Fear of a black movement.

The Field Negro education series continues.

Tonight I cut and paste an excellent article from Huffington Post.

"Why has the Black Lives Matter movement not been classified as a hate group? Elisabeth Hasselbeck on Fox and Friends

Bill O'Reilly, in another conversation, answered this question in the affirmative and swore he would "shut them down." But how does one shut down the legitimate, organic forces of social change? In a modern democracy is the goal really silent, hands- folded conformity? Is this not a vision straight out of some futuristic, dystopian novel like Brave New World?

After all, racism in not a relic of the past to be found in a museum, gawked at and then largely forgotten in one's race to the cafeteria to enjoy a latte, as Fox news tries to peddle.
Racism still thrives. For example, between 2002 and 2014, consistently about 90% of people stopped and frisked in New York City by police were black or Latino, according to data by the New York Civil Liberties Union gleaned from police reports themselves.
 
Even white felons are more trusted by employers than blacks with no criminal record. According to a recent study that attempted to measure racial discrimination in hiring practices: "Among those with no criminal record, white applicants were more than twice as likely to receive a callback relative to equally qualified black applicants. Even more troubling, whites with a felony conviction fared just as well, if not better, than a black applicant with a clean background."

Obviously, contemporary racism takes more insidious and subtler forms than its virulent predecessors. In the South in the 1950's, black people could not vote because of literacy tests, poll taxes, and threats of violence. Today Republicans cloak the denial of the right to vote in the subterfuge of countering voting fraud, even if it is so rare that it is virtually non-existent. For example, one can vote in Texas with a gun permit, but not with a college identification. A party that wants to deny people the right to vote is a moribund political party.

Therefore, movements, such as Black Lives Matter, besides being integral to developing the next generation of political leaders fighting for racial justice, are an extension of the civil right's struggle rooted in the 1960's. Now, today's activists may be angrier than the iconic civil rights leaders of the '60's, but this anger can not be dismissed as illegitimate; for doing so would be a direct denial of the black experience in America, as the data on "stop and frisk" patterns suggests.

In a recent march in St. Paul, Minnesota, Black Lives Matters leaders shouted in unison "Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon" one day after a policeman was gunned down in cold blood in Houston. Such demonstrations of questionable behavior will draw animus even from whites and others of good will. But shouting irresponsible, juvenile refrains is not the same as cold blooded murder of a police officer and trying to connect the two, like O'Reilly does, is largely the work of someone who has not looked in his own heart to pry himself free of racial bigotries.

If the realities Black Lives Matters activists did not exist or were imagined, then Eric Garner would still be alive and not killed by a police officer in Staten Island who put him in an illegal chokehold for the shocking crime of selling loose cigarettes. With his dying breath, he repeated "I can't breath" eleven times before succumbing.

When Fox news sycophants deny racism and condemn Black Live's Matters they are disrespecting the death of Eric Garner and many others who died in police custody for no apparent reason. They are throwing dirt on the grave of Trayvon Martin who was killed for walking down the street eating Skittles by a man-child who readily used as a defense the wide latitude given by Stand Your Ground laws to justify cold-blooded murder.
 
The white hegemony that conservatives are trying to protect no longer exists and they are the only ones who can't see it. No, the vision that O'Reilly and other conservatives have is largely one very reminiscent of a 1950's television drama where blacks were largely seen, but not heard. It is an anachronism as dated as any Norman Rockwell portrayal of Americana.

Whether it is Black Lives Matter who demand to be heard or others, Fox News will attempt to shout down the movement to protect their cherished vision of a monochrome America, instead of the messy, rigidly stratified America that so many face." [Source]

I am glad I am not the only one to see it.

*Pic from newscorpse.com

The Monroe Bird story.

So I saw the following story over at Daily Kos, and I thought to myself that it was worth sharing. (h/t to my twitter fam, Shaun King.)

It's important,  because although it's one incident in Oklahoma, I think it speaks to a much larger problem plaguing our society.

"It's no accident that Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Mike Brown, and Akai Gurley are dead.

The men who shot and killed them showed them absolutely no compassion after they were fatally wounded. Officer Timothy Loehmann stood and watched 12-year-old Tamir Rice struggle to live and offered him no aid whatsoever. Officer Peter Liang literally called and texted his union reps and stepped over the body of Akai Gurley instead of offering him assistance after shooting him in the stairwell of his own apartment building. You won't see any pictures of Officer Darren Wilson checking the pulse of Mike Brown. Eric Garner, completely unconscious on a Staten Island sidewalk, was virtually ignored by officers who performed no CPR. Baltimore police expressed zero concern for the well-being of Freddie Gray.

In many ways, these dead boys and men are much less dangerous to those who killed them than they would be alive. They can't give their side of the story. We'll never again hear from Tamir Rice or Akai Gurley or Freddie Gray.

As George Zimmerman, the Florida asshole/neighborhood watch volunteer who racially profiled, chased, confronted, and shot teenager Trayvon Martin in his own neighborhood, continues to abuse women and pile up mugshots all over Florida, we'll never be able to hear from Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman made sure of it.

The many mugshots of George Zimmerman. But a case with a living survivor shot by an overzealous wannabe cop in his own neighborhood is out there, a case with many parallels to the killing of Trayvon Martin, and his story needs to be told.

 

On February 4, sitting in his own car in his own neighborhood, talking to a female passenger, Monroe Bird was shot in the neck by a security guard, Ricky Stone, a 52-year-old white man. The bullet pierced the C3 vertebrae in his neck. Standing 6 feet, 8 inches, Bird, a gifted athlete, is now unable to move his arms or legs and relies on a ventilator to breathe. Beloved by his family and friends, Monroe had a larger-than-life personality and was really a model citizen. His parents pastor a church outside of Tulsa, Okla., and actually serve on the city council of their hometown.
Below we will dig into exactly how this happened and identify some very troubling aspects of the story.

1. The security guard who shot Bird possessed marijuana at the time of the shooting. He told the Tulsa police that he hadn't smoked it in a few weeks, and they didn't even give him a citation. This is the definition of white privilege. In Oklahoma, possession of marijuana is an automatic misdemeanor. Why was Ricky Stone not cited?

Mind you, Tulsa was quick to test Eric Harris for drugs after they killed him and then released the results widely—even though he never acted violently toward officers.

2. The security guard went to the tired, age-old excuse and claimed that he saw Bird reach into his glove compartment. According to the police report, no weapons were found in or near the car, and no items that even seemed to belong in the glove compartment were found out or about in the car. Yet, in a hurry to leave, we are expected to believe that Bird randomly fidgeted in the glove compartment just for the hell of it.

