Trayvon Martin

[parel]

The world is aghast over Trayvon Martin. The U.S. needs to look at itself


The jurors who acquitted George Zimmerman say they acted in strict accordance with U.S. law. That in itself speaks volumes

“O, wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as others see us! /
It wad frae monie a blunder free us, / An’ foolish notion.”
– Robert Burns

The US is always collectively amazed, on those rare occasions when it has cause to glimpse at how it is perceived by its less friendly critics abroad. The most egregious example, of course, was 9/11, when even the brutal enormity of the attack against America was not quite enough to still the hateful tongues of people crass enough to insist that the US had got what was coming to it. The citizens of the US have an absolute right to go about their business without being slaughtered. Of course they do. Which is why the world is aghast that this right does not extend as far as Trayvon Martin.

When the unarmed 17-year-old was shot dead by neighbourhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman on 26 February 2012, the killer wasn’t even arrested for 44 days, having said that he fired in self-defence. Self-defence? He’d already called the police, telling the operator that Martin was acting suspiciously – “up to no good, on drugs or something”. Zimmerman had been told by the operator not to follow the teenager. But nevertheless he found himself and his gun right next to Martin, provoking a struggle. What kind of self-defence is this, when you decide that someone is trouble, and that you’re going to stalk him, safe in the knowledge that if things get out of hand … well, you’re armed? Yet a jury decided that going out armed, looking for a particular person to defend yourself against, is still self-defence, and on 13 July Zimmerman was acquitted of murder.

Only protest from the public ensured that Zimmerman was tried for killing Martin at all. Only protest from the public has ensured that this killing has been seen through the prism of race. Yet to an outsider, it is obvious that Martin died because he was black, and that Zimmerman walked free after killing him for the same reason.


The jurors say that they acted in strict accordance with the law of the land. They probably did. The law of the land in the US was formulated so that settlers could carry guns in self-defence against their enemies – Native Americans. Later, similar rights over the lives and deaths of slaves pertained. All that is so deeply embedded in the US collective psyche that it’s easier to forget that it’s there than remember it.

Even though equal civil rights for black Americans are still so new, their achievement still so clear in living memory, the US just can’t see what the rest of the world sees – that inequality so entrenched in the history of a state doesn’t disappear in matter of decades; on the contrary, the baleful fruits of generations of inequality can be used to justify the very prejudice that promoted the inequality in the first place.

Not that the UK has room to be too superior. British people went off to win the west, and having won it, imported slaves to make it pay. Later, we invited Afro-Caribbean men and women to come and work in Britain, at the jobs that didn’t pay enough to attract the incumbent population. Our own history of racism may not have been formalised in a written constitution. But Britain is just like the US in its reluctance to admit that the casual, widespread racism of the past has far-reaching consequences that give succour to those who wish to be racists still. Our own Trayvon Martin is Stephen Lawrence. The awful depths of the hostility of the police to the idea of prosecuting his racist killers is still being revealed, 20 years on, as we learn how undercover officers gathered intelligence into the Lawrence family as they campaigned for justice for their son. Modern states that are worthy of the name are meant to protect their citizens from violence, protecting all of us equally, under the law. In the wake of 9/11, the US and Britain were the most active nations in the world in the quest to take up arms in the cause of spreading liberal democracy. Why neither nation is quite able to see why the targets of this largesse don’t quite trust them, when both of us are still demonstrably unable to spread liberal democracy with impunity even among our own citizens, is quite the little mystery.

It’s a little-acknowledged fact, yet an unanswerable one, that states exist in great part to maintain a monopoly on violence, either through the activities of their armed forces or via the upholding of the law. The really disturbing thing about cases such as Martin’s and Lawrence’s is that they reveal how cavalierly states abuse this responsibility. The disconnect in the US can be seen more plainly than in Britain, because the US, as land colonised in recent history, maintains vigilantism as an integral part of its identity so avidly. That’s what’s at the root of its liberal gun laws – that’s what killed Trayvon Martin.

This is one of those moments when the US – and its great ally, the UK – would do well to take a long look at itself. Zimmerman’s right to kill in “self-defence” does not contrast well with Edward Snowden’s fear of retribution. By exposing the fact that the emails of the citizens of the land of the free (and ours here in Britain) could be plucked from the internet at the state’s leisure, wasn’t Snowden too defending himself, his fellow citizens, and the idea of the US and of liberal democracy? But no reluctance to arrest Snowden is evident.

