Pumpkins and cotton stalks are triggering some black people. Today’s blacks have come a long way, but not in the way you think. Their ancestors endured kidnapping at the hands of their own people, shackles, torturous cargo ships, whips, defacement, the forced breakup of the family, forced labor, lynching, Jim Crow laws, separate water fountains and bathroom facilities, and other demeaning actions. Being triggered by cotton and pumpkins is degrading to blacks who suffered from real triggers, ropes, and dogs, not to mention social and economic isolation.

There’s one thing I know. Previous generations of blacks would never have been triggered by pumpkins and cotton stalks. If today’s young blacks want to be triggered by something, they should be triggered by how the government has used them for political gain at their expense. Walter Williams writes:

That the problems of today’s black Americans are a result of a legacy of slavery, racial discrimination and poverty has achieved an axiomatic status, thought to be self-evident and beyond question. This is what academics and the civil rights establishment have taught. But as with so much of what’s claimed by leftists, there is little evidence to support it.

The No. 1 problem among blacks is the effects stemming from a very weak family structure. Children from fatherless homes are likelier to drop out of high school, die by suicide, have behavioral disorders, join gangs, commit crimes and end up in prison. They are also likelier to live in poverty-stricken households. But is the weak black family a legacy of slavery? In 1960, just 22 percent of black children were raised in single-parent families. Fifty years later, more than 70 percent of black children were raised in single-parent families. Here’s my question: Was the increase in single-parent black families after 1960 a legacy of slavery, or might it be a legacy of the welfare state ushered in by the War on Poverty?

Williams’ entire article is worth reading. If you disagree with Williams’ assessment if you’re black, you are labeled a black white supremacist. That’s right. Ben Carson, the former Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital and the current Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Stacey Dash, and former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke are “black white supremacists.”

We know everything is racist, and if you deny this truth, then you are, by definition, a racist. Once you start losing an argument, the only option left is to play the race card. But when the race card is played too much, it loses its effectiveness. Now that everything is racist, it means nothing is racist. We have been inoculated with charges of racism for so long that an immunity has set in. The charge of racism is now meaningless and ineffective.

This is bigotry and racism:

“A volunteer firefighter in Ohio who wrote on Facebook that he would save a dog before saving a black person from a burning building, because to him, ‘one dog is more important than a million n*****s.'” (The Blaze)

Notice the difference when compared to pumpkins and cotton stalks?

Here are the latest racist triggers: pumpkins and cotton. A peer-reviewed journal article titled “The Perilous Whiteness of Pumpkins” is making the rounds. Here’s the abstract from the paper:

This article examines the symbolic whiteness associated with pumpkins in the contemporary United States. Starbucks’ pumpkin spice latte, a widely circulated essay in McSweeney’s on “Decorative Gourd Season,” pumpkins in aspirational lifestyle magazines, and the reality television show Punkin Chunkin provide entry points into whiteness–pumpkin connections. Such analysis illuminates how class, gender, place, and especially race are employed in popular media and marketing of food and flavor; it suggests complicated interplay among food, leisure, labor, nostalgia, and race.

Pumpkins in popular culture also reveal contemporary racial and class coding of rural versus urban places. Accumulation of critical, relational, and contextual analyses, including things seemingly as innocuous as pumpkins, points the way to a food studies of humanities and geography. When considered vis-à-vis violence and activism that incorporated pumpkins, these analyses point toward the perils of equating pumpkins and whiteness.

If you don’t get it, don’t worry. You’re not supposed to. Peer-reviewed articles are designed to be dense and unreadable. If they were clear and made sense, no one would publish them because anyone could be considered an expert, and then what would we do with all those PhDs and the need for more.

Here’s what passes for research in academia, paid for by our confiscated tax dollars, to brainwash a generation so they only see themselves as victims:

Whiteness associated with pumpkins marks who resides where on the spectrum of U.S. social power. . . When Ferguson activists wrote RACISM and WHITE PRIVILEGE on pumpkins, they destabilized the whiteness of pumpkins and the comfort and normalization accompanying it. Bringing pumpkins into the demonstration, and then smashing them on the ground to show outrage at injustice (as opposed to the “holiday mischief” generally ascribed to pumpkin smashing), activists brought pumpkins into a space where racial inequality and instability could not be ignored or glossed over. Their actions made the white privilege encoded in pumpkins explicit and challenged its future.

I’m sure all the white people in Ferguson understood this and went home muttering that their whiteness had been destabilized. More likely, the law-abiding people in Ferguson – black and white – were unsettled by the destruction of property and in what way the destruction was going to help their community when more businesses move out because they can’t afford the insurance anymore.

The next “everything is racist” story is about cotton stalks. It seems that Hoppy Lobby is racist because it has an autumn decoration using cotton stalks. This triggered someone into labeling it racist because blacks used to pick cotton.

A Texas woman was drawn into an intense racial debate on Hobby Lobby’s public Facebook page after she took offense to the company selling cotton stems.

In what appears to be a now-deleted Facebook post, Daniell Rider, of Killeen, claims the store’s cotton stalks were “WRONG on SO many levels.”

“There is nothing decorative about raw cotton… A commodity which was gained at the expense of African-American slaves. A little sensitivity goes a long way,” Rider wrote on Facebook, according to CBS 7. “PLEASE REMOVE THIS ‘decor.'”

Hobby Lobby sells a Cotton Bouquet, and that must be racist:

I checked online, and there are dozens and dozens of pieces of artwork of cotton stalks and cotton bolls.

The woman who was triggered by the stalks of cotton might want to know that white people also picked cotton. In fact, there are a lot of white and black people today who have picked cotton. Read Frank Jones’ story who posted the picture below:

“Well folks this is what it looks like to crop cotton. Grew up doing this. Started picking cotton at age 6. Worked our farm and worked for neighbors’ farms. Did I mention some were black? Didn’t matter when you had to get the crop in. All by hand so we helped each other. Black and white we worked together, ate together and shared the same water jug.” Jone went on “to express frustration with the current political climate of ‘people being offended by everything and protesting things they don’t even really have an understanding of.'”

“No black person I grew up working with ever mentioned anything about cotton reminding them of slavery. And yes, we talked about the civil war and about the then policy of segregation. It was the segregated South but not in the cotton fields or the one general store we had or in our conversations. We all had hope it would change one day,” he added. (Western Journalism)

If young people are going to be triggered by pumpkins and cotton, they are going to have a tough time in this world. They should take some time to have a lengthy conversation with their grandparents and great-grandparents to gain some historical perspective. Have them sit down and watch Something the Lord Made to gain some historical perspective.