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The process is the punishment, and the criminals will always get off scot-free. Once again, an American family is learning the hard way that that’s how the “racial reckoning” and “defund the police” works in practise.
It doesn’t even matter that legally they’re not just completely innocent, but the victims. The law counts for nothing in post-Obama America.
All that counts is the colour of your skin. Whether you’re a white female student terrorised in her dorm, a white kid with the gall to smile awkwardly, or a white shopkeeper, you’re going to get a brutal lesson in the new racial reality: no matter what, you’re going to be punished if you get “uppity”.
America has swapped Jim Crow for Joe Cracker. The only difference is that the lynching parties come for you with lawyers and Twitter accounts.
The six-year financial and reputational death march suffered by Gibson’s Bakery at the hands of Oberlin College and its students has finally come to an end.
On Sept. 8, following the Ohio Supreme Court’s refusal to hear Oberlin’s appeal of the largest defamation judgment in Ohio history, the college issued a statement promising to pay the $36.59 million judgment, including interest. It’s fair to assume that Oberlin’s other costs, including uninsured attorneys’ fees, probably amounted to $6 million to $10 million more.
That’s some $40 million, and an innocent shopkeeper driven to the grave, all to protect a petty thief — solely because he was the “right” skin colour.
This ordeal started on Nov. 9, 2016, when an Oberlin sophomore, who is Black, attempted to shoplift two bottles of wine and use a false ID to purchase alcohol at Gibson’s Bakery, located across the street from the college in Oberlin, Ohio. When he tried to flee, the grandson of the co-owner, who is White, tried to stop him and was beaten by him and two other Black Oberlin students who came to his aid. All three were arrested and later pled guilty.
White boy gon’ learn his lesson, but good.
The day after the incident, however, the Oberlin student body, aided and abetted by the college leadership, commenced a boycott of the bakery, claiming (but never proving) that it racially profiled the students involved and was an historically racist institution. When asked to provide “specifics” about this alleged “racist history,” Carmen Twillie Ambar, Oberlin’s president, replied that they were the “lived experience” of many students.
Just as when a white woman in the Jim Crow south accused a black man of rape, no evidence is needed in today’s Joe Cracker America.
The bakery’s revenues subsequently plummeted and, in 2019, after the college refused to absolve the bakery, it sued for defamation.
They won… eventually. But it’s as Pyrrhic a victory as can be imagined. Certainly, co-owner David Gibson isn’t around to enjoy it.
And Oberlin is, despite the court settlement, steadfastly refusing to apologise.
Liability and the absence of a discriminatory past on the bakery’s part are now both legally undisputed, so it prompts the question: where are the adults among the Oberlin faculty and alumni? Having wasted about $40 million in an effort to prove what was a fatally flawed legal case from the outset, it’s well past time that Oberlin alumni came together to petition Ambar and her board to issue a formal apology to the Gibson family.
Fox News
As if. Let this be a lesson to any other white folks fixin’ to get “uppity”: know your place, Cracker.
