UPDATE: JusticeForTrayvon
...White people are victims. Historically, it was an absurd fear of "white oppression" by free blacks that helped to legitimate white racism. In the present, this language has been recycled as "reverse racism." Both rely upon a White racial imagination which sees blacks as perpetual criminals, brigands, and killers.Quote from: Trouble in Sanford! Negroes Plot Revenge for Trayvon Martin! by Chauncey DeVega at Salon.com, April 6,2012
...Contrary to the chatter, the problem isn’t that George Zimmerman is a race other than Black, the problem is that those empowered with the duty to see that justice is carried out, failed to do their job. The problem is that they treated the victim with absolute disregard. They made no effort to confirm the shooter’s story or seek witnesses, they simply took Zimmerman’s statements as fact and then dumped Trayvon’s body in the morgue without making a single effort to identify him. If you’re the parent waiting for your son to return from a convenience store, have you no right to expect at least that much? As a matter of race, do you think that would have been their response if Trayvon had been a young white boy? If the perpetrator had been Black, do you think he would have simply gone home? Those are the issues.Quote from: Black on black crime Black-on-Black Crime is a Misnomer by Fay Paxton at Open.Salon.com/, April 4,2012
Journalist Joan Walsh concludes that George Zimmerman's strange behavior regarding the Trayvon Homicide case can be seen as further evidence that Sanford police did a lousy job in their initial investigation in which they took Zimmerman's view of the events at face value . The police failed to interview more carefully the ear or eye witnesses. They failed to test Zimmerman for alcohol or drugs . and they failed to do a more comprehensive back check on Zimmerman. They also failed to have him checked by a psychologist or psychiatrist or put him under observation . They released Zimmerman without considering that he might present a danger to the community.
Zimmerman trades lawyers for Hannity by Joan Walsh at Salon.com,April 10,2012
George Zimmerman’s attorneys Craig Sonner and Hal Uhrig shook up the Trayvon Martin case Tuesday afternoon by announcing they had lost contact with their infamous client and were no longer representing him in connection with his shooting the unarmed 17-year-old Feb. 26. With the news that Zimmerman traded talking to his attorneys with talking to Fox’s Sean Hannity, this story went full-tilt culture war crazy.
In addition to revealing that Zimmerman has spoken with Hannity – the Fox host refuses to divulge what they discussed – the pair said they were “concerned for his emotional and physical safety” and suggested he might be suffering post-traumatic stress disorder from watching too much television coverage of the case. They wouldn’t disclose Zimmerman’s whereabouts, with Uhrig saying, “you can stop looking in Florida, look much further away than that,” but “he’s in the United States...”
...Zimmerman is apparently seeking comfort and protection not in the legal system, but in the inner chambers of the right-wing resentment machine known as Fox News. Also Tuesday, Rush Limbaugh declared that “the Trayvon Martin situation caused happiness somewhere in the civil rights community.” The only people happy about this tragedy are right-wingers pushing it to advance their narrative of black criminals menacing innocent whites (or white Latinos, in the case of Zimmerman).
This case just keeps getting uglier. Nothing that happened Tuesday means Zimmerman is guilty of a crime in the Martin case, but it makes the Sanford Police Department’s decision to release him, armed, without drug testing or psychiatric observation, seem even more irresponsible.
Black on black crime Black-on-Black Crime is a Misnomer by Fay Paxton at Open.Salon.com/, April 4,2012
Contrary to the chatter, the problem isn’t that George Zimmerman is a race other than Black, the problem is that those empowered with the duty to see that justice is carried out, failed to do their job. The problem is that they treated the victim with absolute disregard. They made no effort to confirm the shooter’s story or seek witnesses, they simply took Zimmerman’s statements as fact and then dumped Trayvon’s body in the morgue without making a single effort to identify him. If you’re the parent waiting for your son to return from a convenience store, have you no right to expect at least that much? As a matter of race, do you think that would have been their response if Trayvon had been a young white boy? If the perpetrator had been Black, do you think he would have simply gone home? Those are the issues.