We are told that this is all for our own protection – the fight against terrorism is an important part of the state’s protection of its monopoly on violence. Yet, not for the first time in these troubled years since 9/11, one wonders how the US can have pretensions to being the world’s policeman, when it doesn’t even police its own citizens with impartiality. And one wonders how the US can believe that part of its purpose is to be a beacon of democracy and freedom throughout the world, when it clearly believes that it should be able to spy on the private lives of the world’s citizens with impunity.

If the Martin case were “just” about racism, then that would be grotesque and awful enough. But it’s even more basic than that. It’s about the fragility of freedom, and how imperative it is that one person’s freedom, like one community’s, and one country’s, cannot be pursued at the expense of another’s. Zimmerman’s freedom to get on with his own life has been won at the cost of another man’s annihilation. The disregard of the idea that all US citizens have an equal right to freedom and protection could not be made more painfully obvious than this. A monopoly on violence is a terrifying monopoly to hold. It should quite definitely not be shared so casually with self-appointed men from the neighbourhood watch.

[seemslikeadream]

Trayvon Martin And Why The Right-Wing Media Spent 16 Months Smearing A Dead Teenager
Blog ››› July 17, 2013 11:14 AM EDT ››› ERIC BOEHLERT

Appearing on Fox & Friends in the wake of a Florida jury found George Zimmerman not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin, Geraldo Rivera's claim that Martin brought about his own death by dressing in a hooded sweatshirt the night of the killing was shocking, but not surprising. Echoing earlier comments he made on the program, Rivera proclaimed: "You dress like a thug, people are going to treat you like a thug."

It was shocking because the idea of a well-paid commentator going on television and blaming an unarmed teen for being shot while walking home inside a gated community because he wore a hoodie -- because he tried to look like "a thug" as Rivera put it -- is repellent.

So yes, Rivera's comments were shockingly awful and irresponsible. As was his claim that the all-female jury "would have shot and killed Trayvon Martin a lot sooner than George Zimmerman did." But his comments weren't surprising, because Fox News and too much of the right-wing media have spent the last 16 months zeroing in on the memory of a dead teenager and doing their best to denigrate it.

Apart from the far right's gleeful and disrespectful response to the not guilty verdict, there remains a separate thread of loud tastelessness that dates back to 2012 and focuses on the victim for all the wrong reasons, suggesting he somehow got what he deserved. (Or what he "sought.")

Remember the fake, menacing photo of Martin that right-wing sites passed around last year? And when The Daily Caller published tweets from the slain boy's closed Twitter account? Tweets that conservatives then used to portray the teen as a thug?

This week, Fox favorite Ten Nugent practically danced on Martin's grave, accusing the dead teenager of being a "dope smoking, racist gangsta wannabe" who was "responsible" for being shot by a volunteer neighborhood watchman on the night of February 26, 2012.

Comments by Rivera, Nugent and others were proof that a smear campaign was in full swing this week and a reminder the attacks are a continuation of the foul smears first unleashed in the wake of the killing. At the time, the attacks were an ugly attempt to justify Martin's death, to shift the blame away from the gunman, Zimmerman, and to cloud the debate about Florida's controversial Stand Your Ground law. (Rivera in 2012: "I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin's death as George Zimmerman was.")

Trayvon Martin deserves better. Indeed, every victim, and particularly every victim of gun violence in America, deserves better than to have a well-funded media machine like the one led by Fox News targeting shooting victims for endless attacks on their character and on the choices, large and small, they made while alive.

There's something spectacularly misguided about wanting to turn an unarmed shooting victim, an unarmed minor, into the bad guy and blame him for walking home with Skittles and an iced tea. But that's what conservatives in the press have been doing, on and off, for nearly a year-and-a-half now.



Recall the Slate headline from March, 2012, highlighting the trend: "When in Doubt, Smear the Dead Kid."

Yet one of the puzzling questions surrounding the public saga of Martin's death has always been why the partisan, conservative political movement in America, led by its powerful media outlets, felt the need to become so deeply invested in the case, and felt so strongly about defending the shooter, as well as demeaning the victim.