3. The security guard claimed he thought Monroe and his female passenger were having sex in the car and that he only approached them because of this.
She's white. Bird is black.

Both she and Bird have adamantly denied any such thing was happening and denied it when the security guard confronted them. What role did race play in this confrontation?

The security guard has claimed that Bird, who has no criminal record, attempted to run him over and basically kill him there on the spot—a preposterous claim—and that is when the guard says he began firing his weapon into the car.

Both the female passenger and Bird denied the guard's account and stated that they were driving away when Stone began recklessly firing his gun into the car.

4. The security guard who shot Bird worked for Benjy D. Smith, who owns Smith & Son Security Company. This important to know because Smith is a reserve deputy for the same Tulsa Sheriff's Office that is currently under national scrutiny for its unethical practices with Reserve Deputy Bob Bates, who shot and killed Eric Harris earlier this year.

5. Here is where we get a real glimpse of what life could perhaps have been like for Trayvon and his family, had he survived the gunshot wound from George Zimmerman.

Even though Bird has not been charged with a crime of any kind, his insurance company has denied him coverage because of comments made by the district attorney, who claim the entire ordeal was Bird's fault and not the fault of the security guard who fired his gun into the car.

Because of this, Bird, who needs 24/7 care and attention, is going to be sent home and denied rehabilitative care. Because his bed and equipment are too big for his bedroom, he will have to live in the living room of his family's home while his mother cares for him. The insurance company will not even cover home nursing care and has advised that the family simply call 911 if they need help. Mind you, Bird is on a breathing machine and is a quadriplegic." [Source]


I know that there are other big news stories that I could be blogging about: The Iraq nuke deal, NASA doing a fly-by of Pluto, and Donald Trump leading the GOP  field. But you already knew about all of these things.

Now, at least, you will learn about Monroe Bird as well.

*Pic from twitter.

"Fitting the description" at Yale.

If you are a young Negro in America I can't imagine a better place for you to be than in a library at an Ivy League school.

If you are the parent of such a young Negro it must make you proud to have a child in such a position, and you must sleep pretty well at night knowing that your child will be safe and protected in the friendly confines of a very white, very elite, academic environment.

So imagine how shocked Charles Blow was to hear that his child almost got the Trayvon Martin treatment while walking out of the library on Yale's campus.

"As a noted memoirist and New York Times columnist who writes often about race, Charles Blow has spoken about the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, deaths that sparked a national debate over how police treat African-American men.

On Monday, Blow wrote about another young black man's encounter with police -- his son, who was allegedly held at gunpoint on the Yale University campus where he's a student.

 

Blow took to Twitter on Sunday, writing that he was "fuming" after his son called to tell him what happened Saturday -- that he was walking out of the library when university police "accosted" him and drew their weapons. Blow tweeted that his son was detained because he "fit the description" of a suspect.

 

Blow's son was released, and Yale has said that the real suspect was found and arrested later." [Source]

 

I feel your pain Mr. Blow. This is a little too close to home for you. Now when you write all those essays for the New York Times about racism in America you can truly write them from them from the heart. 

 

"Saturday evening, I got a call that no parent wants to get. It was my son calling from college — he’s a third-year student at Yale. He had been accosted by a campus police officer, at gunpoint!

This is how my son remembers it:

 

He left for the library around 5:45 p.m. to check the status of a book he had requested. The book hadn’t arrived yet, but since he was there he put in a request for some multimedia equipment for a project he was working on.

 

Then he left to walk back to his dorm room. He says he saw an officer “jogging” toward the entrance of another building across the grounds from the building he’d just left.

Then this:

 

“I did not pay him any mind, and continued to walk back towards my room. I looked behind me, and noticed that the police officer was following me. He spoke into his shoulder-mounted radio and said, ‘I got him.’

 

“I faced forward again, presuming that the officer was not talking to me. I then heard him say, ‘Hey, turn around!’ — which I did.

“The officer raised his gun at me, and told me to get on the ground.

 

“At this point, I stopped looking directly at the officer, and looked down towards the pavement. I dropped to my knees first, with my hands raised then laid down on my stomach.

 

“The officer asked me what my name was. I gave him my name.

 

“The officer asked me what school I went to. I told him Yale University.

“At this point, the officer told me to get up.”

 

The officer gave his name, then asked my son to “give him a call the next day.”

My son continued:

 

“I got up slowly, and continued to walk back to my room. I was scared. My legs were shaking slightly. After a few more paces, the officer said, ‘Hey, my  man. Can you step off to the side?’ I did.”

 

The officer asked him to turn around so he could see the back of his jacket. He asked his name again, then, finally, asked to see my son’s ID. My son produced his school ID from his wallet.

 

The officer asked more questions, and my son answered. All the while the officer was relaying this information to someone over his radio.

 

My son heard someone on the radio say back to the officer “something to the effect of: ‘Keep him there until we get this sorted out.’ ” The officer told my son that an incident report would be filed, and then he walked away."

 

Mr. Blow's son will be fine. He has a father who has a national platform to speak out against what happened to him. 

 

Think of the countless other black men who have been subjected to similar indignities because they "fit a description". 

 

Fortunately for young Mr. Blow he will not end up like this guy, or this one, but it's not because he doesn't "fit the description."   

 

 

"This is not your country"; even if you are the "Jeopardy" champion.

I can relate to Arthur Chu's experience as it relates to his father.




My father was also working on his post graduate degrees in America in the late sixties, and he too would tell us stories about some of the awful things that he experienced while trying to navigate the racial climate at the time.




Unlike Mr. Chu's dad, though, after he got his degrees my father went back to his beloved Jamaica and never left. As he liked to say when citizens of a certain class were fleeing the island and taking their wealth with them; "I will turn the lights out."


But I digress.




Chu wrote an excellent article for The Daily Beast that is cut and paste worthy, and I would like to share it with you.




 "I wrote the piece below in a late-night frenzy on July 13, 2013, after receiving a notification on my phone that George Zimmerman had been acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin. I had left a party early, brooding about why I felt so strongly about something that, ostensibly, had “nothing to do with me.”
I had originally kept this as a friends-only post on Facebook, because of the justifiable fear that writing angry tearful screeds about how mad you are at America might be harmful for my career.


As it was, the tweets that I sent out about how depressed I was after the Trayvon Martin shooting got dug up several months later by some National Enquirer intern looking for dirt on the recent Jeopardy! celebrity, and I got to see a blurb in the Enquirer asking, “Does Jeopardy champ Arthur Chu hate America?”


