Firefighter is ousted over posts
Racism tends to take two forms.
There’s the overt brutality we saw less than three weeks ago when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin put his knee down on the neck of George Floyd for nearly nine minutes before he died.
There’s also the casual form of racism, the kind that demeans with a flippant, dehumanizing aside.
One form is criminal, the other merely offensive and insidious. But make no mistake: one feeds the other.
Chauvin may have been the one who put his knee down on Floyd, but all the people who made light of the killing by replicating it with “George Floyd Challenge” social media posts are the ones feeding the ugliest side of humanity, the side that laughs at empathy and views the death of a 46-year-old black man as nothing more than meme fodder.
A San Antonio firefighter recently indulged in casual racism. On Thursday, the Fire Department made the difficult but correct decision to terminate the firefighter, whose name was not released by the city.
According to multiple sources, the firefighter is Lauran Bienek Liska, 33, a Floresville resident with 10 years experience in the SAFD. Liska recently shared two Facebook posts, obtained by the San Antonio Express-news, that disturbed her colleagues.
Liska did not respond Thursday to an interview request for this column.
On May 25 (by coincidence, the same day Floyd was killed), Liska posted a picture of former President Barack Obama from a New York Post article.
Liska attached a photo of a monkey and made the follow
ing assessment of Obama, the first African-american president in this nation's history: “Is it wrong of me to say that he looks like a MONKEY ???? I'm just saying.”
The obvious answer to her question was that yes, it was wrong of her. It was wrong to give oxygen to a vile racist trope that has been used for centuries to justify unspeakable acts of cruelty.
It was wrong to join a club that includes 2016 Kentucky Republican state House candidate Dan Johnson who made several Facebook posts depicting both Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys. Johnson, the pastor of the Heart of Fire Church in Louisville, refused to apologize and defended his Facebook posts as “satire.”
That club includes Brian Conner, a 2016 Minnesota county board candidate who posted a photo of a baby monkey and called it “Obama's baby picture.”
That same year, Dr. Michelle Herren, a Colorado pediatric anesthesiologist at Denver Health, wrote the following Facebook comment about Michelle Obama: “Monkey face and ebonic English.”
Liska not only ridiculed President Obama, she also joked about committing an act of violence against the Black Lives Matter demonstrators who have protested against Floyd's killing.
She shared a screenshot of someone asking Google if it's legal to run over protesters who are blocking a road.
“GOOGLE SAYS: I can HIT the gas and plow through them !!!! ” the firefighter wrote.
Jimmy Holmes, a retired African-american firefighter, joined the SAFD in 1971, at a time when there were few blacks in the department.
“I know a lot of the young guys that work there and I keep in touch with them. One of them sent me the message” from Liska, Holmes said. “They were very disappointed. They were upset by it. They thought it was out of line.
“They said (Liska) didn't think there was anything wrong with what she did. She thought it was blown out of proportion. Some of them talked to her about it and she just blew it off.”
San Antonio officials released a statement Thursday saying the city and SAFD “consider these posts absolutely unacceptable and reprehensible.” The statement added that such messages “will not be tolerated, and employees that choose to engage in such behavior will be dealt with swiftly and severely.”
The termination came a week after Justin Silva, a detention deputy in the Bexar County Sheriff 's Office, was placed on administrative leave for social media posts which advocated killing people who are “rioting, looting, attacking innocent people and burning the city down.”
Over the years, our legal system often has failed us when it comes to adjudicating racist acts of violence. But it at least carries the potential for justice.
Verbal expressions of bigotry are harder to address and easier to deny, easier for the perpetrator to dismiss as a joke or a constitutionally protected expression of free speech.
For some, the lesson from the punitive actions taken by SAFD and Sheriff 's Office will be that people need to be careful about sharing ugly, hateful thoughts on social media. But that's missing the point.
The real lesson needs to be that these kinds of statements are unacceptable, whether they're delivered on social media, at the workplace or in the privacy of your own home.