I understand why civil rights leaders who traditionally lean to the left politically embraced the case, why they saw it as part of a long history of injustice for blacks, and why they urged that Zimmerman be charged with a crime. But why did GOP bloggers, pundits and talk show hosts eventually go all in with their signature brand of hate for a local crime story?

As Kevin Drum wrote at Mother Jones last year:

There's no special conservative principle at stake that says neighborhood watch captains should be able to shoot anyone who looks suspicious. There's no special conservative principle at stake that says local police forces should barely even pretend to investigate the circumstances of a shooting. There's no special conservative principle at stake that says young black men shouldn't wear hoodies.

And if you go back and look at the coverage of the Martin story as it began to unfold nationally in the winter of 2012, the conservative media, including Fox News, were especially slow to take interest in the matter. That's in part, I suspect, because there was no natural angle to pursue. As Orlando Sentinel columnist Beth Kassab wrote at the time, there was "no good way for gun proponents to spin the death of an unarmed teenager." The Martin killing didn't fit the far right's usual narrative about violence and minorities and how white America is allegedly under physical assault from Obama's violent African-American base.

At the time, National Review editor Rich Lowry even wrote a blog post headlined "Al Sharpton is right," agreeing that Zimmerman should be charged with the killing of Martin. (Lowry slammed the shooter's "stupendous errors in judgment" that fateful night.)

That same day, on March 23, President Obama answered a direct question about the controversy and said, "My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon." That quickly sparked a mindless right-wing media stampede as Obama Derangement Syndrome kicked in. "Once Obama spoke out, caring about Martin became a 'Democratic' issue, and Republicans felt not just free but obligated to fling all sorts of shit," Alex Pareene wrote last year at Salon.

Pledging to uncover the "truth" about the shooting victim and determined to prove definitively that anti-black racism doesn't exists in America (it's a political tool used by liberals, Republican press allies insist), many in the right-wing media have dropped any pretense of mourning Martin's death and set out to show how he probably deserved it.

Along with the fake photo of Martin being passed around online, chatter about his alleged drug-dealing past, and his teenage Tweets being dissected, bloggers also pushed the phony claim that a photo of Martin used by the news media had been lightened to make him look more "innocent." (The charge was bogus.)

Then Glenn Beck's The Blaze published a laundry list of criminal offenses Martin may have committed while he was alive:

• Aggravated assault

• Aggravated battery against a non-staff member

• Armed robbery

• Arson

• Assault/Threat against M-DCPS employees or persons conducting official business

• Battery or Aggravated battery against M-DCPS employees or persons conducting official business*

• Homicide

• Kidnapping/Abduction

• Making a false report/threat against the school*

• Sexual battery

• Possession, use, sale, or distribution of firearms, explosives, destructive devices, and other weapons.

It was a textbook example of trying to blame the victim. And it's the miserable course Rivera, Nugent and others continued this week.

[8bitagent]

I am certainly no fan of Obama and his administration, but I have to say that his little speech on the Trayvon thing was very good. I think for the first time I felt like there was actually a human voice in there. This was coming from him.

As for the case itself, what I think happened is very different from what a prosecutor can prove in a court of law. I accept that.

Obama, hell Bush are both people who have spoken out on racism. Just because a leader has no pause in their conscience from slaughtering middle eastern children doesn't
mean they can't speak out on homegrown American prejudice!

Bush almost seemed to tear up and get really emotional, when asked what the one thing that bothered him the most as far as accusations. It wasnt Katrina, lying to go to two wars, torture, etc...it was Kanye West accusing him of being a racist.

[American Dream]

Key Mistakes Sway Jury in Zimmerman Trial: Jury Prevented from Considering Race and “First Aggressor”

By Marjorie Cohn

19 July 2013

A Southern jury of six women – none of them black – found 28-year-old George Zimmerman’s shooting of unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin to be justifiable homicide because he acted in self-defense.

The jurors were prohibited from considering race. They were instructed only on the parts of self-defense law that helped Zimmerman, and the chief police investigator improperly testified that he believed Zimmerman.


Jury prevented from considering race

None of the jurors thought race played a role in the case, Juror B-37 told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. In fact the question of Zimmerman profiling Martin because he was African-American didn’t even come up in deliberations, the juror said.

