Daily Archives: August 26, 2020

The first day of the Republican National Convention featured speeches from a variety of politicians and public figures,a number ofwhom spoke about the dangers of so-called cancel culture.

Polling indicates that this issue could be ripe for Republicans.

Over half (56%) of Americans think that cancel culture-- defined as a form ofboycottin which an individual (usually a celebrity) who has said something that offends some people is called out and shunned ---in the United States is a very big (28%) or somewhat big (28%) problem, according to aJuly 2020survey from Yahoo News and YouGov.

To find out more about why people feel this way, YouGov posed the same polling question toYouGov Chatusers. This extendedchat-basedsurvey reached1,452 US adultsandoffered open end questions that help researchers findout a little bit more about thepublicsfeelings on cancel culture.Its important to note that the results from thechat are still raw and unweighted.

One userwrote:Cancel culture prohibits free speech and sharing ideas. You cant have a decent and civil conversation with people anymore out of fear of the mob.

Among those who believe cancel culture is a problem, many in this chat wrote in some variation of the idea that cancel culture impedes on free speech.

It takes freedom of speech away from Americans that dont agree with the masses on social media. It prevents difficult conversations from being had, mainly because there are those that dont want to hear logic and reason. It also goes back into peoples pasts to find reasons to cancel them, there is no redemption or second chance.

The above quote from a YouGov chat user also reflects a concern that many othersshared: the idea that cancel culture doesnttake into accountredemption and the ability tolearn from ones mistakes.Several users shared their belief that people should not be canceled without the chance to apologize or explain.

Everybody makes mistakes and we need to give people the opportunity to explain themselves and apologize. Cancel culture is toxic and it ruins lives.

But not everyone agrees.About one in eight(13%)people in the Yahoo News/YouGov polltaken before the chat was fielded saythatcancelcultureisntaproblem,while31 percent say its a small problem.

Whenwe probedYouGov chatusersthat didnt think cancel culture was a problemonwhy theythought that way,some said it wasbecause they feel its appropriate to withdraw support when someone does or sayssomethingthey find offensive.

One user wrote:Someone can say all the nasty, racist, anti-gay or anti-trans stuff that they want - but when they do, I am not obligated to like or follow them, to support them, or to buy their products.

A number ofothers wroteabout the idea of accountability, and whether cancel culture is even an accurate term.

It isn't "cancel culture," it's "accountability culture." People are free to share whatever views they care to share - but when they espouse views that are harmful or hurtful to other people, having "views" does not insulate them from criticism. This is especially true when the views being shared are based only on some immutable characteristic such as race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual preference.

See the fulltoplinesandcrosstabsfrom the Yahoo News/YouGov survey.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Every day, members of YouGov Chat are asked to share their opinion on a topic in the news. We allow anyone to take part in these chats, and do not display or weight results in real-time. Instead, to make the experience informative but still interactive, the chat displays weighted data fromotherYouGov pollsto show them how the rest of the country voted. This enables us to pose the question to all, while retaining data accuracy and validity when communicating results.YouGov chat seeks to add to the what? (the quantitative poll result) by finding the why? (qualitative open ends) in a members own words.Learn more about YouGov Chat here.This Yahoo News/YouGov survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,504 US residents interviewed online between July 11-14, 2020. These samples were weighted according to gender, age, race, and education based on the American Community Survey, conducted by the US Bureau of the Census, as well as 2016 Presidential vote, registration status, and news interest.

Image: Getty

Continued here:
What Americans have to say about cancel culture - YouGov US

By Thomas Scripps 26 August 2020

This is second and concluding part of a two-part series. The first part was published on August 24, 2020.

Another author on the Policy Exchange report is Eric Kaufmann. A professor at Birkbeck University in London, Kaufmann spoke in defence of Noah Carl during the Cambridge campaign. He is the author of a book, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities, which argues that Western politics is being defined by the tug of war between white ethno-traditionalism and anti-racist moralism, that anti-racism is a repression of ethnic instincts, and that white people should be able to assert their own racial self-interest. Kaufmann has recently called for giving preference to white people in a points-based immigration system.

