As you read this article try not to focus on what was said by representative Joe Mitchell, instead ask yourself ‘why would he feel empowered to say  it’?

Then imagine what would be the media response if this was said in reverse race order, from a white state representative to a black constituent?

ALABAMA – A black member of the Alabama legislature uncorked a racist tirade in an email this week to a constituent who urged him not to embrace new gun control laws – copying his incendiary language to every member of the state legislature.

Joseph Mitchell, a Democrat who has represented parts of the city of Mobile since 1994 and ran for re-election unopposed in 2010 and 2006, castigated a voter named Eddie Maxwell, a Jefferson County man whom he correctly presumed was white.

‘Hey man,’ Mitchell wrote. ‘Your folk never used all this sheit [sic] to protect my folk from your slave-holding, murdering, adulterous, baby-raping, incestuous, snaggle-toothed, backward-a**ed, inbreed [sic], imported criminal-minded kin folk.’

The email he was responding to asked him, and the other members of the Alabama legislature, to keep state gun laws in step with the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees citizens access to firearms.

‘Do not violate your oath of office by introducing additional gun control bills,’ Maxwell urged Mitchell, or by allowing those already enacted to remain in the body of our laws.’

The exchange was first reported by Mobile’s Press-Register and provoked outrage on Yellow Hammer Politics, an Alabama-based conservative political blog.

Mitchell’s reply also suggested that he favored arming black Alabamians before enforcing new gun-control measures, in case they needed to defend themselves from racist white southerners.

‘You can keep sending me stuff like you have however,’ he wrote, ‘because it helps me explain to my constituents why they should protect that 2nd amendment thing AFTER we [blacks] finish stocking up on spare parts, munitions and the like.’  (read more)