The Rape of Trayvon Martin

One month away from the three ring circus that will be George Zimmerman's trial for the murder of 17 year old Trayvon Martin, the public assassination and rape of the young victim has jumped into full gear.

Zimmerman's defense attorneys have released stuff found on Martin's cell phone, pictures and texts depicting the now snuffed out life of a kid doing kid stuff, who didn't know he was gonna die. He wasn't walking around a ghetto. He was walking around his father's probably predominately white neighborhood, going to the store and back. There were no gangs, no gang-bangers. No reason for a reasonably street savvy kid to worry about his own safety. He wasn't doing anything except talking to a girl on his phone. How dangerous can that be?

The defense calls the pictures released, evidence in the pending case that shows their client Zimmerman is the victim here. The pictures show Trayvon with gold grill. They show a marijuana plant. They show Trayvon with his friends. One pic even shows a gun. Since Martin wasn't in the pic with the gun, or holding the gun, it is questionable whether the picture even came from Trayvon's phone. Even if it did, he's a kid and kids download the damned things from the internet to keep and show to their friends. Funny how stuff like this never seems to affect white kids, even after they kill 20 or 30 people. 

Zimmerman's defense team is still relying on that ages old American defense of “little white guy defending himself against attacking big black hoodie wearing ghetto kid.” This, despite telling the courts that it would not seek immunity under the “stand your ground” defense following public outcry against those bogus laws, put on the books for one reason and one reason only, and that is to allow white men with guns to shoot people because they want to, when they want to. Nobody else, not black men, not black women, not even white women have successfully been able to use the stand your ground defense and thereby evade prison. Zimmerman ran into trouble as soon as he invoked it. He lives like a white man, but was swiftly reminded of his recent immigrant roots, so can't really claim master of the universe immunity/privilege like a “real” white guy. He's a bit too brown toned for that.

Zimmerman's defense can't stand on the facts of the case because Zimmerman precipitated the incident where he killed an unarmed kid after police told him via dispatch to leave Martin alone. Zimmerman brought the gun, got into a fight and killed the youth in cold blood just feet from his father's house.

So now the only option seems to be a public rape, just like what happens to women who report sexual assaults and black men/women/youth in the USA. It's never the assailant who is tried in court. It is always the victim put on trial, raped repeatedly with questions about past acts having no bearing on the incident in question, and Trayvon Martin is no exception. A recent case in point, Charles Ramsey of Cleveland. All he did was rescue three kidnapped women held for 10 years and w-Within 24 hours every news organization was reporting on his past bad acts, as if to say he's not a good guy. He's not the hero that everybody thinks he is.  Retried in the court of public opinion until folks got mad about it.

The pictures and what they depict, don't matter. They are not evidence about the incident in question. They are being held up and waved around only to say “look, George Zimmerman killed a bad guy, would you want him in your neighborhood, talking on the phone to your daughter?” Classic fall back defense of the bigoted in America when they know they were in the wrong.

What troubles me is that more often than not, it still works in Amerikkka. It remains to be seen if the judge will actually allow them into evidence given the notoriety of the case.

Martin was a black kid walking home, doing what he was supposed to do, he was accosted by Zimmerman, an arrogant prick with a gun who got his jollies driving around his neighborhood harassing people who “didn't fit” in with his perception of who should be there.

So what if they fought. So what if Zimmerman got a bloody nose. So what...

Trayvon Martin lost his 17 year old life doing what he was supposed to do. Doing what his parents had taught him to do for a change. He was 17, not an angel. The kid was walking home when he was jumped and shot for no reason by a white man with a gun.

Playing the race card, am I? Damn right, because otherwise, we wouldn't be having this conversation. If anyone other than the little white guy police wannabe George Zimmerman had pulled the trigger on a black hoodie wearing kid named Trayvon Martin on that fateful night, they would still be in jail or already subjected to trial and convicted and awaiting sentence, at the very least.

A Snowy Day in Nati-town

Some things I've learned by reading the newspapers today, as 9 inches of new snow falls on top of the foot of snow that I have yet to shovel from my driveway...


Those shiftless, lazy white people...

Democratic Candidate for governor of Texas says...white people don't want to work in factories...Farouk Shami...who is a self made millionaire who manufactures hair care products says...white people want special treatment and won't work...Shami explained his nearly 100% minority workforce this way....