The appeal to far-right, social Darwinist layers, is made explicit in the Academic Freedom report. The passage deserves to be cited at length for its insistence on the positive intentions of advocates of race science:

It is difficult to imagine that black students would or should be unmoved at news a professor in their department is pursuing a line of research proving black people are inherently less intelligent than white people, for instance, all under the umbrella of academic freedom. Or that a student of Indian heritage might not be deeply offended by a professor or lecturer teaching in class that British colonialism was the best thing that ever happened to the Indian people.

However, the question ultimately boils down to whether we aim to build an academic community and wider society which operates on the good-faith assumption of positive intentions in others or one that operates on the assumption of nefarious intentions.

Furthermore, with British institutions, including universities, now under a microscope following the outpouring of anti-racist protests and initiatives after the heinous killing of George Floyd in America, it smacks of the implausible that any rational scholar interested in a successful academic career would consider propagating racist beliefs to be a wise or even just beneficial career path.

These ideas and their advocates have a major influence among leading government figures. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has ruminated on the significance of innate IQ differences for human equality. His closest advisor, Dominic Cummings, has written a 200-plus-page paper for the Department of Education insisting on the importance of genetics in childrens academic success and was responsible for the hiring of a self-professed eugenicist as a special government advisor. As social inequality reaches obscene levels, this ideology is regaining its central place in the thinking of the ruling class.

The unholy alliance behind the Academic Freedom report is completed by the author of its foreword, former Labour MP Ruth Smeeth. Part of the Blairite core of the Labour Party, Smeeths most significant political role has been as a key player in the anti-Semitism witch-hunt against the Corbynite left. She has been at the forefront of criminalising criticism of Israel through enshrining the International Holocaust Remembrance Associations definition of anti-Semitism. Between 2005 and 2007, Smeeth served as director of public affairs and campaigns for the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), a pro-Israel lobby group. She was exposed by WikiLeaks in July 2016 as a strictly protect United States asset in leaked diplomatic cables.

In 2018, Smeeth had long-time anti-racism campaigner Marc Wadsworth thrown out of the Labour Party after alleging he had engaged in anti-Semitic conduct towards her. At a party meeting, Wadsworth had seen a Telegraph reporter passing one of his leaflets calling for the deselection of right-wing Labour MPs to Smeeth and commented, We can see whos working hand in hand. Now Smeeth comes out in favour of a campaign with the Telegraph s fingerprints all over it!

Smeeth endorses the Policy Exchange report in her capacity as recently selected CEO of the Index on Censorship. Former leading Labour member Trevor Phillips now serves as chair of the Index on Censorship's board of directors. Phillips managed to criticise Tony Blair from the right, denouncing him for promulgating multiculturalism. In an interview with the Times in 2004, he called for a rejection of multiculturalism and for the government to assert a core of Britishness. He said in 2016 about immigration to the UK, Rome may not yet be in flames, but I think I can smell the smouldering whilst we hum to the music of liberal self-delusion and referred to the dark side of the diverse society. He was thrown out of the Labour Party for Islamophobic comments earlier this March.

In the last few years, Phillips has worked closely with the Policy Exchange, and now heads its History Matters project. In June, he was considered by Munira Mirza to lead a government race inquiry, having already been appointed to an earlier inquiry into how the pandemic affected BAME communities.

Like Smeeth, Phillips was a leading figure in the Labour anti-Semitism campaign, writing in the Financial Times, Labours inaction on anti-Semitism is shameful.

In arguing for the freedom of reactionaries to speak unchallenged, the forces marshalled behind the Index on Censorship intend to use government intervention on the campuses to suppress criticism of Israel and its criminal abuse of the Palestiniansa touchstone issue for British imperialism. The right-wing press frequently cites protests against visiting Israeli officials as evidence of a culture of censorship and intolerance.