So for a while I was paranoid about ever letting anyone see this again. But then another late-night frenzy piece I wrote in response to the Isla Vista shootings took off, and I thought maybe sharing this wouldn’t be so bad an idea.
The one sticking point was, of course, that my D-list viral celebrity as a Jeopardy! champ and all that followed came a year after George Zimmerman’s acquittal and the whole issue of white guys shooting minorities dead and getting away with it was, as we say in the journalism business, “stale.”




But I remember a dark, cynical voice in my mind thinking, “Don’t worry. The issue may be stale now, but just give it a few months and it’ll be in the headlines again. Have faith. This is America.”


What do you know, I was right.

***

When my father first came to this country as a graduate student, there was an incident where he and a friend were walking home and were suddenly confronted in a parking lot by a group of apparently intoxicated students in a car, driving around them in circles, shouting threats and racist catcalls.


My father’s friend counseled him to ignore it, to wait for them to get their jollies and leave, that this is just the kind of thing that happens once in a while.
My father waited, and they didn’t leave, and then my father picked up a rock and said, “I’m counting to thirty and if they’re not gone by then this rock is going through their windshield.”


Luckily, they tired of the sport and peeled off around when my dad hit fifteen. It’s good for me that they did—had the rock gone through the windshield, had glass flown in a thousand bright shards across the asphalt, had the driver slumped over, bleeding, and the car doors swung open and his friends stormed out filled with anger, had police been called and charges been filed—well, I probably wouldn’t be here.


If by chance one of those students had been a Zimmerman, carrying a firearm for “self-defense” against “violent criminals” armed with rocks, I very definitely would not be here.


There was a moral to this story when my father told it to me, a moral that I hated more than any of the other morals that came attached to his other anecdotes.


It was a moral that explained many things. It explained, for instance, why he never went to parent-teacher association events, never integrated himself into “the community.” Why he consistently obeyed Rule #1, a rule that my friends’ white suburban parents had never considered—a rule I would not hear from others until I actually met people who’d grown up urban and poor when I got older—Never Talk to the Cops. (In the Bill of Rights it’s actually Rule #5.)
Why he urged me to choose a career specialization based on objective assessment of skills and achievements, one where success was quantifiable, one whose practitioners were organizationally indispensable. To take an “Asian” job like engineer, scientist, programmer. One where there was little room for subjectivity, where the personal impression of the interviewer counted less. To stay away most of all from fields where I would be judged purely based on how well people could relate to me, like direct sales, like middle management, like the performing arts.


To never, ever, ever put my livelihood in a position where I depended on white people liking me.


Because it was a lesson he learned the night that some random drunkards decided that terrorizing two pedestrians in a car, swerving toward them again and again, would be fun—would have no legal consequences because the cops wouldn’t care, would have no moral consequences because the victims didn’t matter.


A lesson he learned every time he was pulled over for a speeding ticket, or pulled aside by the store detective and asked to turn out his pockets, or quietly scoffed at and eyerolled at by a customer service rep for his accent.
That lesson was:


This Is Not Your Country.


You can live here. You can make friends. You can try to live by the law and be a decent citizen and even maybe make a lot of money.


But you will never, ever belong. You will never, ever be one of them. And you must never, ever trust them.


I resisted this lesson. I fought back. I worked for hours to give myself a generic Midwestern broadcaster’s accent—I became a voiceover artist because the way I have trained myself to speak is a “radio voice.” I fell in love with the English language, I developed a vocabulary of nearly a hundred thousand English words, I devoured American culture both high and low, Mark Twain and Eugene O'Neill and Flannery O'Connor and Jerry Seinfeld and Tupac and Public Enemy and the Beach Boys and Buddy Holly and Madonna and Ella Fitzgerald and Weird Al and Bill Hicks and George Carlin and Martin Scorsese and John Waters and John Philip Sousa and Aaron Copland and George Lucas and Beverly Cleary and Matt Groening and on and on and on, all of it, everything I could find, every TV show, every radio station, every book in the library.


History, literature, politics. Fast food and junk food and pop culture trivia and song lyrics and idiomatic colloquialisms of the South, the Northeast, the Midwest. I binged on America, I stuffed myself so full of America I was bursting at the seams with America.


I swallowed it all. As much as I could. I swallowed things that tasted foul and struggled to keep them down, but I did the best I could, to prove I could, to prove that I could swallow anything. I stomached the Chinese Exclusion Acts and the Riots of 1871. The gold miners and the borax miners and the railroad workers. I held my nose and I ate Jack London and the Yellow Peril and the coming war with China. I swallowed H.S. Tsien's deportation and Cold War paranoia and Joe McCarthy and the Yellow Peril and the coming war with China.


I choked down Wen Ho Lee’s arrest and Vincent Chin’s murder and Iris Chang’s suicide and Andrew Breitbart and the Yellow Peril and the coming war with China.


My friends were white. The girls I dated were white. I laughed at the racist jokes and invoked hipster irony to make them myself. I steeled my muscles and kept inside all the shit I’d swallowed, told me it was another time, another place, just another one of my dad’s stupid stories. I took history instead of CS or EE in college. To hell with my dad’s misgivings, I set out to be an actor, a performer, to live or die by whether I could get the audience to like me.


Because none of that was real. That was all in another world.


The historical atrocities and the daily microaggressions. Kids who screamed “Chinese Pig!” and adults who asked in an exasperated tone “I mean where are you from originally?” John McCain and the gooks he could never forgive. Making it to callbacks three times in a row only to never be the “fit” they were looking for. Being complimented on my English. Being criticized on my English. The tingle of nerves bristling at standing next in line to a FOB with a thick accent and a bad haircut, the desire to scream “I’m not with him! We’re not related!”




Sum Ting Wong and Ho Lee Fuk. Dick jokes. Accent jokes. Chinese restaurant jokes. The mute Chinese nerd in the background of the movie. The Chinese lead character being played by a white guy in makeup.


Waking up every day knowing that all of it—the broadcaster accent, the memorized cultural references and song lyrics—isn’t fooling anybody. Your face gives you away. The way you overenunciate certain consonants. The foods that don’t make you retch and the foods that do. The sound of your parents’ voice on the phone.


The way it simply matters more when a pretty white girl goes missing than when an Asian man goes missing and is later found dead. The way academics still publish papers on whether you possess the necessary mental apparatus to function in a civil democracy.