“A majority of the people are going to be Hispanic and African-American. You don't find white people who are willing to work in factories. And our history proves, you know, lots of time when they, you know, the white people come to work in a factory they either want to be supervisors or they want to be, you know, paid more than the average person. And unfortunately they exit.”

Shami also apparently thinks along with the rest of those running for Texas gov, that 9/11 was an inside job.

Maybe America should go ahead and let Texas secede from the Union...ya think..

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Imprecatory Prayer

This is the kind of prayer that pseudo christians use to pray for God to kill somebody, as in those who daily pray that President Obama dies or is killed, because they don't like him or agree with what he is trying to do for this country. You can read more about that here.

I wonder if these fake christians have come across the phrase..."you reap what you sow" in their bible. Or maybe that other commandment from Jesus, about loving others as you love yourself...

Obviously, they have the second part of that commandment down pat..

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Canceling 12th grade

Utah is considering whether or not to cancel the 12th grade as a way of saving the state money. At first, the proposed law was to cancel the grade altogether. Now apparently because of the outcry, the lawmaker behind this has changed his mind and says..ya'll didn't understand..what I meant to say was,12th grade should be optional...

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Losing another Democrat

Evan Bayh of Indiana is retiring.....says he can better serve the people outside Congress. Given the gridlock on Capital Hill, I ain't mad at him...

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Darth Cheney

Cheney ticks me off whenever he opens his mouth, but one afterthought about his latest foray on television.....he apparently hates Dubya as much as he hates Obama...and he doesn't like Sarah either...but that is probably his mysogynistic tendencies showing through..he doesn't like women in general..unless it's one of his mini me daughters, you know, the gay one in the illegal marriage or the tea bagger with the five kids...

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Tiger Woo-woo

Did we really need to know that Woods reportedly knocked up one of his porn girls, twice? She is telling the tale, all the while saying she feels sorry for Wood's wife...Well if she feels for Elin...why tell this story...that she miscarried the first time and aborted the second and never told Tiger about it in the first place..

I mean, why go there, unless you're looking for a payday...

Elin, meantime, is handling her business....regardless of all the bimbo eruptions taking place...

Raising Racists

Like many blacks of my generation, as well as those who are older, I fear for the safety of Barack Obama. It has been our history that whenever one of us rises up and speaks, we get shot down, sometimes literally losing our life. I think of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and a host of others who were brutalized because they stood up to challenge the powers that be in our time.

Obama was justifiably given secret service agents long before anyone else because of the racial situation in this country. A racial situation that has not really changed since his election and scheduled ascension to the White House.

The secret service reported that the death threats have increased rather than decreased. You can read it here. Threats were even documented in my own back yard, in the Cincinnati, Ohio suburb of Mt. Washington, at the hardware store on Salem (tried to include the link, but it keeps disappearing, sorry.)

I haven’t written previously in depth about the threats or my feelings because, frankly I’m tired of talking about race and racism. I’m tired, after nearly 60 years on this earth of having to justify my very existence through that prism. I look forward to the day when it is no longer necessary for people like me to have to work twice as hard to prove that we are merely equal.

I’d hoped that Obama’s election would, and ultimately, will change the racial climate in America. But, I’m still not yet convinced that it will. Especially when I see stories like the ones I’ve just mentioned.

I was particularly upset by reports of the 9 year olds on the school bus chanting “kill” Obama, “assassinate” Obama. Public response to this story prompted the mayor to speak out. He wrote a letter to local parents, you can read it here.

I was not surprised by the kids and their chants, because I know that racists are bred not born. Little kids like this are strictly nurtured, not natured. They don’t come out of the womb hating. Kids are like little tape recorders. Families and parents know that you have to be careful about what you say around them.

I remember an incident from my own past, when I was maybe eleven or twelve. I was downtown in Pogues, a high end department store, in a dress, a very pretty dress, dress shoes, hair done, very clean, church going clean, because that was the only way I could go to downtown Cincinnati with my parents or as in this case, with my grandmother. There was a white family standing next to us as a clerk waited on my grandmother. They had a small child who kept staring at me. I had long ago been taught not to stare back. But the kid kept looking and finally turned to her mother, I assume, and asked out loud...

”mommy, is she a nigger?”