No wonder it never came up. At the beginning of the trial, the judge forbade the prosecution from speaking about racial profiling. Only the word “profiling” could be used, Judge Debra S. Nelson ruled. “Criminal profiling is based on behavior,” NAACP President Benjamin Jealous said on Democracy Now! “Racial profiling is based on color and on race. And the reality is that it appears that George Zimmerman had a pattern of confusing color with grounds for suspicion.”

The entire trial from start to finish was sanitized of any mention of race.

Zimmerman told the 911 operator, “These fucking punks” and “these assholes, they always get away,” when he spotted Martin walking down the street in Sanford, Florida, that fateful evening. “Looks like he’s up to no good or he’s on drugs or something,” Zimmerman said. “Something’s wrong with him.” When an investigator later asked Zimmerman what he meant by those words, the shooter replied, “I don’t know.”

But the prosecutor was forbidden from telling the jury that the “something” that was “wrong” may have been the color of Martin’s skin. The Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock, senior pastor at the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, told the New York Times, “Trayvon Benjamin Martin is dead because he and other black boys and men like him are seen not as a person but a problem.”

Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, noted, “George Zimmerman saw a young black male as a threat to his community.”

Clifford Alexander, who worked as a lawyer in the Lyndon Johnson White House, said in an interview with the Washington Post, “The clear reason why Zimmerman had the audacity to approach this child was that he saw the color of his skin as a threat.”

Two days after the shooting, Zimmerman’s cousin, known as Witness No. 9, told a Sanford police officer in a telephone call, “I know George. And I know that he does not like black people.” She added, “He would start something. He’s a very confrontational person. It’s in his blood. Let’s just say that. I don’t want this poor kid and his family to just be overlooked.”

But the judge sanitized the case and everyone involved was forced to ignore the elephant in the room. Indeed, after the verdict, Mark O’Mara, Zimmerman’s defense attorney, made the preposterous statement that if his client were black, “he never would’ve been charged with a crime.”

Jury prevented from considering first aggressor

Florida’s self-defense law prohibits “initial aggressors” from using force if their own conduct has provoked that force. So if a defendant “initially provokes the use of force” against himself, he cannot claim to have acted in self-defense, unless he withdraws or retreats.

The prosecution asked the judge to instruct the jury that it could consider who was the first aggressor in the altercation between Zimmerman and Martin. If the judge had agreed to give that instruction, the jury might have concluded that, by following Martin, Zimmerman provoked a physical response from Martin. The defense objected to the instruction, and the judge decided not to give the first aggressor instruction.

The jury was instructed to consider only whether Zimmerman reasonably believed deadly force was necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself – when he later tussled with Martin on the ground. The jury was also told Zimmerman had no duty to retreat, that he could stand his ground, and meet force with force- including deadly force – if he was not engaged in an unlawful activity and was attacked in a place he had a right to be. Finally, the judge instructed the jury that if it had a reasonable doubt about whether Zimmerman was justified in using deadly force, they should find him not guilty.

The instructions prevented the jury from considering whether Zimmerman was the first aggressor when he got out of his truck and began following Martin. When Zimmerman told the 911 operator, “Shit, he’s running,” the operator asked, “Are you following him?” Zimmerman said that he was. “OK, we don’t need you to do that,” the operator told Zimmerman. But Zimmerman followed Martin nevertheless. Rachel Jeantel testified that Martin told her on the cellphone he was being followed by a “creepy ass cracker.”

The jury was only given partial instructions on self-defense – those parts that helped Zimmerman. They were prevented from considering whether Zimmerman might have been the first aggressor, which would have negated his claim of self-defense.

Ultimately, nothing mattered to the jury, Juror B-37 told Cooper, except whether Zimmerman feared for his life in the seconds before he shot Martin.

Juror B-37 said that Zimmerman was guilty of nothing more than “not using good judgment.” She added, “Both were responsible for the situation they had gotten themselves into.”

Officer permitted to make credibility judgment

Sanford police officer Chris Serino, the chief investigator on the case, testified that, given all the evidence, he believed Zimmerman was telling the truth. It is well-established that witnesses cannot make credibility judgments – it invades the jury’s exclusive province of determining the credibility and weight of any evidence. But the prosecution didn’t object to Serino’s testimony until the next morning, at which point the judge told the jury to disregard it. Yet the damage was done, and Serino again testified that there were no significant inconsistencies in Zimmerman’s statements to police.