The way a grad student is willing to hurl a rock through a car windshield—and throw away his entire future with it—because he knows in that moment that he has no other options, that if he is found run over and dead the next morning the cops won’t really care.


The way a terrified black teenager might lunge at a racist vigilante because he knows there’s no good way out of this and it’s better to die fighting than to be shot in the back.


The way a crowd of people who have had their total and utter helplessness before the law rubbed into their face by the media over and over again might pick up rocks, sticks, knives and break anything they can, because while mindless vengeance is not justice—is far inferior to justice—it is still more than nothing, which, when they try to stand up and peacefully demand justice, is what they always receive.


The way a grim-faced storeowner might pick up an assault rifle and begin firing into that selfsame aggrieved, desperate crowd because he knows no one is coming, no one will help, no justice will be served—the men whose blood the crowd wants are safely ensconced in police protection in the suburbs miles away and they, like the Jewish bailiffs in feudal Russia in the time of the pogroms, will be left to soak up the rage of the masses. They fire round after round in “self-defense” without thought of justice because for them justice does not exist.


They live in a world different from your world, gentle white reader. The one you take for granted, where you can pick up the phone and someone on the other end will listen, a cop or a lawyer or a congressman. They live in Trayvon Martin’s world, in my father’s world, in the world that under all the assimilation and the “model minority” bullshit I live in, despite all my best efforts, despite all my father’s warnings.


But even that is a facile evasion, isn’t it? Calling it two worlds. It’s really only one world, only one country, only one United States of America. There’s one place, one culture, one system.


We all live here. We all make friends here, eat the food, watch the movies, maybe even make money.


It’s just some people belong here, and others don’t.


I can pretend to belong here better than Trayvon was ever given the chance to. The white racist looks at me and sees a stolen job or the slow decline of national prominence, but he doesn’t see a rapist, a thug, a barbarian at the gate. I fear being snubbed and sometimes spat on but rarely shot. And that is a very important difference.


But it is still not my country. However hard I try, however well they treat me, however much we all smile at each other and however much people praise the "model minority" I am, I know it is not.


Because it’s also the country whose government had to be pressured into taking an interest in the murder of a young man simply because of the color of his skin. A country that produced a jury that let that murderer walk free. And a country whose most self-proclaimedly patriotic citizens were whooping and hooting and setting off fireworks the night that man went free, right in the midst of the shock and grief and sorrow of those still mourning.


And I am done making excuses for this country, to say that “America” isn’t like that despite what the American government is like, despite what American history is like, despite what even now an overwhelming number of the American people are openly and proudly like. I am dead tired of pretending that countless examples are all exceptions, that to see a pattern where a pattern clearly exists is to be a “reverse racist” and “paranoid” and all the things I have accused my father of being.


I am sick and tired of reassuring myself that if their smiling faces can rejoice at the murderer’s freedom simply because the victim didn’t belong here, that I have any hope of belonging here either.


I am not an American. This is not my country. I have no country other than a China I barely know and do not love. Trayvon had no country other than the vanished West African kingdoms of centuries ago, replaced by post-colonial polities that know nothing of and care nothing for their long-lost sons and daughters of the Middle Passage.


It is not a good feeling, to be homeless. I wish it were not so. I continue to live here, work here, pay the taxes and obey the law. I even intend to spend my life here fighting to the end of my days in whatever small way I can to make this benighted country less of a failure at living up to its ideals. I like the food, I love the music, and in some broken, painful, tragic way I even love America itself, the way a victim of abuse might be unwilling to surrender his love for his abuser because to do so would be to surrender the last of his illusion of dignity and agency.


But of this, no more illusions. I am sorry, father. You were right.
This is not my country.


It never was." {Source}












 

Officer- involved killing.

If you happen to be a man of color in America these days, you might want to be very careful when you come in contact with members of the law enforcement community.


It's as if there is a secret shooting game circulating among police officers in this country. Over the past few days it has happened again, and again, and again.




The latest tragic tale comes to us from the city of St. Louis, where an unarmed teen was killed by a police officer in what was described as a "police shooting".


The police chief, in his press conference, seems to be hinting that the shooting was justified; eye witnesses and others, on the other hand, say something quite different happened out there. He was shot ten times. I guess with the Negro you have to keep shooting until he is dead. They hard to kill those Negroes.




Members of the community are understandably outraged. But they should be used to this by now. And, sadly, the tipping point will not be coming anytime soon.


Check out this collection of men of color who were killed by members of law enforcement over the past few years.


Chilling stuff. But it's something we have to live with here in America.


As a man of color I have learned how to navigate the day to day perils of life in our country. It is a delicate dance. One that requires vigilance, street smarts, and knowledge of the law. It's a dance that always ends tragically for some, and one that leaves a constant feeling of cynicism and jaded mistrust for those of us who survive it.


Some of us have an easier time of it than others. Fate has been kinder to us. We don't live in those neighborhoods, or hang around with those types of people. The chances are, then, that we won't be executed by some trigger happy, color aroused cop, or some gangbanger's stray bullet.


But we are not naïve; we understand that we are just a car stop or a misunderstanding away from meeting the same fate as Eric Garner, Michael Brown, or Trayvon Martin.


It's our reality, but it doesn't make it right.    















 

Kobe's short memory.

 I remember Kobe Bryant when he was a school boy at Lower Marion High School right outside of Philly. The guy had skills, and I knew that he was going to be good at the next level, although I didn't know that he would be this good.

 

Unfortunately, now that he is in the twilight of his career, he is letting his mouth and not his game do the talking. And that's sad.

 

His latest screed about Trayvon Martin and black solidarity was so far over the top that most people reading it had to do a double take.

 

Talk about irony. Isn't this the same Negro who was charged with getting his freak on with Missy against her will? I bet he had no problem with racial solidarity then.

 

Now, in retrospect…..hey, I am just saying. You never know.

"I won’t react to something just because I’m supposed to, because I’m an African-American. That argument doesn’t make any sense to me. So we want to advance as a society and a culture, but, say, if something happens to an African-American we immediately come to his defense? Yet you want to talk about how far we’ve progressed as a society? Well, we’ve progressed as a society, then don’t jump to somebody’s defense just because they’re African-American. You sit and you listen to the facts just like you would in any other situation, right? So I won’t assert myself."

"Something happens"? A little more than something just happened, Kobe. This unarmed young man was shot and killed in cold blood.

Now if you are so desperate to be embraced by the majority population that you would diminish the memory of Trayvon Martin, well then good luck to you.