This is a view shared by Spiked s editor Brendan ONeill, who is a keynote speaker for pro-Israel advocacy organisation StandWithUS. He penned an article in 2018 titled, Why do you hate Israel? The question that hangs over the left.

The final seal of approval was put on the Policy Exchange report by Toby Young and Nigel Biggar, writing in the Telegraph and the Times, and by their Free Speech Union, founded in the wake of Noah Carls resignation. Report authors Remi Adekoya and Eric Kaufmann are on the unions advisory council, along with Claire Fox. Trevor Phillips delivered a speech at its launch.

The relentlessness of this campaign is rooted in the turn of the ruling class towards dictatorial methods and ideologies. A deepening world crisis of capitalism, exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, confronts the elite with ever more explosive geopolitical conflicts and domestic social struggles. They are seeking a stranglehold on the universities to lay the intellectual groundwork for a vicious counterrevolutionary assault on the working class.

This is an international phenomenon. In Germany, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality has led a six-year-long struggle against efforts to transform universities into centres of state propaganda for militarism and far-right politics. These centre on the work of professors Jrg Baberowski and Herfried Mnkler to rehabilitate the Third Reich and the militarist crimes of the German Empire, and on the growing prominence afforded to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) on campus.

Last year, these forces received cross-party state support in the form of a book, printed by the right-wing German publisher Wilhelm Hopf, Academic Freedom and its Enemies. The book included essays from Baberowski, Mnkler, anti-migrant ideologue, social Darwinist, and SPD politician Thilo Sarrazin, AfD politician Marc Jongen, and head of the Association of University Lecturers Bernhard Kempen. Oxfords Nigel Biggar contributed a chapter. The most abhorrent political arguments and vicious conspiracies against the population, developed in close collaboration with the state, are reincarnated as shining examples of a democratic commitment to free speech and academic debate.

In Britain, this campaign relies wholly on posing as an opposition to the pseudo-left purveyors of identity politics on campus. Time and again, right-wing commentators cite examples of no platforming as evidence of student intolerance. The Policy Exchange report refers specifically to the efforts to no-platform gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, feminist Germaine Greer, and Oxford Professor Selina Todd, all on the charge of advancing transphobic views.

It says everything about the forces grouped around the Policy Exchange that the report does not mention by far the most outrageous, anti-democratic use of this practice. Namely, the effective blacklisting of the most significant journalist of the 21st century, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assangeor anyone who dared speak in his defenceon the basis of discredited, state manufactured sexual assault smears. In 2012, George Galloway was banned by the National Union of Students on the grounds of being a rape denier for defending Assange. In 2015, Cambridge Students Union attempted to ban Assange from speaking on campus, and Sheffield Students Union tried the same in 2016. Both efforts were overturned by the popular demand of students.

The authors of the Academic Freedom report do not raise these events because they do not disagree with them. Students should reject with contempt any suggestion that the Policy Exchange is genuinely opposed to such anti-democratic campaigns. Their criticisms of no platforming are a means to a reactionary end.

For that end to be averted, students must carry out their own fight against identity politics, on the basis of a turn to socialist politics and the international working class. No-platforming as a tactic began in the 1970s and was able to gain a broader sympathy among students because it targeted fascists and the far-right. Even then, however, the practice had dangerous political implications in that it was often linked to appeals to the state to intervene, when history has shown repeatedly that measures nominally introduced against the right are then more regularly and savagely deployed against the left. The advocacy of no-platforming was generally the province of pseudo-left groups, such as the Socialist Workers Party, hostile to a struggle for socialism in the working class.

The subsequent development of the pseudo-lefttheir constant lurch to the righthas exposed more clearly the reactionary implications of no-platforming.

It has increasingly been bound up with the ferocious promotion of identity politics, socially rooted in an affluent layer of the middle class and based theoretically on a rejection of the Enlightenmentin particular, its crowning achievement in the historical materialism of Karl Marx. Above all, the proponents of identity politics are hostile to and seek to conceal the fundamental division in society, social class.