I don’t dispute that Blacks kill other Blacks, particularly as a result of gang activity. But so do Latinos, yet there is no “Latino-on-Latino” crime. Whites certainly commit their share of crime as well. In fact, the vast majority of serial murders are committed by white men, who prey on other whites. The shooting at Columbine, the gunman in Norway was a white man who killed 92 white people. From the "Wild West" to vigilante lynching, to the act of war; indeed Hitler was white and the vast majority of his 11 million victims were white; Jack the Ripper, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy...all white men who murdered white people, yet these misdeeds are not relegated to be “white-on-white” crime.
That Blacks are simply unredemptive criminals is a stereotype that has been perpetuated by the media, law enforcement and revisionist history. I lived most of my life in Chicago, a city with high gang and crime activity, but I’ve never personally known a crime victim, let alone anyone who was murdered. I’m not certain I can distinguish a gunshot from a firecracker. I raised my two girls there...all of their friends are alive and well. But I do vividly recall that the police department was once cited for exposing the identity of African Americans who had been arrested to television cameras and print media while they guarded the identity of white individuals, even if it meant putting a police jacket over their faces. Sadly, many of our leaders also help to perpetuate misconceptions and stereotypes about Blacks.
George Zimmerman's camera-loving attorneys say they can't reach him, but he's talking to the Fox host...
...How do we explain the disparity in how society views the acts of one race versus another? Are there degrees of death? Do you ever read about such extreme police activity waged against whites? Look again at the statistics. Why doesn't the prison population reflect the arrests? Why are so many Black men killed at the hands of law enforcement because an officer "thinks" he sees a handgun? Whites own the vast majority of handguns, yet we seldom hear of these violent encounters with the police.
From “Birth of a Nation” to cartoons like “Heckle and Jeckle” and news print, the media plays a major role in how we perceive things...
...What everyone is missing is the fact that the race of George Zimmerman is not the issue...Trayvon Martin’s race is.
The anger is about Amadou Diallo, Oscar Grant, Ramarley Graham, 14 year-old Derek Lopez, Sean Bell, 7 year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones and countless other unarmed Blacks and Latinos who are gunned down by law enforcement. The anger is about arbitrary laws like New York's "Stop and Frisk" program that targeted 685,724 New Yorkers in 2011. 88% of those stopped were people of color; 9% were white. The anger is about the "racial" difference and indifference shown by law enforcement and legislators.
Commentator Chauncey DeVega points out that historically the record shows that when it comes to race riots the facts are that Black Americans had more to fear from whites rioting, lynching and massacring Black Americans. And yet the media and public figures are always at the ready to fear monger about Black Citizens rioting and killing white citizens even though this flies in the face of the historical reality.
Trouble in Sanford! Negroes Plot Revenge for Trayvon Martin! by Chauncey DeVega at Salon.com, April 6,2012
...Across the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries the formula remains the same: race, crime, guns,"scary" black men, and white fear. This holds true even if Trayvon Martin (unarmed and innocent) is dead at the hands of George Zimmerman (armed and hunting his human prey).
The historical irony is rich. For example, as demonstrated many times in places like Rosewood, Chicago, Tulsa, and East St. Louis, racial violence in the United States is almost the exclusive province of whites against blacks. Race riots are almost by definition the murderous mob actions of whites against people of color. Funny then, how in the popular imagination such matters are muddied and inverted...
Memory echoes across time: our collective conscience is trans-historical. White supremacy, what is a changing thing, reaches back to the past to find life in the Age of Obama. While the temptation is to focus on the Southern Strategy of the 1960s in order to explain the virulent anti-black and anti-brown animus of the New Right and the Republican Party at present, the roots are in fact much older.
The Conservatives who instinctively rally to defend George Zimmerman are actually the intellectual and emotive kin of racist White populists who lived centuries before. In all, matters would be much improved if the reactionary Right owned their philosophical and intellectual wellsprings in the hanging tree, chain gangs, and press gangs of post-Reconstruction America.
History is real; the past is present in the year 2012. This is true for all black folks. It applied to Trayvon Martin. It also applies to someone as powerful as the President of the United States of America.
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