You had a Hall of Fame career on the court; you are a first class jerk off of it.

Finally, there is this Negro in Charlotte who allegedly betrayed the public trust and is going down for corruption.

Now you all know how I feel about corrupt black politicians; they are the lowest of the low. They are put in a unique position to help others and they throw it all away because of greed.

Sadly, there is a long list of them, from Jesse Jr. to Kwame, to Ray . The hits just keep on coming with these greedy Negroes.




And please don't tell me that they were set up by "the man", and that "the man" only targets black politicians. If they were doing what they were supposed to do and they weren't so money hungry, all the stings in the world couldn't pull them in.


"Mayor Patrick Cannon was getting ready to close the deal with the big-time developer, but was reluctant to take a briefcase containing $20,000 while sitting in his city office.

"I just got to be conscious about that kind of stuff here, you know," Cannon told the fictitious developer, who was, in fact, an undercover FBI agent.

Yet when the "developer" left, the briefcase, given to Cannon in exchange for his offer to pull strings with important city officials, stayed behind, according to court documents."

Some of you Negroes I swear.


*Pic from Urban Daily


   

 

No fight.

I am happy to see that Damon Feldman canceled plans to promote a fight between George Killerman and DMX. (Shout out to Black Twitter for a staging a successful campaign to stop this insulting mockery of the memory of a dead young teenager.) This was a stupid and misguided idea from the very start. George Killerman  might be infamous, but he is not a celebrity, and he is not someone whose actions we should be celebrating.


To DMX and everyone else who wants a piece of George Killerman, this is not the way to go about it. A staged fight with thousands of people watching and with rules of conduct is not what I had in mind for George..... Just sayin.


Meanwhile, another man who tried to take the law into his own hands is on trial for the murder of yet another young black male.


This killer claims that the young man's music was too loud, and when he tried to tell him to stop, the young man (or someone in his vehicle) pulled a gun on him.


The man fired nine shots into the vehicle, and when it was over, seventeen year old Jordan Davis was dead.


Now, like George Killerman, he is claiming that he feared for his life.


"Coming on the heels of the Trayvon Martin trial, the Dunn trial is likely to once again put Florida's controversial stand-your-ground law into the spotlight.
"Even if they do not use it as a defense, it will be in the background," says Lance deHaven-Smith, a Florida State University public policy professor. "It raises a question of whether the stand-your-ground law encourages overreaction to situations that are deemed by some people as threatening."


The law, Professor deHaven-Smith notes, doesn't specify whether a threat must be real for someone to invoke self-defense as a justification for attack, but just whether that threat is perceived.


While deHaven-Smith expects heated debate in the state about the law as the trial takes place, he notes that the Florida legislature is about three-quarters Republican and is unlikely to revise it." (Source)


Hmmm, just a "perceived" threat.


Well, a car full of black teens is always going to be a "threat" to some people, so this might explain the Florida legislature and their mind -set when they passed this particular law.


"This case has never been about loud music. This case is about a local thug threatening to kill me because I dared to ask him to turn the music down," Dunn wrote in a letter to First Coast News, a local television station, in the fall. "When Mr. Davis opened his door and said, 'You're DEAD expletive! This expletive is going down NOW,' I was convinced that the loss of my life was imminent, I had no choice but to defend myself, I am NOT a murderer. I am a survivor."


Mr. Dunn, we will wait to see how a jury feels about your story.


Fortunately Jordan Davis might get justice, because in his case, unlike with the case of Trayvon Martin, there were witnesses.


 

Sorry Claudius, you ain't no George Zimmerman.

Unfortunately the people of Florida are starting to realize that when you have bad laws you get bad results.


The latest high profile "stand your ground" case from that wacky state should be quite interesting.


In this particular case, unlike the case of Trayvon Martin,  both the shooter and the victim were people of color.


Most of the Zimmerman supporters will not give the shooter in this case the benefit of the doubt, because this shooter is not a white [Hispanic] neighborhood watch guy, who shot some "young black punk" in self -defense.


And then there is the flip side: The same people, who called for an arrest and thorough investigation of George Zimmerman, should be asking that the same level of scrutiny be placed on Claudius Smith.

"The gunman accused of chasing and killing a 21-year-old man at a west Orlando apartment complex on Thursday told police he was pursuing a suspected burglar and acted in self-defense after he was attacked.


A police account of the shooter's self-defense claim obtained by the Orlando Sentinel suggests this could be the latest local homicide in which the state's controversial "stand your ground" law becomes a factor.     
  
Police were called to the shooting just before noon Thursday at the Fountains at MetroWest apartments. They arrived to find 21-year-old Ricardo Sanes dead in the grass, surrounded by six .45-caliber shell casings.


The alleged shooter, 32-year-old Claudius Smith, was caught later Thursday. Smith told detectives that he had shot someone "in self defense," according to a police report.


Smith said he was inside his house on Carter Street when his girlfriend, looking at a outdoor surveillance monitor, spotted someone in dark clothing "walking around his yard," who "was last seen climbing over the fence into" the apartment complex.


Smith told police he had been having "a recent problem with burglaries at his house ... and he was certain the unknown male was responsible," a police account states, so he "began chasing the unknown male."


According to police, Smith admitted jumping the fence into the apartment complex, armed with a .45-caliber handgun, where he said he saw Sanes "looking into windows of apartments as he walked past them."


Smith admitted pulling his gun and confronting Sanes, and when Sanes tried to walk away, Smith said he grabbed Sanes' hooded sweatshirt and tried to force Sanes back to his house "so the police could be called."


Smith told police Sanes "punched him in the mouth and grabbed for his gun."
"[Smith's] immediate response was to pull the trigger and fire shots at [Sanes],"   [Source]  


I bet that if he is arrested Claudius Smith will not be getting thousands of dollars from supporters all over the country to pay for his legal defense.


Stay tuned.

No treats for these tricksters.

The fall of the American Empire will not be caused by a Socialist government, or, for that matter, the browning of our population.

What will ultimately cause our downfall is the stupidity of our citizens.

Take for instance the clowns who chose to make Halloween costumes out of a national tragedy.

"Today's REALLY? Halloween costume comes to us from a tipster by way of Quincy, MA where some brainiacs decided to slap on some blackface and dress up as George Zimmerman shooting a bloody Trayvon Martin.

 

The pictures are just starting to circulate online, and the girl who posted the photo has already deleted the photo from her Facebook account and her Instagram. The men in the photograph, on the other hand, are still active on social media. Until this morning, the man dressed as George Zimmerman had set it as his profile photo; he changed it and locked his photos sometime overnight.