The term is never used except as an entirely subjective concept referring to a form of prejudice, classism. It is ranked far below the three primary identities of race, gender, and sexual orientation, used as leverage in a petit-bourgeois jostle for well-rewarded positions and preferential treatment by the state and big business.

This is a wholly reactionary, disorienting, and divisive politics, hostile to a socialist fight for equality and democratic rights. The implications are most starkly revealed in the protests against the police murder of George Floyd in the United States. This event triggered international outrage and opposition, across supposed racial divides, against state violence and racism.

The response of advocates of identity politics such as Black Lives Matter was to insist that what was posed by the killing was a purely racial question, going so far as being demonstrably hostile to the involvement of non-black youth in the protestsidentified as privileged due to their whiteness. Any reference to the need to mobilise a broader struggle of the working class was met with the same pejoratives.

Just how useful this rotten politics is to the ruling class was indicated by a Telegraph article published on Monday. Made the leading Op-Ed in the newspapers print edition and given the top spot on its online edition, the article, authored by Nick Timothy, is titled The racist and sexist language of the Left is hopelessly hypocritical, with the by-line, The Oppression Olympics has reached a new low, as an extreme, divisive lexicon is imported from America.

In what follows, an advisor to former Prime Minister Theresa Maywhose government orchestrated huge assaults on democratic rights and working peopleis able to posture as a defender of civil liberties and point out that Social class is often overlooked, even though the education and prosperity of our parents is the biggest determinant of our life chances!

Without a socialist political challenge to the divisive politics of identity, the far-right will continue to make gains. The government is well-prepared to act on the Policy Exchanges signal. Johnson took the Tory Party into the 2019 general election on a manifesto promising to strengthen academic freedom and free speech in universities. This February, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson threatened in the Times, If the universities cant defend free speech, the government will.

In March, the head of the OfS said that universities must take practical steps to secure freedom of speech, and the government indicated it was looking to strengthen the 1986 Education Actbrought in by the Thatcher government to suppress protests against Enoch Powell and politicians from Apartheid South Africato allow for direct policing of student unions and societies.

In July, Tory MP Robert Halfon, chair of the Education Select Committee, said that universities could be required to fund security for controversial speakers to protect free speech. The same month, Williamson announced that universities in financial difficulty would have to provide assurance that [they] are fully complying with their legal duties to secure freedom of speech to receive government loans.

The International Youth and Students for Social Equality calls on students to wage the necessary struggle against the attempt to enforce a right-wing agenda on campus through government intervention. This must be done on the basis of an entirely opposed perspective to the advocates of competing identitiesthat is, a turn to the one political force capable of combatting these state-backed schemes, the international working class.

Concluded

The author also recommends:

British think tank fronts right-wing academic freedom campaignPart 1 [24 August 2020]

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British think tank fronts right-wing academic freedom campaignPart 2 - WSWS

(The Center Square) After two nights of rioting, Wisconsin's governor is drawing a line between protesters and the people who are looting and burning buildings in Kenosha.

Gov. Tony Evers on Tuesday said the First Amendment protects freedom of speech and the right to assemble. He said that is different than setting fires and stealing whatever you can.

"There remains a line between peaceful assembly and what we saw [Monday] night that put individuals, families, and businesses in danger, Evers said in a statement.

The governor's words come after two nights of violence in the streets in Kenosha following the shooting Sunday of 29-year-old Jacob Blake. Blake by Kenosha police officers.

Blake, who had an active warrant at the time, was seen on video fighting off officers and moving to get into his car when the officershot him.

Evers once again said protests in Kenosha and other cities are alright.

"We cannot forget the reason why these protests began, and what we have seen play out over the last two nights and many nights this year is the pain, anguish, and exhaustion of being Black in our state and country," the governor's statement read. "But as I said [Monday], and as Ill reiterate [Tuesday] , everyone should be able to exercise their fundamental right whether a protester or member of the press peacefully and safely. We cannot allow the cycle of systemic racism and injustice to continue. We also cannot continue going down this path of damage and destruction.

