Texas man says he painted ‘white power’ on his fence to prove a point -- but he’s not racist
A white man in Houston who has painted "white power" and "KKK" on the corrugated steel surrounding his home insists he's not racist.
Donald Burns said he painted the inflammatory messages to draw attention to what he believes are unjust property-related violations by the local civic club, Click2Houston reports.
"Has nothing to do with race, it has a problem with black property owners and what they've got away with. It does have something to do with race," said Burns, who introduced an African-American woman to the station who he said was his girlfriend.
Click2Houston acknowledged this was "tortured logic."
Burns painted over some of the words after he was interviewed by the station, but insisted he was not racist, even taking his shirt off to demonstrate his lack of white supremacist tattoos.
"Since 1977 I've been in and out of your prisons, you don't see no marks of that (expletive) hate on me," he told Click2.
Neighbors in his predominantly African-American community of Shamrock Manor have been taken aback.
"It's very offensive," Joseph Boxie, a member of the civic club, told Click2. "He's totally out of control."
"If you feel a certain way you don't have to write all this on your fence, because you have kids come by here from school looking at this stuff," neighbor Sam Pratt told the station.
Community activist Quannel X said Burns is provoking people.
"What he's doing is dangerous. Many of the young people in this community have a problem with that signage and he's creating a very volatile situation," he told Click2.
Burns said the point of his actions was to draw attention to what he considers a violation of his civil rights.
"I don't have an NAACP, I don't have a LULAC. There's no means for me to get something when I'm offended," he said.
Amazingly, some of Burns' neighbors seem to have been sucked into his Alice In Wonderland logic whirlpool.
"He's not actually speaking about KKK and white folks and black folks. He's speaking about a lot of illegal doing going on in this neighborhood," said a man named James who declined to give his full name.
Watch the report from Click2Houston here:
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