From the beginning, Serino did not believe there was enough evidence to file criminal charges against Zimmerman. The officer told the FBI that he was pressured into making the arrest. Zimmerman finally was charged for Martin’s death only after a powerful national outcry, and the governor’s appointment of a special prosecutor – 40 days following the killing.

Serino testified, “In this case, [Zimmerman] could have been considered the victim also.” Likewise, Juror B-37 felt sorry for both of them – the dead boy and the shooter alike.


http://truth-out.org/news/item/17620-zi ... lf-defense

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild and deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Her most recent book is The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse. Her next book, Drones and Targeted Killing, will be published in 2014 by University of California Press.

[American Dream]

Jesse Hagopian Speaks at Trayvon Martin Vigil in Seattle

[American Dream]

http://www.racismreview.com/blog/2013/0 ... searching/

President Obama: “We need to do some soul-searching”
By Jessie


President Obama’s historic remarks yesterday about Trayvon Martin and the Zimmerman verdict were striking for their clarity on on race and racism. Addressing how the Zimmerman case unfolded, President Obama said:

“If a white male teen would have been involved in this scenario, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different.”



All of this, of course, set the right-wing media machine into overdrive, calling President Obama’s remarks “race-baiting,” a claim that boggles the mind for a second term president, but no matter. You can read thefull transcript of his remarks, and we’ll have more to say about these in the coming days on this blog, but the place I wanted to start with is near the end:

“I think it’s going to be important for all of us to do some soul-searching.”

It’s perhaps not surprising coming from a man who wrote a memoir, Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, that contains his own soul-searching around race.

Memoirs about Race

A quick survey of the landscape of contemporary U.S. memoirs, there are quite a few that take on this task of soul-search around race, including James McBride’s The Color of Water, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Beautiful Struggle, June Cross’ Secret Daughter and Michelle Norris’ The Grace of Silence.

Yet, when it comes to soul-searching memoirs by white people about race and racism in the U.S. there are just many fewer of these and they are mostly disappointing endeavors. There is Clara Silverstein’s White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation, in which the author uses her experience to undermine the entire project of integrating schools.

Then there is the whole sub-genre of memoirs by white people that I refer to “one-drop” memoirs. These are memoirs written by white people who discover that a relative was black even though they had passed as white. The chief example here is Bliss Broyard’s One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life–A Story of Race and Family Secrets. There are others, like Joe Mozingo’s The Fiddler on Pantico Run: An African Warrior, His White Descendants, A Search for Family. Related, is Mishna Wolff’s I’m Down her memoir about growing up as one of the only white kids in her neighborhood.

There are a few notable exceptions to these, including Thomas DeWolf’s Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History, Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family, and Cynthia Carr’s Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America. Mab Segrest’s Memoir of Race Traitor stands out as another welcome exception to this general pattern, as she offers and engaging, critical analysis of her family’s racism and her struggle to move away from that legacy while still embracing her family. And the Claire Conner’s Wrapped in the Flaglooks promising (although I haven’t had a chance to read more than this excerpt).

Truth and Reconciliation

Debra Dickerson asks, “why are white people suddenly so interested in race?” and goes on to point out, memoirs such as DeWolf, Ball, and Carr’s:

“do what America never will; participate in all the truth and reconciliation we’re ever going to have—piecemeal, caveated, hazy, [and] statute of limitations-expired…”

Dickerson is right. There’s been no truth and reconciliation process in the U.S. for the centuries of chattel slavery, rape, Jim Crow segregation, lynching, discrimination, and ongoing extra-judicial killings. Beyond these few titles, there’s a paucity of writing by whites who are doing any of the really difficult “soul-searching” about the past or the present in the U.S.

I recently watched the documentary, “Hitler’s Children,” which chronicles the stories of descendants of the most powerful figures in the Nazi regime. One of the people featured is Niklas Frank, who wrote a book about his father, Hans Frank, convicted and hanged at Nuremberg as a Nazi war criminal. Frank’s bookDer Vater: Eine Abrechnung (“The Father: A Settling of Accounts”), and was published in English as In the Shadow of the Reich, is a scathing account of his father’s participation in the Third Reich’s genocide of six million. The interviews with Frank in the film capture his unflinching courage at looking at the legacy of his father. In one of the most touching scenes, Frank has a conversation with this daughter and asks her if she ever thinks about Hans Frank, her grandfather the Nazi war criminal. She responds that she rarely thinks of him because, she says to her father, “You were a fortress against that. Because of what you wrote, I felt like I was protected somehow.” It’s moving encounter that reveals so much about why this sort of soul-searching is necessary.

