Thread: Profs Write Openly Racist Manifesto Against Campus Concealed Carry

Profs Write Openly Racist Manifesto Against Campus Concealed Carry


BLAKE NEFF
Reporter

7:04 PM 11/11/2015


Two professors at the University of Texas (UT) have taken a new approach to resisting the impending legalization of concealed carry on Texas campuses: Gun rights are the new segregation.

A new Texas law, passed earlier this year and taking effect in 2016, will allow those with concealed carry permits to bring their weapons onto Texas college campuses and even into classrooms. There is a strong movement of students and professors opposed to the new law, and two such professors released a manifesto for the movement Tuesday that is remarkably open in its hostility toward white men.

“As professors, we don’t see classroom carry to be about our own personal security,” the manifesto says early on. “We will most likely never be shot in our offices or classrooms, even if we were to piss off some white male students with sacrilegious ideas about race, empire, evolution, or god.”

The new manifesto, authored by UT-Austin history professor Jorge Canizares-Esguerra and UT-El Paso political science professor Patrick Timmons, both leaders of Gun Free UT, was released in an email urging opponents of concealed carry to attend a Tuesday rally. In it, the authors argue that it’s misguided for opponents of concealed carry to focus on whether the new law will increase or decrease violent crime rates.

Instead, Canizares-Esguerra and Timmons explicitly frame the conflict as a racial one, with supporters of gun rights cast as white racial oppressors who are the heirs of slavery, Jim Crow, and other acts of “settler colonialism.”

“We are witnessing the great ideological return of settler colonialism,” they say. “America has all along been about the sheer display of white male power (with guns): over Indians, over slaves, over females, over Mexicans, over Asians, over African Americans, and over Arabs. [The] return of the vigilante movement is a giant, collective white push back against the Civil Rights Movement and against the unintended consequences of globalization,migration, and demography.”

The two authors also make the unusual argument that Texas’s concealed carry law is unconstitutional because it results in the suppression of free speech.

“When a student brings a gun into our individual first -amendment [sic] right to control the bond of trust and community that is constitutionally under our care,” they say. “Yes, this is a classroom he has privileged his individual right over our right to establish and control the bond of trust and community in the classroom necessary to teach. The mere presence of guns can intimidate and thwart free speech.”

The two then return to equating gun rights with racism, blaming a “toxic ideology of white racism and libertarianism” for infringing their “individual right to determine the nature of the community of trust within our classroom.”

The manifesto ends by suggesting that those who carry guns are no different from those who attempt to hurt others by causing a panic.
“What differentiates an individual who seeds mistrust and puts people at risk by shouting ‘fire,’ in a crowded theater, from the individual who carries a gun into our classroom? Neither the shouter not the carrier can avail himself from constitutional protection.”

More than 250 UT professors have signed a petition protesting the new Texas law. In October, economics professor Daniel Hamermesh announced he was resigning his position and going to teach at another university, claiming the law drastically increased the chances a disgruntled student would assassinate him. Supporters of concealed carry have accused Hamermesh of being a false martyr, suggesting he was planning to leave anyway and chose to blame the gun aw for political reasons.

http://dailycaller.com/2015/11/11/pr...-campus-carry/

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

---

Professor — Ph.D., University of Wisconsin

Professor; Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History

Contact

• E-mail: canizares-esguerra@austin.utexas.edu
• Phone: 512-475-7694
• Office: GAR 2.108
• Office Hours: On leave- Fall 2015
• Campus Mail Code: B7000

Patrick Timmons

Adjunct Professor of Political Science at The University of Texas at El Paso
Mexico City Area, MexicoWriting and Editing

Current	The University of Texas at El Paso, Mexican Journalism Translation Project
Previous	None, Human Rights & Criminal Justice Research, Essex Transitional Justice Network
Education	University of Essex

This is the racist, inflammatory garbage that these two are pushing as "education" I hope no one is paying for their children to go to this University/Indoctrination center.
The Gun Free UT Manifesto

Ratings: (0)|Views: 65|Likes: 0
Published by Texas Students for Concealed Carry
This mission statement/legal strategy was released November 10, 2015, by Gun Free UT, a professor-led anti-campus carry group at the University of Texas at Austin.
See more

THE LAW, CLASSROOM CARRY, SETTLER COLONIALISM, AND THE MEANINGS OF TRUSTAND COMMUNITYJorge Canizares-Esguerra and Patrick TimmonsThose battling against classroom carry have largely misidentified the very nature of this struggle. This hasto be a large, raucous, political, cultural, and legal movement to ascertain and defend very differentmeanings of community than those championed by licensed carriers. As professors, we don’t seeclassroom carry to be about our own personal security. We will most likely never be shot in our offices orclassrooms, even if we were to piss off some white male students with sacrilegious ideas about race,empire, evolution, or god. This is a struggle over the meaning of education, the classroom, and opensociety.