The governor's statement follows a number of Republicans who criticized the governor for his initial comments that seemed to blame police for Sunday's shooting.

Sen. Chris Kapenga, R-R-Delafield, on Tuesday said the governor is a day late to the calls for peace and calm.

"Following the shooting of Jacob Blake, Governor Evers issued a statement designed to fan the flames of outrage without having any of the details necessary to make such a judgement," Kapenga said in his own statement. "In these situations, we should be getting facts through the investigatory process before rushing to judgment for political gain. If police officers break the law, then they should be held accountable to the full extent of the law, and vice versa."

Kapenga said his statehouse office was trashed by an angry mob Monday night or early Tuesday morning.

Madison saw its own protests and riots after Blake's death.

A mob there looted stores on State Street, set fires, and took their anger back to the State Capitol Monday night and overnight Tuesday.

Wisconsin Republican U.S. Senator Ron Johnson said the violence in the streets must not be allowed to continue. Johnson said Evers needs to call up more WisconsinNational Guardsmen to protect both cities.

Peaceful protesting is a constitutionally protected form of free speech. Rioting is not.It must not be allowed to continue," Johnson said.

Leaders in Kenosha are preparing for a thirdstraight night of protests and violence. Another curfew is expected from 8 p.m. til 7 a.m.

See more here:
Gov. Evers condemns Kenosha violence after two nights of rioting - Ashland Daily Press

I graduated from Fordham College at Rose Hill in 1983 with a bachelors degree in philosophy and political science.After graduating from Pace Law School in 1986, I was admitted to the Bar in New Jersey in 1986 and New York in 1987.

In 2004, I was elected to the Civil Court, Bronx County, and assigned to serve in the Criminal Court.I sat in both Brooklyn and the Bronx.Currently, I work as a mediator for a private company called First Court, where I work to resolve personal injury matters.

I provide you, the reader, with this description of my background in an effort to establish my qualifications to make the statements that follow.

I have reviewed with great interest the case of Austin Tong, Gabelli School of Business at Lincoln Center 21, who was disciplined by Dean Keith Eldredge for posting a series of photos on social media: one commemorating a murdered police officer and another of himself, holding a rifle. Members of the Fordham community complained that Tongs posts made them feel unsafe.

I have also read the article published by Gabriela Rivera in The Fordham Observer on July 29, 2020, regarding her views on the Tong matter.

It is my considered opinion that Tong is well within his rights to post a photo of a deceased police officer and to post another photo of himself holding a legally owned rifle on private property. To view these actions as a violation of any code of conduct is ludicrous, and to sanction Tong for the exercise of his rights is nothing short of criminal.

In her article, Rivera states that (t)he Constitution, while we believe it is always intact and applicable to every point in our life, loses its power in non-public spaces like Fordham.

Yet, while Fordham is ostensibly a private institution, it does accept federal funding, in exchange for which it voluntarily subjects itself to federal rules and regulations, such as Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Education Amendment of 1972, which protects students from discrimination in housing, athletics, and access to facilities on the basis of such things as gender, sexual orientation, sex or pregnancy outside marriage, or having an abortion.

Very few schools can claim exemption from federal law almost all that do are religious institutions, and only if they can show they are controlled by religious organizations with whose beliefs Title IX requirements conflict, according to The Atlantic.

In 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the case of Tinker v. Des Moines. The principal of a public school tried to stop students from wearing black armbands in protest of the Vietnam War. The case eventually reached the Supreme Court, which stated that both students and teachers did not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.

Justice Abe Fortas went on to add that the law protects the citizen against the State itself and all of its creaturesBoards of Education not excepted they are educating the young for citizenship is reason for scrupulous protection of Constitutional freedoms of the individual, if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes.