 

None of the three pictured have made a public comment about the photo yet.

It's not clear if the woman's costume was intended to be part of the joke; but her costume is sold online as "Robyn da Hood". [Source]

 

Of course we always knew that blackface was all the rage with college kids at their parties. But now it seems like it has become in vogue during Halloween as well.

Poor Julianne Hough didn't get the memo that it's never cool to go with the blackface look. Even during Halloween. The poor child had to take to Twitter to issue a public apology. Unfortunately for Julianne when you are famous and do dumb stuff you can't hide.

 “I am a huge fan of the show Orange is the New black, actress Uzo Aduba, and the character she has created. It certainly was never my intention to be disrespectful or demeaning to anyone in any way. I realize my costume hurt and offended people and I truly apologize.”

You are forgiven Julianne. You are just another clueless American who never bothered to read or try to understand the history of the country of your birth. If you did, you would have realized the ugly and shameful history that this type of behavior represents.

 

 

 

Billo on Trayvon. The Chicago "killing fields".

Now from the ignorance with a capital I department comes Bill O'Reilly. Mr. O'Reilly, in his infinite wisdom, has declared that  Trayvon Martin died because of the way he looked.

"The reason Trayvon Martin died is because he looked a certain way, and it wasn’t based on skin color. If Trayvon Martin had been wearing a jacket like you are and a tie, Mr. West, this evening, I don’t think George Zimmerman would’ve had any problem. But he was wearing a hoodie, and he looked a certain way, and that way is how gangstas look. And therefore he got attention.” [Source]

Holy crap! So we shoot people for what they wear in America, now? Look, there has been a time or two when I wanted to put some dude out of his misery for rocking a short sleeve dress shirt, but I never acted on it.

Bill, you are wrong, the reason Trayvon died that night was not because he looked a certain way; it was because he was born a certain way.

And speaking of dying, some folks are wondering why we made such a huge deal when a deranged killer shot up the Navy facility in Washington, but there is no non-stop cable coverage about the 13 people shot (including a three year old) in Chicago last night.

The killers used an AK-47 assault rifle to carry out his horrific and depraved act. (I had a debate on a national radio show with some clown from Chicago once, and the dude actually claimed that street criminals didn't use assault rifles. I would love to talk to him now.) The story is not getting as much attention as we would like it to because it's a dog bites man story, not the other way around.

Sadly, we have no one but ourselves to blame for what is happening to these young killers out here. Everyone wants to be a "shotta"; no one wants to be a straight A student. Hitting your books and making good grades doesn't give you "street cred," shooting an innocent child on the street, does.

This victim will be treated like a victim.

It's a real tragedy what happened to that Chris Lane fellow, but as an Australian, why was he even in this country on a  baseball scholarship? Don't they play cricket in Australia? And why was he out jogging by himself? Where was his girlfriend? And how do we know that he was just out jogging and not trying to score some drugs....

If you are reading this and thinking to yourself that Field Negro is out of his mind and how dare he disparage the victim of this tragedy in such a contumelious manner, you probably understand how those of us who wanted George Zimmerman tried and convicted for the murder of Trayvon Martin felt.

Chris Lane, like Trayvon Martin, is dead. Two young men cut down in the prime of their lives. Lane was killed because a bunch of thugs; one black, one Hispanic, and one white (sorry FOX News, one of his killers was white) decided that they were "bored" and it would be cool to just bang a random stranger.
Martin died because some dude decided that he didn't belong in his neighborhood.

The difference is that Chris Lane's killers will never see the light of day ever again, or, if they do, they will be too old to enjoy it. Martin's killer, on the other hand, is a free man who is basking in the glow of his celebrity status among those who believe that he did us all a favor by killing Trayvon Martin.

Martin was portrayed as the bad actor, and every negative thing in his background was highlighted over and over again by the media. His killer's sordid past was kept under wraps, and only those of us who took the time to go outside of the main stream-- news media-- bubble (thank you Mr. Capehart) were able to find out about all the skeletons in George Zimmerman's closet.

I am sure that Chris Lane was a nice guy, and I am just as sure that we will be hearing what a nice guy he was over and over again for the next few days.

That's fine with me. He was the victim here, and he deserves to be treated as such.

I just wish that another young man could have been treated the same way.  

Shelby's turn.

I was waiting to hear from Shelby Steele on the George Zimmerman verdict. (Shout out to my twitter fam James for sending me the link to the article.) Shelby is a right wing thinker and House Negro who does not believe that racism exists in America. To Shelby, Negroes have arrived and we should stop fighting for social justice and true equality here in the land of the [only some are] free.

"The verdict that declared George Zimmerman not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin was a traumatic event for America's civil-rights establishment, and for many black elites across the media, government and academia. When you have grown used to American institutions being so intimidated by the prospect of black wrath that they invent mushy ideas like "diversity" and "inclusiveness" simply to escape that wrath, then the crisp reading of the law that the Zimmerman jury displayed comes as a shock.

On television in recent weeks you could see black leaders from every background congealing into a chorus of umbrage and complaint. But they weren't so much outraged at a horrible injustice as they were affronted by the disregard of their own authority. The jury effectively said to them, "You won't call the tune here. We will work within the law."

Today's black leadership pretty much lives off the fumes of moral authority that linger from its glory days in the 1950s and '60s. The Zimmerman verdict lets us see this and feel a little embarrassed for them. Consider the pathos of a leadership that once transformed the nation now lusting for the conviction of the contrite and mortified George Zimmerman, as if a stint in prison for him would somehow assure more peace and security for black teenagers everywhere. This, despite the fact that nearly one black teenager a day is shot dead on the South Side of Chicago—to name only one city—by another black teenager." 

Shelby Steele thinks that diversity and inclusion is a "mushy" idea.--- How quaint and ironic, since his own immediate family is a model of diversity.--- As usual he misses the point entirely. Had one of those black teenagers murdered another one and was on the scene when police arrived with literally a smoking gun in his hand, he would have been cuffed and arrested on the spot. He then would have been charged with the death of Trayvon Martin, and rightfully so.

George Zimmerman was not even charged, and it took outrage and pressure from the civil rights leadership Shelby pontificates about to even get an arrest in the case.  