This is a struggle over the meaning of trust and community.The great debate (at least ours) has been centered on proving that guns do not make us safer from massshooters on campus. That guns do nothing to lower crime rates. That guns instead increase the number ofaccidents, suicides, sexual assaults, and deaths. That licensed carriers are not the benign actors that thestatistics on crime seem misleadingly to suggest. Ever since the massacre of Virginia Tech this countryhas been committed to the idea that to fight mass shooters (themselves the product of the pathologies ofgun culture), we need more guns in dorms, in classrooms, in university offices. It has become a sweepingwave that is now crushingly moving into K12. To fight crime in schools, to discipline the diseases of raceand poverty, we need to deputize teachers as armed marshals.

We are witnessing the great ideological return of settler colonialism. Well, it never went away. Thevigilante, the deputized marshal, the good guy lying in wait to shoot the bad one is at the very core of howthis country got to be made from coast to coast, from the sixteenth-century to the closing of the Americanfrontier. And beyond. We have been told that what made America exceptional is dying, that kids are nolonger able to secure better lives than those their parents enjoyed. No. What has made America really peculiar throughout has been the fiction of the triumph of the self over community. How to secure myselffrom physical threats? Get a gun and fictionally shoot your way into the safety of your own den. How to protect myself from the frying pathologies of power, poverty, and racism? Deputize yourself to disciplinethose who stubbornly resist. America has all along been about the sheer display of white male power(with guns): over Indians, over slaves, over females, over Mexicans, over Asians, over AfricanAmericans, and over Arabs, now The return of the vigilante movement is a giant, collective white push back against the Civil Rights Movement and against the unintended consequences of globalization,migration, and demography.

When a student brings a gun into our individual first -amendment right to control the bond of trust andcommunity that is constitutionally under our care. Yes, this is a classroom he has privileged his individualright over our right to establish and control the bond of trust and community in the classroom necessary toteach. The mere presence of guns can intimidate and thwart free speech. But more important, gunsdirectly challenge our right protected by several decisions of the Supreme Court. And no, this is notabout “academic freedom” as we have repeatedly been told. In fact the Texas law on guns, SB11, gave universities, as corporations, the right to decide which areas should be reasonably considered gun- free.Academic freedom has been largely decided in Supreme Court jurisprudence as the corporate right ofuniversities to defend decision on tenure, hiring, and affirmative action, somewhat independent from localand state laws. SB11 lies squarely within this tradition. Although SB 11 might seemingly threaten ourcorporate right, it mostly undermines our rights as individuals. So we reject pursuing any legal challengeto this law as a struggle over “academic freedom.”

This is a battle over our individual right to determine the nature of the community of trust within ourclassroom, well established by constitutional law. This right has now been challenged, assaulted by atoxic ideology of white racism and libertarianism. What differentiates an individual who seeds mistrustand puts people at risk by shouting “fire,” in a crowded theater, from the individual who carries a gun intoour classroom? Neither the shouter not the carrier can avail himself from constitutional protection.Finally, the Texas laws of gun signage (SB273) do not apply to us. We cannot be considered officials of astate agency. What transpires in our classroom is free speech protected by constitutional law. It is withinour rights to use our syllabi to symbolically reject this policy. We can make it a written rule, although notlegally enforceable, that students cannot bring guns into our classrooms. We look forward to going tocourt to defend our right to use our syllabi to voice our INDIVIDUAL views were we to be challengedeither by students or the state. We faculty have in our toolkit many ways to resists this law that are protected under the robust constitutional tradition of free speech.

​This is a battle over our individual right to determine the nature of the community of trust within ourclassroom, well established by constitutional law. This right has now been challenged, assaulted by atoxic ideology of white racism and libertarianism. What differentiates an individual who seeds mistrustand puts people at risk by shouting “fire,” in a crowded theater, from the individual who carries a gun intoour classroom? Neither the shouter not the carrier can avail himself from constitutional protectionclassroom, well established by constitutional law. This right has now been challenged, assaulted by atoxic ideology of white racism and libertarianism. What differentiates an individual who seeds mistrustand puts people at risk by shouting “fire,” in a crowded theater, from the individual who carries a gun intoour classroom? Neither the shouter not the carrier can avail himself from constitutional protection.Finally, the Texas laws of gun signage (SB273) do not apply to us. We cannot be considered officials of astate agency. What transpires in our classroom is free speech protected by constitutional law. It is withinour rights to use our syllabi to symbolically reject this policy. We can make it a written rule, although notlegally enforceable, that students cannot bring guns into our classrooms. We look forward to going tocourt to defend our right to use our syllabi to voice our INDIVIDUAL views were we to be challengedeither by students or the state. We faculty have in our toolkit many ways to resists this law that are protected under the robust constitutional tradition of free speech.

Finally, the Texas laws of gun signage (SB273) do not apply to us. We cannot be considered officials of astate agency. What transpires in our classroom is free speech protected by constitutional law. It is withinour rights to use our syllabi to symbolically reject this policy. We can make it a written rule, although notlegally enforceable, that students cannot bring guns into our classrooms. We look forward to going tocourt to defend our right to use our syllabi to voice our INDIVIDUAL views were we to be challengedeither by students or the state.

We faculty have in our toolkit many ways to resists this law that are protected under the robust constitutional tradition of free speech

http://www.scribd.com/doc/289364219/...e-UT-Manifesto