White conservative Arkansas and poor black Arkansas converge rarely.
One such unnatural occasion arises during state legislative sessions at the state Capitol. White conservative Arkansas overruns the place and poor black Arkansas tends to seethe in powerless alienation.
Seething sometimes can blow.
On Wednesday evening, as a Senate committee hearing on white conservative Arkansas' so-called "stand your ground" proposal went past its third hour, Sen. Stephanie Flowers of Pine Bluff erupted.
A motion had just been made and passed to limit debate. The motion was not itself offensive, but practical. People had heard plenty and were ready to vote.
But for Flowers, an African American lawyer in her crime-ridden and violence-infested hometown of Pine Bluff, the very idea of limiting debate on what she knew to be a racially discriminatory gun policy sent her over seething's edge.
She asked to speak. The chairman, Sen. Alan Clark, advised her to do so, but briefly. She said she'd try to be as brief as the time it took to shoot somebody.
And we were off.
She said she'd had it with all this gun craziness from people who don't live where she lives and experience what she experiences. She said she had feared often for her son because of guns, guns everywhere.
She accused Sen. Trent Garner of El Dorado, a big stand-your-ground advocate, of being armed under his coat when he testified to the committee. He angrily denied it, albeit with a warning that sometimes he indeed might be armed in the Capitol if he thought it "necessary."
When Chairman Clark advised Flowers that she needed to stop talking, at least in the way she was talking, she asked him what he intended to do about it. Shoot her?
Then, twice, she said "sh**," the vulgar expletive so enjoyed by the president of the United States.
Then Flowers walked out of the committee room, returning in time to go off again on the bill's sponsor, Bob Ballinger, and then to vote on--get this--the prevailing side in a 4-3 decision to oppose the bill.
That happened because one Republican senator, John Cooper, wandered away from the white conservative huddle.
Citing instances with which he'd become familiar through jury service in a murder trial, Cooper voted against the white conservative policy to repeal the section of current state law calling for persons to attempt first, before engaging in counter-aggression, to, if practicable, retreat from threat of attack.
Black people tend to think that a law calling for "standing your ground" poses an inordinate threat to blacks who are instinctively distrusted and feared by many whites who could argue they merely stood their ground against a perceived threat.
White conservatives tend to think everybody ought to have a gun for defense and that no one should be told by law to run rather than stand and shoot.
These are the kinds of attitudinal and experiential differences that won't easily get solved in theologically principled discussions on race and faith put on by conservative churches and attended by governors and mayors.
Law enforcement people told the committee that we face no problem with our current self-defense laws and that no one has been run in on murder charges for a genuine act of self-defense.
Police and prosecutors testified that the proposed bill essentially provides that a person could retreat successfully from an assailant, go to his car and get his gun, then return to the scene to wait in hopes that the assailant would come at him again.
Sometimes law-enforcement experience contradicts white conservative thinking, particularly regarding guns.
For example, there's the conservative thinking that permitting guns on college campuses would deter mass shootings. Then there's the law-enforcement thinking that police would be better off when responding to a report of an active shooter on a college campus if they didn't run into crossfire from every which way.
At any rate, the offended Republican senators, Ballinger and Garner, took to social media Wednesday night and Thursday morning to deplore Flowers' attack as uncivil and violative of the rules of decorum of the Senate. They suggested some sort of formal action should be taken against her.
Indeed, it is untoward for a state senator to talk in open debate and about another senator in the style of communication that the president of the United States uses. We should try to keep our state legislative standard higher than that.
We can hope everyone will spend the weekend in quiet reflection and return Monday in calmer states of mind.
Perhaps Flowers will take a moment of privilege in the Senate to defend her passion and the basis for it, and to explain that her language exploded from fear of not being heard, which she has now been.
Perhaps Garner and Ballinger can let that be enough.
Perhaps this dangerous and divisive "stand your ground" bill will not come back, though Ballinger was threatening.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 03/10/2019