Sadly, Shelby Steele is celebrating Zimmerman's acquittal as if he somehow benefits from a killer who profiled and took the life of a young man walking free. (Maybe he does. The House Negro business is good.) Steele is just as guilty of doing what he accuses those on the "civil rights establishment" of doing. The difference is, of course, that Shelby Steele advocates for the status quo and a return to a time in this country (what he calls the "glory days") when questioning the actions of a sheriff's department in a small Southern town was unheard of. For him to write that the "civil-rights establishment" could "intimidate" what he calls "American institutions" just goes to show you how delusional he is.

I suppose that it has never occurred to Mr. Steele that one of the reasons there are so many killings in places like Chicago in the first place is because black life has been so devalued. The scary thing about Steele is that unlike Thomas Sowell and other conservative black thinkers, he has actually made some interesting and provocative points about race relations in the past. "The Content of Our Character" is still one of the best books ever written on race relations in America. But sadly, as he continues to live in his ivory tower and conservative cocoon in Northern California, Shelby Steele has become increasingly detached and isolated from what is going on in the rest of America. Like other right wing republicans, he continues to hold up a few civil rights leaders like Rev Al. Sharpton and Jessie Jackson as being the driving force behind any social movement for justice in this country. This, of course, is no longer the case. The thousands of people who marched this weekend did not do it because they wanted to get a better look at Rev. Al's suit. They did it because they felt moved to get up and march because they know that "American institutions" cannot be easily intimidated.

"Why did the civil-rights leadership use its greatly depleted moral authority to support Trayvon Martin? This young man was, after all, no Rosa Parks—a figure of indisputable human dignity set upon by the rank evil of white supremacy. Trayvon threw the first punch and then continued pummeling the much smaller Zimmerman. Yes, Trayvon was a kid, but he was also something of a menace. The larger tragedy is that his death will come to very little. There was no important principle or coherent protest implied in that first nose-breaking punch. It was just dumb bravado, a tough-guy punch.

The civil-rights leadership rallied to Trayvon's cause (and not to the cause of those hundreds of black kids slain in America's inner cities this very year) to keep alive a certain cultural "truth" that is the sole source of the leadership's dwindling power. Put bluntly, this leadership rather easily tolerates black kids killing other black kids. But it cannot abide a white person (and Mr. Zimmerman, with his Hispanic background, was pushed into a white identity by the media over his objections) getting away with killing a black person without undermining the leadership's very reason for being.

"The purpose of today's civil-rights establishment is not to seek justice, but to seek power for blacks in American life based on the presumption that they are still, in a thousand subtle ways, victimized by white racism. This idea of victimization is an example of what I call a "poetic truth." Like poetic license, it bends the actual truth in order to put forward a larger and more essential truth—one that, of course, serves one's cause.

In the Zimmerman/Martin case the civil-rights establishment is fighting for the poetic truth that white animus toward blacks is still such that a black teenager—Skittles and ice tea in hand—can be shot dead simply for walking home. But actually this establishment is fighting to maintain its authority to wield poetic truth—the authority to tell the larger society how it must think about blacks, how it must respond to them, what it owes them and, then, to brook no argument."

"Poetic truths succeed by casting themselves as perfectly obvious: "America is a racist nation"; "the immigration debate is driven by racism"; "Zimmerman racially stereotyped Trayvon." And we say, "Yes, of course," lest we seem to be racist. Poetic truths work by moral intimidation, not reason." [Source]

Mr. Steele, with all due respect, without "moral intimidation" you would be driving Stanford University students to school and not lecturing them.

A flawed victim?

As a trial lawyer who wanted george zimmerman to be found culpable for his actions, I was disappointed with the state's performance in the case. There are quite a few things that they did during the trial which left me wondering, and there are things that they allowed the defense to get away with that seemed way too easy.

The way, for instance, the defense portrayed Martin as sinister, minatory, and scary throughout the trial, and the testimony about young black males committing break-ins in the apartment complex where the incident took place.

This all helped to make zimmerman's actions justified because he feared for his life. The post trial statements by juror B-37 proves that it worked.

I am not mad at the defense lawyers; they were doing their job for their client. But I am still upset that the jury didn't find the Mall Cop wannabe guilty of something.

So george zimmerman is free and most black people, like me, are disappointed. Some blacks are angry, and still others are not as angry or even disappointed. Some of you wish that there was a more angelic victim than the young Trayvon Martin for you to rally around. While most will not go as far as the slave catcher, Jesse Lee Peterson (when he called Martin a "pot smoking thug" who deserved what he got), some will say, like an African American friend of mine (a man I respect who owns a business where he hires more than a few young black men), "With all due respect, this young buck ain't Rosa Parks."

No, he is not, but we can't always wait around to pick the perfect victim of injustice. Injustice is blind. Trayvon Martin was still a young man who lost his life because he was profiled by someone who believed that he had no right to be where he was that evening. That is an American tragedy, and just like the tragedy of hundreds of young African American men being killed by other young African American men every year; it is a tragedy that should be acknowledged. I don't care how much pot he smoked, or how much he liked to take pictures on Facebook with a braggadocios posture. His life, and the way he lost it, should not be diminished by these particular actions when he was alive.

Finally, I would like to address this Rich Benjamin controversy a little bit. Mr. Benjamin is a smart dude, and he is someone I respect. (At least I used to.) But some of the things he wrote in his article for Salon Magazine left me scratching my head.

I have to agree with some of my twitter fam who wrote things like the following:

"JamilahLemieux 18h

And I actually understand the colloquial use of "inner nigger." But it has NO PLACE IN THIS ARTICLE. Salon is not 125th Street.

 

blackgirlinmain 18h

@fieldnegro @JamilahLemieux Yes! Things we say in private amongst ourselves are not meant for the larger world, that includes inner niggers."

 

Rich, the next time you are inspired to share your inner most black thoughts, try to think about the platform that you are sharing it from. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The "post racial" president speaks about a racial tragedy.

I am glad that the president finally spoke directly about the george zimmerman (no caps for your name, george) verdict. I know that he did more dancing than Fred Astaire about some of the more serious issues concerning race relations, but we get it, he can't leave out white folks; he is their president, too.

Still, today, I finally felt like he was letting his black side out a little bit and speaking about racism on a more personal level. Some white folks won't like it, but there is nothing they can do about it now. He will be the HNIC for the next three years.

"'Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,' Obama told White House reporters in a surprise appearance at the daily briefing."

Anyway, If you happen to believe that the police in Sanford, Florida cared about just another another young black man being shot to death, and that the reason they were going to let george zimmerman walk---- without even so much of a trial--- was because of a lack of evidence, consider what is going on down in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

"A veteran Baton Rouge police detective who used a racial slur to describe a homicide victim was suspended from duty recently after an internal affairs investigation determined he violated department policy.