This landmark case remains the law of the land to this day. In fact, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) continues to bring cases against schools that violate the free speech rights of their students.

Thus, despite being a private institution, Fordhams right to punish Tong for the free exercise of his constitutional rights off campus is not absolute.

The ACLU even states that, You have the right to speak your mind on social media, and your school cannot punish you for content you post off campus and outside of school hours that does not relate to school.

Thus, despite being a private institution, Fordhams right to punish Tong for the free exercise of his constitutional rights off campus is not absolute.

Further, there can be no doubt that Tong was punished for the content of his speech. This is the fundamental reason our founding fathers incorporated the First Amendment into the United States Constitution to allow for divergent opinions. Tong has the same right to speak out that any other citizen has, no matter the content of his speech.

That being said, free speech is never absolute. In the 1919 U.S. Supreme Court decision Schenck v. United States, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes gave his famous warning: The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.

Yet Tong has not falsely shouted anything that would cause a panic. He merely celebrated his right to bear arms under the Second Amendment, a right he did not possess in China, by exercising his First Amendment right to express his opinion.

Frankly, Riveras position is a clear and present danger, which is another quoted warning from the Schenck case. Her view would censor Tong and any other person who wishes to express a view contrary to that held by the majority. Most insidious, her concern that she wouldnt feel safe knowing someone I see in the hall has the means to commit violence (b)y posing with the gun and spouting praise for the right to be armed has no basis in law or fact.

All legal gun owners have the means to commit violence this is the very purpose for which these persons own guns!

Rivera has also failed to differentiate between a legal gun owner and a criminal. A legal gun owner is exercising their right to bear arms, a right which is subject to regulation from both federal and local authorities.

More likely than not, a legal gun owner has training in the use of a firearm and has learned discretion in the safe handling of a weapon. A criminal has no such training or discretion. Who is more likely to bring a gun on campus and threaten students a criminal, or a legal gun owner? Common sense tells you its the criminal.

How Rivera, and no doubt other Fordham students, have become opponents of our Constitutional rights is beyond the space I have available here to discuss. But suffice it to say, there can be little doubt that the decision of Dean Keith Eldredge should be reversed quickly and Tong returned to his place among his fellow students whether they agree with him or not.

Original post:
Austin Tong Has Done Nothing Wrong - The Observer - Fordham Observer

Marja Broussard, president of the Lafayette chapter of the NAACP, calls Mayor-President Josh Guillory racist, calls for him to step down. Lafayette Daily Advertiser

After days of pressure from Black community leaders, LafayetteMayor-President Josh Guillory apologized Monday for his initial response to the police killing of a Black manwalking away from officers.

As nearly two dozen protesters staged a sit-in outside a locked City Hall hoping to deliver a letter complaining about the mayor and asking for his resignation, Guillory met with a group of ministers and elected Black leaders.

That Monday meeting delayed a scheduled news conference by nearly two hours, and resulted in Guillory speaking for the first time since 31-year-old Trayford Pellerin was shot and killed by officers Friday about the pain of Pellerin's family and in the African American community.

Mayor President Josh Guillory holds joint press conference with Chief of Police Scott Morgan, Sheriff Mark Garber, Fire Chief Robert Benoit, and Parish Councilman Abraham Rubin. Saturday, Aug. 22, 2020.(Photo: SCOTT CLAUSE/USA TODAY Network)

I did offer an apology for things that could have been handleddifferently perhaps, we dont know. Well have facts that will come out that will give clarification, but I recognize the pain that members of their congregations are going through, Guillory said.

The mayor's comments Monday contrasted sharply withhis defense days earlier of the police killing of Pellerin, described by Guillory as "threatening" and carrying a knife before officers fired at least 11 bullets at him outside a gas station entrance. When Guillory issued that statement in defense of the shooting, he did not mention the family but praised officers.

Lafayette Mayor-President Josh Guillory: Black man killed by officers was 'threatening'

We can recognize this pain," Guillory said Monday after his meeting with Black leaders. "We can grieve for the family and still support law enforcement, and we are.