Yet, this sort of grappling with hard truths is mostly missing in the U.S. context. It’s part of what prompted me to start work on my own memoir.
My Memoir

In my experience doing research for my first book about white supremacist groups, I did some of my own personal, familial history and soul-searching. I learned that my paternal grandfather, in addition to being the mayor of the small town of Eden, Texas, had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. This was especially startling given the family mythology I was raised with which was that we were, on my father’s side, descendants of Native Americans (tribe unknown).


(My father, Jim Tom Harper, with his parents, George and Bernice.)

If your ancestors, like mine, were actively involved in making sure that systems of inequality were entrenched and continued in perpetuity, then going back and looking at – not to mention looking for – that history is can be a painful exercise in shame. The tendency for people when confronted with that kind of history is to dismiss, deny, ignore.

Uncovering the history of racial privilege can affect the present. When I learned the facts of my grandfather’s participation in the KKK, I used this newly discovered fact about my grandfather’s involvement to situate my own work about white supremacy in the preface to White Lies. As a result of this discovery, I also changed my given name to Jessie Daniels. For me, seeing that my last name (Harper) was the same as my grandfather who was in the Klan, seemed wrong. And it seemed especially wrong to be on a book in which I was critical of white supremacy.

When my father read a draft of that piece, he threatened to stop publication of the book and had me briefly committed to a psychiatric ward. After the seventy-two hour hold, my older brother came to the hearing considering my release, testified that I was mostly sane, and got me sprung. That first book was published, I moved far away and lived under my new name, teaching about racial privilege to college students on the East Coast. My father died two years after the book was published, and we never spoke again. The last time I saw him was at a hearing where he wanted to have me locked up for telling the truth about our family. I think my father’s reaction was extreme, but in many ways, it was not. As I learned, there are powerful cultural and social forces – like fathers and judges and hospitals – that can align to keep family secrets about racism.
It’s important that we do the kind of “soul-searching” that President Obama called for. Whites in the U.S. in general are incredibly naïve about race and about their own complicity in creating and maintaining this system of racial inequality. My naïvete was in not realizing how profoundly upset my father would be about these revelations. Even with my difficult experience with my father, I still think it’s important for whites to go back and look at what their genealogy of racial privilege is as painful and unpopular as that might be.

Ask your grandparents about the G.I. Bill – did your grandfather go to school on that government subsidy? Did he buy a house with help from the G.I. Bill? Were there “deed restrictions” on the house you grew up in? Ask about the college admissions policies when your parents or grandparents went to school – who was excluded? Ask about the employment policies – who was hired — who was not? How many whites know the answers to these questions going back even a generation? Two generations? Three generations? Very few.

My point here is not to remain in the shallow eddy of thinking about race that is “white guilt,” but rather to use this sort of “soul-searching” to move the conversation forward in some small way. Only then can we begin to step up and take responsibility for what our ancestors have wrought and more importantly, take some responsibility for dismantling the system of inequality they put in place and from which we still benefit.

~ Jessie Daniels, PhD, is a CUNY Professor, and is writing a memoir called, No Daughter of Mine.

[American Dream]

White supremacy has taught him that all people of color are threats irrespective of their behavior. Capitalism has taught him that, at all costs, his property can and must be protected. Patriarchy has taught him that his masculinity has to be proved by the willingness to conquer fear through aggression; that it would be unmanly to ask questions before taking action. Mass media then brings us the news of this in a newspeak manner that sounds almost jocular and celebratory, as though no tragedy has happened, as though the sacrifice of a young life was necessary to uphold property values and white patriarchal honor. Viewers are encouraged to feel sympathy for the white male home owner who made a mistake. The fact that this mistake led to the violent death of an innocent young man does not register; the narrative is worded in a manner that encourages viewers to identify with the one who made the mistake by doing what we are led to feel we might all do to “protect our property at all costs from any sense of perceived threat.” This is what the worship of death looks like.

