities are drawn), it was discovered that someone in the night had strolled down a hallway lined with portraits of the tenured faculty, and put black tape slashes across certain faculty members faces: only and all of the minority faculty. That’s chilling. And that’s exactly the feeling that these cowardly bigots always try to instill, just like the KKK: be afraid to be here.

And now ‘White student union’ has formed to ‘organise against black terrorism’ at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

Amid ongoing racial tensions across US and Canadian campuses, a Facebook page entitled ‘Illini White Student Union’ (IWSU) surfaced – saying it sought to “organise against the terrorism we have been facing from Black Lives Matter activists on campus.”

…the IWSU told its members: “Feel free to send in pictures you take of any black protestors on the quad so we know who anti-whites are.”

Black terrorism is any group of black Americans daring to demand the same right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that is promised to everyone in the declaration of independence…which was written by the same bunch of guys who apparently thought a black person was only worth 3/5 of a white person, so maybe the white dudes are right, and the black students are expecting more than they should. No wonder the precious White Students are complaining!

But I’ve visited the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. It’s not exactly a center of seething hatred against white people…I think I met a scarce few black students there at all, so I’m not sure why the white students would feel so endangered.

The next several years promise to be interesting ones, with the Republican party in its death throes and the country’s demographics changing. I fear they’re going to get uglier before they get better, though.

Right now, the usual trolls are doing their best to lie about Skepticon: they’ve seized on that one incident in which Mark Schierbecker was unfortunately given a slot to speak as an excuse to rant about how Skepticon hates autistic people (nope), how Skepticon called him a racist (nope again — that was what his own publicist said), that they were abusing an “autistic kid” (no way — he came to Skepticon fresh off interviews on Breitbart and Fox News), and how evil SJWs are. I saw people calling in biased outsiders like Milo Yiannopoulos, Thunderf00t, and Sargon of Akkad to contribute to the propaganda, and I’m sure we’ll see more noise from them soon; it was also somehow magically tied to #gamergate and the standard anti-feminists.

I thought about writing a rebuttal, but decided the best thing to do was just present the views of a few black people who have a genuine interest in this matter.

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Skepticon has released a video of the interview to, I presume, shut down all the stupid claims by people who weren’t there.

It didn’t work. This is the kind of response I’m seeing on Twitter now.

@RealSkepticon Wow. Watched the video and the participants at Skepticon should be ashamed by their behavior.

— Zerilos (@Zerilos) November 15, 2015

@RealSkepticon Wow. Watched the video and the participants at Skepticon should be ashamed by their behavior.

I was there for the first half of the talk. I’ve now watched the whole video. Skepticon has absolutely nothing to apologize to Schierbecker about: they gave him and his publicist a time slot at the last minute, they allotted him 25 minutes and he went on for an hour and 15 minutes instead, and the audience was calm, made reasonable points, and asked difficult questions. And now their videographer worked extra hard to make the whole talk available on YouTube!

It seems the racists on Twitter want Skepticon to apologize for questioning a white man.

It got ugly for a while. There was a last minute addition to today’s schedule: a “panel” to discuss the recent events in Missouri, specifically the university resignations in the face of endemic racism, and the efforts by students to exclude journalists from a meeting place on campus. Good idea, I thought: we’re in Missouri, this is a major topic, it is entirely appropriate to discuss the problems in racism and in the efforts to oppose racism.

Only it turned out to be very badly handled. The event was simply an “interview” with a white photojournalist/student, Mark Schierbecker, who was the one who captured that viral video of the students and a faculty member blocking another photojournalist from taking pictures, getting questioned by Danielle Muscato.

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I’ve seen the video of the professor in Missouri, demanding that the aggressive reporter be thrown out of a circle of students. And I have mixed feelings about it. So many people are reflexively aghast, and shouting about “freedom of the press!”, but I’m wondering if we’re going to have any limitations on freedom of the press.

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The bad news: horribly racist incidents.

…at issue is the school administration’s handling of several racist incidents that occurred this fall. In September, Peyton Head, a senior and the president of Missouri Students Association, said he was called racial slurs as he walked near campus.

“I really just want to know why my simple existence is such a threat to society,” he wrote in a Facebook post.

That incident was followed by one on October 5 when members of the Legion of Black Collegians were called the N-word while rehearsing for homecoming festivities. Three weeks later, on October 24, a swastika was drawn with human feces at a university residence hall.

The good news: students and faculty reacted vigorously. Boy, did they react. Students protested; one went on a hunger strike. The student athletes refused to perform until action was taken, and the coach actually supported them, and said they were excused from practice. Faculty supported a strike and student walkout.

Somebody is finally taking the issue seriously.

And the really amazing news: it all worked, and university president Tim Wolfe has resigned. So it only takes a couple of months of strong protests and a threat to the football season to achieve victory.

The University of Iowa has some serious dissatisfaction with their recently appointed president. Maybe they need to get the support of the football team to get rid of the rascal.