The Lafayette police killing of Pellerin promptedtwo nights of protests across the city, and Monday's protest outside City Hall.

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Police were responding to a routine disturbance call Friday when they attempted to arrest Pellerin at a gas station on North Evangeline Thruway. He walked away from them, and they followed him on foot for almost half a mile to another gas station. Officers even tasered Pellerin, who continued to walk away.

As a group of roughly six Lafayette police officers came up behind him, Pellerin reached for the station's door and officer's fired a blast of bullets. Officers said he had a knife.

"The officers opened fire when it became apparent the armed individual was attempting to enter a convenience store, threatening the lives of the customers and workers inside," Guillory said in a written statement issued almost 24 hours after the killing occured.

More: Lafayette police fire 11 rounds, kill Black man after tasing him in disturbance call

"Our thoughts and prayers are with our community tonight, and with the men and women in uniform who put their lives on the line every day to keep us safe," he said then.

Guillory's tone after his Monday with Black ministers was more conciliatory.

Immediately when I heard about this situation I began praying. Praying for his soul and for his family, Guillory said. But I recognize that I could have recognized that earlier. Its a fair point.

He recognized the Pellerin family's loss.

Lafayette police shooting: Second second night of protests, demonstrations across city

As a member of this community, I stand before you grieving the fact that we have a family in pain. We have an individual that was a son, that had a family, had friends. And we dont take that lightly,he said.

On Sunday during the second night of protests in Lafayette, Black community leaders called for Guillory to resign. They said he did not act in the interest of the African American community and ignored the pain caused by Pellerin's death.

Marja Broussard, the local NAACP president, said community members must make it known to others outside the area that Lafayette continues to struggle with racial inequality, in part because of Guillory.

More: Peaceful vigil for Lafayette police shooting victim becomes clash between marchers, police

"They need to know this is not a wonderful city when a mayor-president as him is a racist mayor-president," she told protesters Sunday. "Yes Marja Broussard said it. Josh guillory is a white racist. We know that."

Guillory met Monday with members of the Senior Pastoral Alliance, a local congregation of Black religious leaders, about his initial comments and response to protests over Pellerins death.

Were here to get information because we want structure and accountability so well be able to report to our congregations and the people of our community exactly whats going on in our city, said Pastor Ricky Carter of Good Hope Baptist Church on Willow Street.

Story continues below the video.

Jamal Taylor, a Lafayette activist, questions Mayor-President Josh Guillory's response to a police shooting that killed a Black man, Trayford Pellerin Lafayette Daily Advertiser

Guillory said he recognizes the rights of marchers and protesters who want to speak out against Pellerin's killing, protests that continued into the third day Monday.

We do have a majority of individuals that are protesting who are local and peaceful. Its our understanding that many of the individuals that are possibly agitating are not from here, he said, although neither Guillory or other local officials have offered evidence of protesters causing problems from outside the area.

He said he respects free speech, but will protect the city.

I have a duty to protect life and property and I will do so, he said.

Guillory acknowledged calls for his resignation, and said, Im not resigning.

Guillorys spokesman Jamie Angelle said he was not concerned about a push to obtain a recall petition for the mayor-president, which would require more than 31,000 signatures from Lafayette Parish voters.

Fire Chief Robert Benoit, who did publicly offer condolences for the Pellerin family over the weekend,warned people planning to protest the police shootingto exercise caution as the weather worsens. Tropical Storm Marco is expected to bring bad weather to the area Tuesday, and Tropical Storm Laura is expected to intensify into a hurricane before making landfall Thursday, perhaps in south Louisiana.

We have a lot of protesting going on. We dont want to stop you from moving around, but this storm is dangerous, Benoit said. This storm will take you out, so thats something to consider while youre doing your freedom of speech to protest.

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Lafayette police shooting: Mayor says 'I recognize the pain' the killing of Black man caused - Daily Advertiser