Meet the Ferguson court clerk who says she feels like she's been raped by being fired for sending those insanely vile racist e-mails

See and hear Mary Ann Twitty talk about the clean-cut fun she had swapping those hilarious e-mails with other Ferguson law-enforcement folks, and how she felt like she'd been raped by being fired for it, visit this KMOV Web page.

by Ken

You remember Mary Ann Twitty, right? The court clerk in Ferguson, MO, who got caught swapping racist e-mails with, among others, "Captain Richard Henke, who was the second in charge of the Ferguson Police Department, Sergeant William Mudd, who was the fourth in charge of the Ferguson Police Department and the supervising officer of Darren Wilson," as DailyKos's Shaun King put it in his recent post "Newly revealed records show just how disturbingly racist many Ferguson officials truly were," after a public-records request from the Washington Post pried the actual e-mails loose.
"What they show," Shaun wrote, "is a deeply disturbing strain of racism that was socially acceptable among essential government employees who not only interacted with African Americans consistently in the majority black town of Ferguson, but were in positions of power in which they could make life miserable for the people they clearly disdained."

One cannot reasonably believe that men and women could send such hateful and disgusting emails for years and years, find them enjoyable and share them, but somehow miraculously compartmentalize that same racism when it came time to perform their daily duties. I'm not trying to insult janitors or repairmen, God bless them, but these were three essential employees in the Ferguson justice system. . . .

These several emails that were discovered are obviously not the extent of their racism, but just a symptom of it. What does it say about Captain Henke, who ran the day-to-day affairs of the police department, that he sent and regularly received racist emails? When Sgt. Mudd and Mary Ann Twitty sent messages just to Captain Henke, what did they know about him that gave them the knowledge that he would be comfortable with such nastiness? . . .

After President Obama was first elected in 2008, on November 14, 2008, Captain Rick Henke sent an email stating, "We shouldn’t worry about him being president for very long because what black man holds a steady job for four years.” . . .

On April 9, 2011, Twitty forwarded the email with the picture of Ronald Reagan feeding a chimp with the caption, "Rare photo of Ronald Reagan babysitting Barack Obama in early 1962."

Shaun provided some other examples, and directed readers to Mark Berman's earlie WaPo report for more.

Now Shaun is reporting: "Ferguson court clerk who sent racist emails says they were funny and she feels like she's been raped."

Yeah, this is real life.

After sending emails out comparing President Obama to a chimp and more, Mary Ann Twitty still refuses to accept that she has a racist bone in her body. When challenged on whether or not she thought the emails were funny, here was her reply:

“Funny as in humor wise? Yes. Not because it was racist or biased, just funny because it was just funny jokewise,” Twitty said. “I feel bad because that's not, I don't want people to look at me and say ‘she sent those racist jokes out because she's racist or biased.' I am not.”

Twitty said she was simply doing what others in Ferguson's government were doing.

“It took me a while to get over the feeling of being raped and being thrown under the bus,” Twitty said. “I'm human, I meant nothing bad by it.”

Yeah, okay. "Meant nothing bad by it."

We all recall the hit Starbucks took when it tried recently to promote a national conversation about race. There were people, though, who thought the company should have been cut some slack, for at least trying to do something about this toxic subject. It seems pretty clear to me that Mary Ann and her hilarious e-mail pals are far from alone, and the story they tell echoes way beyond Ferguson -- that in fact on the subject of race they are something like the face of America. Totally ignorant and totally savage.

And by the way, Mary Ann, humor-wise, there was nothing in the slightest funny about those e-mails. At least not to anyone with a non-diseased brain.

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