The State Bar of Michigan awarded — and then rescinded — an award they gave to a lawyer with a long history of clownish stunts and racist views.
“Liberalism promotes sexual perversion — especially homosexuality and miscegenation — which debases the White race,” according to an essay written by Michigan attorney Kyle Bristow in 2011. Bristow believes that “societal progress . . . ended in Egypt” because relatively light-skinned Egyptians had children with darker-skinned individuals in other parts of the African continent. “The early and relatively sophisticated Egyptians understood that their civilization would be threatened if they bred with the Negroes to their south,” Bristow wrote in 2012, “so pharaohs went so far as ‘to prevent the mongrelization of the Egyptian race’ by making it a death penalty.” Bristow’s book, White Apocalypse, is about white Europeans who supposedly immigrated to the American continents before Native Americans arrived — and were then slaughtered by Native Americans’ ancestors.
And yet, Bristow briefly won a writing award from the State Bar for a short story that is very much in line with his previous work.
Until recently, the State Bar, a mandatory organization that Michigan attorneys must belong to, ran a short story contest for lawyers who wish to dabble in fiction writing. One of the judges of this year’s contest was a sitting state circuit judge.
This year, the contest’s judges awarded an honorable mention to Bristow for his story “Post-Conviction Relief.”
Some time later, the bar received a pair of complaints about Bristow’s award-winning story, a revenge fantasy about a lawyer who kills a man named “Tyrone,” who is described as a “thug,” a “leech on law-abiding people” and a “man-animal.”
On Wednesday, the bar released a statement apologizing for giving an award to a story “embedded with racist cues and symbolism,” and withdrawing the award. Moreover, State Bar President Thomas C. Rombach explained that the bar will discontinue the contest altogether after this incident. “The short story contest has been popular with many members,” he wrote, “but if this result could occur even with the high caliber of the judges who conferred the award, the contest should be discontinued.”
Bristow’s story is no longer available on the State Bar’s website, but a cached version of it can be read here. It is told from the perspective of Jack Schoenherr, a “soft-spoken, introverted” criminal defense attorney whose daughter is murdered by “an 18-year-old, tattoo-covered, drug-abusing gangbanger named Tyrone Washington.” Schoenherr expresses regret and disgust for his past work defending criminal defendants, while also musing on his own superiority to Mr. Washington:
Could there not be a more stark contrast between him and me? I worked hard my whole life to go through undergraduate and law school, I worked hard to pay back my student loan debt and to provide for my family, I played by the rules in everything I did, and I never hurt anyone. He, on the other hand, never worked a day in his life, he stopped going to school after the sixth grade, he is a leech on law-abiding people of whom he committed crimes, and he offends everything with which he has dealings. Even the tattoos on his body — especially the “THUG” one on his forehead — constitute a manifestation of his repugnant nature.
In the end, Schoenherr pretends to be Washington’s lawyer in order to arrange a meeting with him in a prison conference room, launches into some ponderous dialogue about the purpose of the criminal justice system (“Retributivism is the only legitimate basis for justice, because through retributivism, good is rewarded with good and bad is punished with bad. This is the purpose of justice, after all — so says Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics”). And then stabs Washington to death with a pen.
Bristow’s career as a white supremacist began at an early age. As a college student, Bristow led the Michigan State University chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), which earned the unusual distinction of being labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center despite the fact that it was only a college club.
As a YAF leader, Bristow specialized in “publicity stunts masked as political demonstrations that seem inspired in equal parts by the movie ‘Animal House’ and the Hitler Youth.” YAF, for example, hosted a “Straight Power” rally where students held signs with slogans such as “End Faggotry” and “Go Back in the Closet.” Bristow also posted a 13 point statement calling for reforms to student life at Michigan State such as “an end to funding for all nonheterosexual groups on campus, hunting down and deporting illegal immigrants, creating a ‘Caucasian Caucus’ and ‘Man’s Council’ and forcing ‘Planned Parenthood on Grand River Avenue to leave.’”