Why We'd Fear Black Militias

They’ve found a new double standard.

Imagine that the inauguration of President George W. Bush had sparked an explosive rise in African American militia groups. Suppose thousands of heavily armed black men began gathering at training camps in wooded areas throughout the country, devising military tactics for “taking back their country” after what they believed was an electoral coup.

Do you think Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney would have reacted to a black militaristic buildup as coolly as President Obama has to the phenomenal growth of white militias?

Since Obama took office last year, the number of white militias has shot up from about 170 to more than 500, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremist groups in the United States. Armed with enough firepower to take on a police department, some of these groups are honing their sniper skills using photographs of Obama for target practice.

They cling to the delusion that the nation’s first black president is somehow a subversive working for Muslim extremists, and they aim to bring him down.

“If the people we saw running around armed to the teeth were black, I think their organizations would be destroyed in a matter of hours,” Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, told me. “If people saw on their TV screens photos of black militia members shooting at images of a white president, I don’t think they would last.”

First of all there are black armed organizations called street gangs and they’re killing more people this hour than any white organization will in the next ten years.  We don’t see them training in the woods because that requires too much planning and coordination.

But the point may be that street gangs aren’t generally political and as far as that goes there is a double standard on the militia issue.  There are a few legitimate reasons for this.  The first is that whites have a history of responsible firearms use.  There are rural parts of America where young children are given guns to take care of.  If they tried that in the inner cities they’d need dump trucks to clear the bodies each weekend.  We have a prudent fear of black men with guns that no amount of political correctness will ever beat out of us.

The second thing we have to consider is what kind of ideology a black militia would have.  Presumably it would be socialist and for forced integration.  In contrast to whites with their guns who want to be left alone, looting and aggression would be the raison d’être of any black armed force which thought the Republicans were white supremacists holding them down.  We’d fear them more than any group with a libertarian ideology and rightfully so.