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Lawyer Sends Around Racist Pictures Of Beer, NAACP Gets Involved

After facing consequences for posting an offensive image online, a lawyer complains that it's everyone's fault but his.

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The last 365 days haven’t been great for beer.

First, we had Keggy McRapenstein’s Senate confirmation hearings degrading the office of the Supreme Court for decades to come, then Santacon, and now this racist picture sent around Facebook by a Connecticut attorney.

Norm Pattis, a tenacious trial attorney with a long history of taking on controversial cases, claims he put together the post “to test Facebook’s screening policies, which he thinks to cater to the ‘morbidly sensitive.'” Which is exactly the sort of dumbass response you’d expect from someone who put a racist picture on Facebook — a private platform that can screen whatever the hell it wants to. Perhaps it’s a serious problem that America’s social media power is concentrated in the hands of a very few actors who can filter access to information based on their own black box of standards, but that’s an antitrust question and certainly not a discussion a “civil rights” attorney can really add to.

Pattis’ post comprised a photo of three beer cans with white hoods surrounding a brown beer bottle. The bottle was hanging by the neck from a refrigerator rack. The caption read “Ku Klux Coors.”

Ah, I presume that’s part of an upcoming triptych with “Triumph Of The Miller” and “Orval FauBud At The Schoolhouse Door.”

Unsurprisingly, the NAACP blasted the image as “unacceptable, degrading and disgusting,” which it is. That’s another thing this “I hate PC culture” dudes don’t get — comedy can absolutely spring from sensitive and controversial subjects — but it takes a deft comedian to pull it off. It does not tend to come from aging hippies sitting on their couch. There’s nothing funny about this image except “hey, this looks like killing black people… isn’t that a riot!”

“Candidly, P.C. police disgust me,” Pattis said. “I’m done with Facebook.”

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Cool. That’s actually the right call if you’re the sort of entitled white dude who thinks civil rights are important as long as they result in your personal aggrandizement but otherwise think people need to “lighten up” when you joke about how they were routinely tortured and murdered during your own lifetime. The tragic failure of the 1960s “radical” culture was the spawn of these tragic dudes whose fixation on freedom amounted to a radical disdain for accountability. It put them on the right side of a lot of fights, but as the years drag by the shallowness of their commitment becomes clearer and clearer. Not as shallow as some, but rivers aren’t made by being half an inch deeper than a creek.

Norm Pattis has fought for people of color in court before — as he’s quick to point out in his defense — and that’s not something we should take away from him. But that’s the rub… this isn’t a fight that black people get to ironically step back from. This is a fight that never ends for them. Being there for civil rights today doesn’t let you throw them asunder tomorrow and claim a pass. These aren’t chits you can accumulate and spend at your leisure.

Whatever. Time to get some whiskey.

NAACP official slams lawyer’s ‘Ku Klux Coors’ Facebook photo; is it an ethics violation? [ABA Journal]

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HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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