The detective, John L. Colter, [*pic] complained at the scene of a fatal shooting in January that, “It’s my wife’s birthday and I am standing here over a dead nigger,” according to records released Tuesday by the Baton Rouge Police Department.

Colter, who is white, made the remarks among a group of officers that included a black detective.

Provisional Police Chief Carl Dabadie, in May, suspended Colter without pay for 20 days as a result of the incident and ordered that he attend a diversity training course.

*“Your actions could have potentially devastating consequences for this department in our bid to win the hearts and minds of those we have solemnly sworn to protect and serve,” Dabadie wrote in Colter’s letter of suspension.

He added, “This type of unacceptable behavior relegates anyone from the ranks of quintessential professional to that of an insensitive, arrogant and callous egotist that has neither empathy nor feeling towards others.”

Dabadie declined through a spokesman to discuss the case after the records were released Tuesday in response to a Public Records Act request because Colter remained hospitalized with serious injuries sustained in a motorcycle crash last week in Livingston Parish.

The spokesman, Cpl. L’Jean McKneely, said Colter sustained “significant brain injury” but is expected to survive.

Colter’s use of a racial slur came to light in February during former Police Chief Dewayne White’s pre-termination hearing. Without naming Colter, White said he had sought unsuccessfully to transfer the detective shortly after the incident, claiming the case highlighted Mayor-President Kip Holden’s tendency to micromanage him.

“Not only were the officer’s comments and conduct deplorable,” White said during the packed hearing in the Metro Council chambers, “but they could potentially cause to be called into question all of his prior investigations involving African-American victims....”


The spokesman, Cpl. L’Jean McKneely, said Colter sustained “significant brain injury” but is expected to survive.

The incident that led to Colter’s suspension occurred on the morning of Jan. 5, when Colter was called out to investigate the killing of 43-year-old Keith Matthews, a West Feliciana Parish man found fatally shot in a vehicle parked in front of a vacant home on Erie Street.

Officers at the scene recalled Colter taking out his smartphone at some point and appearing to photograph the corpse, suggesting he should send a picture to his wife to account for his middle-of-the-night absence on her birthday.
Colter denied snapping any photographs, telling internal affairs officers later that he had been using the flashlight application on his cellphone to see inside the vehicle where the victim was seated.

But Colter readily admitted using the racial slur, adding he quickly apologized to his fellow officers, who had been huddling in strategy over how to approach the “whodunit, head-scratcher” of a slaying.
Colter told internal affairs officers that the racial epithet was a “slip of the tongue” and that he shouldn’t have said it.

“I meant to say dead Negro,” he explained.

In his interview with internal affairs, Colter apologized if his remarks “came off as racist,” but noted he and other homicide detectives often make “very dark, inappropriate jokes” in coping with the gory scenes they encounter in their work.

“We were kind of making fun of the fact that the guy got shot with his pants down around his ankles basically,” Colter told investigators. “There had been other jokes about that prior to my comment.”

Police have said they believe Matthews was in the company of a prostitute at the time of his death.

Police records revealed conflicting accounts of the immediate reaction to Colter’s use of the racial slur. Dabadie, in the letter of suspension, mentioned that a lieutenant who overheard the remarks admonished Colter and told him he “did not want to hear that again.”

But another detective — whose name, like other police officials other than Colter, was blacked out of the records that were released — told investigators the officers “kind of brushed it off” after Colter apologized “and that was the end of it.”

Colter told officials that he prided himself on professionalism and said that his use of the racial epithet marked “the first time it has come out of my mouth in relation to my police duties” of 25 years.

“Truth be told, I probably shouldn’t have been making that comment to begin with,” he said. “We had been out there for about two hours and it was a bad scene.” [Source]

This story is sad, but what made it even sadder were the actions of the black house Negro detective who was on the scene. We would expect this type of behavior from Mr. Colter, not his fellow officer who happens to be black, himself. This was a sick display of ignorance: An officer sworn to protect and serve calling a dead victim a "Nigger". Even for a white police officer in the deep South, his actions went beyond the pale.

"..African-Americans feel the context of the Martin killing is little known or denied, "and that all contributes, I think, to a sense that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different..."

Mr. President, that "white male teen" would not have been called a "white ass cracka" by the detective investigating his death. I think we can all agree with that statement.

Not guilty says the Florida justice system.

Congratulations Mr. Zimmerman, you are a free man.

 You can no longer be tried for the murder of Trayvon Martin.

You can start the rest of YOUR life now.

Find a good agent and accountant because things good get interesting for you from here on out.

There will be book deals,  movie scripts, speaking tours, and no doubt a guest  hosting spot on FOX news.

Blacks are understandably outraged, but it’s not surprising that a jury of mostly white Floridians decided to set him free. To them, Trayvon Martin is not like their children; his life was  deemed less valuable.   As a young African American male he fits into a stereotype that was placed firmly in their minds years ago. It’s unavoidable when you live in America. Besides, the thinking goes, aren’t thousands of young African American males murdered and senselessly killed every year by other young African American men? 

To the jurors and some people in America, George Zimmerman’s actions on that rainy winter night  was justifiable. They would have done the same thing.  It was a jury of his peers. It was not a jury of  Trayvon Martin’s peers.

People will argue that the prosecution did a poor job, and that their hearts were never in it. While I agree that they could have done a better job, it didn’t really matter how well they prosecuted their case; they were fighting an uphill battle from the very start.

The fact that we had to raise our voices to even get an arrest in this case speaks volumes. If it was not for the case becoming something African Americans rallied around ---because many of us saw in Trayvon Martin our cousins, our brothers, and our sons--- George Zimmerman would not have been arrested in the first place, and cable news advertising directors would not have been celebrating over the past few months.

So now it’s over, and all is quiet (so far) on the streets of Florida. The riots FOX News and others in America were predicting have yet to materialize.  All the people implying that blacks would riot like a bunch of savages are as racist and ignorant as the man who profiled a 17 year old and shot him to death on that February night in 2012.

What they failed to realize is that most of us (black folks) expected this. People of color in this country did not expect justice for the Martin family. We know, that because of prejudices and other imperfections in American life, that lady justice is not truly blind. And we understand,  that sadly,  children who look like Trayvon Martin will never be looked at like the children who look like the Judge (or five of the six jurors) who presided over the case.   

 #IAmGeorgeZimmerman was recently trending on twitter.

I think I will go on twitter and start another trend: #AmericaisGeorgeZimmerman