Racism is stupid, racists are the stupiderest

If your idea of righteousness is to threaten the owners of a Black bookstore, please exit the human race now

You may call me naïve if you must, but I’d hoped that by the time America had made it through almost the first quarter of the 21st century, racism would no longer be a thing. Or, at the very least, it would be far less of a thing. And even if we hadn’t achieved that idealistic goal, I’d hoped that judging and reacting to people based solely on the color of their skin would be an outlier as behaviors go.

Indeed, I’d hope that by now, Americans would’ve become enlightened enough to move past the stage where skin color meant anything divisive. Then came Donald Trump in 2015. He permitted the worst among us to think they’re the best among us and thus to let their freak flag fly high AND proud.

Trump didn’t invent racism, of course, far from it. But his power and appeal depend in large part on his ability to exploit divisiveness and drive wedges between racial, social, cultural, religious, gender, and ethnic groups. So, while he didn’t invent racism, he’s been able to spend almost an entire decade exploiting and employing it to his political advantage.

Now and again, that exploitation of racism rears its ugly head. It claims a victim, the most recent being in Raleigh, North Carolina, where Selling Books While Black has become the latest intolerable crime against humanity.

Man, some people suck, don’t they?

This racist nonsense is why we can’t have nice things, y’all.

The first Black-owned children’s bookstore in North Carolina will be shutting down this month after the owner received anonymous death threats aimed at the shop and her family. Victoria Scott-Miller and her family opened Liberation Station bookstore in downtown Raleigh just before Juneteenth last year, after selling kids’ books out of their car at pop-up events around the Raleigh-Durham area for several years.

When the store opened Scott-Miller told the local CBS affiliate that she and her husband got into the bookselling business after a disappointing search for books for their two sons at a big-box bookstore. The family had some particular criteria in mind for the books they’d sell at local events: They would offer “Black authors, illustrators and stories that weren’t based in trauma,” she said. Things went well enough that, with some help from a crowdfunding campaign, they were able to open the brick-and-mortar location last year. The grand opening included a book signing by 10 Black authors and illustrators and a rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” by a local baritone.

But then starting last September, Scott-Miller wrote on Facebook (archived link),

we’ve faced numerous threats following the opening of our store. Some we brushed off, while others included disturbing phone calls detailing what our son Langston wore when he was at the shop alone.

Scott-Miller runs the shop with her husband and her oldest son, who’s 13. She told WRAL that after the threats began, they took a two-week break from the store “just to breathe and process that the thing we had created for good was now attempting to be destroyed and taken away from us in some way.”

So, Ms. Scott-Miller and her husband were “guilty” of trying to provide a more culturally appropriate and positive book-buying experience for Raleigh’s Black community. Wow, git a rope, eh?? What we have here is someone bent on upsetting the carefully ordered way of the world, WHICH WILL NOT BE ALLOWED TO STAND by the good, God-fearing, racially blindered, White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexual scions of the community.

“It’s not just a bookstore. It’s a movement.”

Well, there ya go, right? Today, you have a movement. Tomorrow, you might have a race war on your hands—or something like that. Then, the Blacks will think they can do what they want and go wherever they want.

No, we certainly can’t have that, can we??

Except that there was nothing radical about the bookstore and nothing that could conceivably threaten the community—other than its mere existence. And, this being North Carolina (as in much of the South), there are those ready, willing, and able to ensure that Blacks remember their place…and keep to it.

It looks like a terrific place for kids, but only if they aren’t being threatened, and here we are in 2024, when Mayoring While Black can make someone the target of racist conspiracy theories, as can Historying While Black, so Selling Books While Black apparently is, too.

Scott-Miller told WRAL, “Unfortunately, we live in a country that has given permission to the nameless and faceless people to make threats and cause harm, emotional harm.”

Unfortunately, that seems to be the platform of one of our major political parties.

She said that she’d been reluctant to say anything about the threats until she brought them up with the building landlord in January, because

“I didn’t want to become the face of another movement,” she said. “I didn’t want to become the face of another cause.

“I wanted to settle into this space with a peace that we all deserve.”

Of course, the cowards who threatened the Scott-Miller family wouldn’t dare show their faces or identify themselves. They know that doing so would result in their being ostracized within much of the Raleigh community. Thankfully, they represent a tiny minority, but it only takes a small number of assholes to ruin things for everyone.

It’s one thing to oppose a Black bookstore, but a straightforward solution is available if that sort of thing offends your tender sensibilities- don’t shop there. Find a White Power bookstore somewhere and buy your books from them. I’m sure they’ll have copies of The Turner Diaries, Mein Kampf, or Boys Life. But to feel such hatred in your blackened heart that you’d resort to such cowardly methods? It would be difficult to overestimate my contempt for people like that.

[P]olice don’t have a record of any calls regarding the threats, and they encourage anyone receiving threats to report them.

Scott-Miller said Liberation Station will close its doors April 13 and any unsold inventory will be donated to area literacy nonprofits, but that she also plans on bringing back the business in the future, after she and her family “go back to the drawing board to reassess and redefine what we will need in our next location.”

Perhaps she could try selling $60 Bibles as a sideline. If you want to help Liberation have less unsold inventory to deal with, here’s their website.

Sadly, a few hateful pinheads have ruined what had been a positive experience for the Black community in Raleigh. I suspect the vast majority of people there, regardless of color, are appalled that the Scott-Miller family feels they can no longer safely operate their bookstore.

Liberation Station hardly represents a threat to anyone for any reason. It’s a bookstore. Unless you consider authors like Maya Angelou, Cornel West, and Ibrahim X. Kendi to be radical, bomb-throwing leftists and, therefore, clear and obvious threats to White hegemony, it’s a net benefit to the community. People in the Black community have had a place to gather and find reading material that caters to their experience and history. It’s not that you can’t find the same in a Barnes and Noble, but the Scott-Miller family was trying to address a need they felt wasn’t being met in Raleigh.

I can only hope that there’s a reserved parking space in Hell waiting for whoever’s responsible for the threat that led to the closing of the Liberation Station. In the meantime, I hope someone finds them and kicks their sorry asses from Raleigh to Charlotte. They deserve nothing less.

Racism sucks. And racists suck harder.

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