I looked up at her mother. She turned crimson in the face and snatched the kid away from our proximity, as if we were the threatening ones. She never apologized, nor answered her daughter’s question, at least within my hearing. The clerk behind the counter turned red, too. But she didn’t say anything either. Nor did my grandmother, but then she had been hearing it longer than I had, and we never talked about it until she got drunk one night at a family party, later that year. Up until that party, I assumed that my grandmother really liked white people. But it was actually liberating for me to find out that she didn’t. She survived by going along and she’d taught me to go along, too, in order to survive. Looking back, I realize that the little girl was trying to figure out her world. She needed to be taught and she was, just not the get along way that we seek today.

Obama’s election is a start on the path to a post racial world. He represents the beginning. He was elected by a coalition of all people, who are making a strong statement that the incidents that I’ve just been talking about, are a thing of the past. I like this path that we are on now. It won’t be without adventure. Race and racism will always be with us in some form or other.

But this election has taught us that what we need to do when it does crop up, is to speak up and to educate our young. They do hear us and they do learn if taught.

And just maybe, like the fear of a black man in the white house, racism will fade away, too, taken to its grave when those of us who lived through it, pass on to our next plane of existence.

Race Card

You’ve seen those old 20th century postcards depicting lynchings in America. There are museum exhibits of these cards that were sent through the mails , just like you, or I would send a card from our latest vacation spot, like Las Vegas or the Virgin Islands.

When I look at those, it’s not the mangled man or woman, hands tied behind their back, dangling at the end of the rope, slowly twisting in the wind that horrifies me. It’s the crowd surrounding the spectacle that terrifies me. The looks on the faces of the men and women who had witnessed the killing of another human being, for no other reason than they were black and had offended some white woman or crossed some invisible line drawn in the dirt, by some white man.

Washington Post columnist, Charles Krauthammer, opened his column today, which he titled; “Who’s Playing the Race Card?” with these words:

“Let me get this straight. A couple of agitated yahoos in a rally of thousands yell something offensive and incendiary, and John McCain and Sarah Palin are not just guilty by association -- with total strangers, mind you -- but worse: guilty according to the New York Times of "race-baiting and xenophobia."

Mr. Krauthammer goes on to argue that McCain and Palin are being vilified for injecting race into the campaign when actually it was Barack Obama who brought up the subject.. He maintains that McCain and Palin should be held guiltless when a couple of “yahoos” as he calls them, shout obscenities every time Palin or McCain say Obama. Continuing his reasoning, since McCain and Palin can be held accountable for these stranger actions, Obama should be held accountable for his past associations with William Ayers, Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the organization ACORN.

Mr. Krauthammer’s argument is comparing apples to oranges. The McCain/Palin role in their campaign rallies is more like the one or two guys who beat the black man, found the rope and tree and strung him up as the crowd watches in not so silent approval.

If this scenario was also happening at Obama rallies when Obama/Biden invoked the names of McCain/Palin, then Krauthammer might have an argument. But I’ve personably attended these rallies on both sides, since I do live in the swing state of Ohio. There are no similarities.

Until shamed into speaking, McCain/Palin stood silently smiling, while the rage spread through their crowds. Obama’s press releases tell you up front “don’t bring homemade signs, and he shushes the crowd as soon as anyone tries to take his opponent’s names in vain.

I don’t worry about who surrounds me when I’m at an Obama rally. I do worry when the rhetoric starts to heat up at a McCain/Palin rally If the violent rhetoric was happening on both sides within the same type of situation, then Krauthammer would have an argument. He doesn’t. His column is merely a thinly veiled attack from the right attempting to paint Obama as a shady man with a shady past. The extreme right can’t beat him on issues, so they slam him with mud balls.

Now if Obama were to suddenly flood the market with campaign advertisements that talked about, say, Palin’s husband’s affiliations with the secessionists of Alaska, or her affiliations with the African witch doctor, or McCain’s past affiliations with General John Singlelaub or current affiliation with Oliver North, or pastor John Hagee, or even McCain’s past affiliation with ACORN, then Krauthammer would have had justification for some of the things he stated in his column. There is even a white supremacist group hiding in McCain’s past. But none of this has been brought up by the Obama campaign, in ads or at campaign rallies.

The scenario that I opened with, is ugly. It doesn’t feel good to even talk about or to write about. It is an open wound on all of us over the age of 45. But as long as the Charles Krauthammer’s of the world refuse to take responsibility for their own racial blindness while at the same time justifying the racist subtexts that still permeate American politics, I will continue to bring it up.

Obama may be our next president...a black man in the White House...But he is only the beginning of true racial healing in America. Columns like those written by Charles Krauthammer show us that we still have a very long way to go.





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