The National Rifle Association has long been accused of being a racist organization. For example, I'm doing it right now. Omnipresent spokescritter Wayne LaPierre's most dire warnings frequently center around the need to stockpile weapons for a day of disaster in which "inner city" youths run riot in his listeners' peaceful suburbs; he and his organization are keen on the militia-peddled notion that a potential American collapse will either be preceded by or result in race riots in which white Americans will be obliged to keep the peace by murdering people. The group is beside itself when they believe someone, somewhere is being unduly deprived of their rights to carry whatever weapon they want in whatever venue they want—and are conspicuously silent when a black American is gunned down by police on the mere suspicion of having a gun, in places where carrying guns is, thanks to the NRA, legal.
The group is also nutty as an almond bar, stocked with militia and confederate-leaning kooks and such all-purpose crackpots as guitar owner Ted Nugent, so it is not entirely shocking to hear that another of their board members, Sandy Froman, has not been entirely forthcoming about her own past dalliances with one of the most famous racists of the last half-century.
[T]he video leaves out an intriguing piece of her past: When she was at those prestigious schools, she helped controversial Stanford University professor William Shockley, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, as he promoted his theory that blacks were genetically inferior to whites.
William Shockley was a spectacular physicist who, late in his career, tossed it all aside to become a self-proclaimed expert on the supposed genetic inferiority of the "American Negro." He is not the only Nobel Prize winner to go off the rails late in life, and will not be the last, but his was an especially gaudy and public case. He was widely shunned for his new theories, which were, as one might expect from someone who spent his entire life studying something else, dull-minded and shoddy.
And Sandy Froman, as it turns out, helped him publicize his work.
Froman graduated from Stanford in 1971 with an economics degree before heading to Harvard Law. Recordings of several conversations between her and Shockley captured Froman helping Shockley on that 1972 response to the [National Academy of Sciences] NAS, referring to the extensive work she had done for Shockley, and discussing the idea of bringing Shockley to Harvard to promote his theories.
In a summer 1972 conversation, Froman assisted Shockley in organizing, editing, and circulating the NAS response. She also advised him on how best to title this report in order to draw attention to it. “If you called this something like ‘courses on dysgenics,’ I think it would catch somebody’s eye,” she said, referring to a term Shockley used to describe genetic deterioration within the black population. [...]
In a September 1973 conversation, Froman and Shockley discussed the possibility of Shockley debating his ideas on black genetic inferiority at Harvard with Roy Innis, a civil rights figure. Froman told him she would contact the head of the Harvard Law Forum to gauge his response to the idea.
When contacted, Froman insisted to Mother Jones that she was just an office typist and "didn't really know anything" about his work. But the tapes clearly demonstrate she had considerably more role than that, and once the reporter let on they had those tapes, Froman suddenly had ... a plane to catch.
So what happens now? Should the NRA shun her for her past promotion of open, faux-scientifically premised white supremacy? Should she be obliged to explain herself?
I don't know, and I don't care. We have absolutely no ability to infuse a conscience in a group devoted to promoting the notion that their members have a patriotic duty to perhaps murder someone if they believe they have found someone who needs murdering. This is just another case of the NRA leadership being exposed as something much different than what they pretend at.
There's nobody in the NRA leadership that you should trust enough to even board an elevator they're on, and this is just another reminder of that.