This quote is from bell hooks’ 2001 book, “All About Love: New Visions,”

[American Dream]

A poster design for Trayvon, as well as multiple recent unresolved cases of racist murders in the Milwaukee area. Please share, print, etc.

A downloadable 18×24 poster version is available here

just FYI: the “castle doctrine" law is the same as “stand your ground" it goes by several different names depending on what state you’re in.


URL: http://tmblr.co/ZZ-J-xqCXrbr

[seemslikeadream]

McCain calls for review of 'stand your ground' laws

Posted by
CNN's Ashley Killough
(CNN) - Sen. John McCain, who lost in 2008 to the first African-American elected to the White House, said President Barack Obama's speech about race relations was "very impressive" and agreed that "stand your ground" laws should be re-examined, including those in his own state of Arizona.

"The 'stand your ground' law may be something that may needs to be reviewed by the Florida legislature or any other legislature that has passed such legislation," McCain said on CNN's "State of the Union."



Arizona is one of 30 states that have such laws, which give individuals certain legal rights in cases of self-defense. The law in Florida has come under scrutiny recently during the trial of George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer who shot and killed teenager Trayvon Martin last year during a confrontation.

Asked if he thinks Arizona should review the law, McCain said: "Yes, I do."

"And I'm confident that the members of the Arizona legislature will, because it is very controversial legislation," he told CNN chief political correspondent Candy Crowley.

McCain said he didn't agree with fellow Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who argued Friday the Obama administration is calling for a review of "stand your ground" laws as a way to further its agenda against Second Amendment rights.

"Isn't it time for America to come together?" McCain asked. "I'd rather have a message of coming together and discussing these issues rather than condemning.

"I respect (Cruz's) view, but I don't frankly see the connection," he added.

Protesters stand up to 'stand your ground,' but laws likely here to stay

McCain said that while American society has made progress on racial issues, the recent tensions over the Trayvon Martin case have "highlighted the differences that remain."

"What I got out of the president's statement, which I thought was very impressive, is that we need to have more conversation in America," he said. "I need to talk to more of my Hispanic organizations in my state. I need to talk to more African-American organizations."

The longtime senator pointed to the economic disparities between African-Americans and other demographic groups, citing the city of Detroit, which he called a "wasteland," as an example.

"What's the majority of the population in the city of Detroit? Who suffers the most? Obviously we know the answer," he said of the city that filed for bankruptcy last week.

The main point that can be drawn from the president's speech on Friday, McCain said, was that "we've still got a long way to go."

"And I think the president very appropriately highlighted a lot of that...as only the president of the United States can," he said.

Trayvon Martin Stood His Ground and Got Murdered for It: So Did Native Americans

MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

In one respect -- amidst an acquittal verdict of George Zimmerman that has been interpreted depending upon the prism through which one sees racism in America -- what Trayvon Martin did when encountered by the stalking, armed-vigilante who defied police orders to stop following Martin, was quite simple: Martin followed the ALEC-NRA sponsored law. He "stood his ground."

A Turner Broadcasting HLN article states the legal base for a "Stand Your Ground" right to kill someone (and ironically details the double standard of the application of the law as applied to a black woman):

The “Stand Your Ground” doctrine in can be found in Florida Statute § 776.013(3) (2012). Here are some key parts of the legislation:

§ 776.013. Home protection; use of deadly force; presumption of fear of death or great bodily harm

(3) A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.

The “Stand Your Ground” law in Florida essentially gives individuals the right to protect themselves or others from serious bodily harm or death, and it gives them the right to use deadly force if no other non-lethal options are available. Most states give people this right within their own home, but Florida permits individuals to stand their ground anywhere they have a right to be without requiring them to retreat first.

In Florida, you can use deadly force anywhere as long as you:

--Are not engaged in an unlawful activity

--Are being attacked in a place you have a right to be

--Reasonably believe that your life and safety is in danger as a result of an overt act or perceived threat committed by someone else toward you.

By any account, munching on a packet of skittles and walking not far from the gated community his father lived in -- the same one where Zimmerman resided -- Trayvon Martin fits these criteria for having had the right, under Florida law, to kill Zimmerman, except he wasn't armed with anything but some candy. Zimmerman had the official NRA apparel strapped onto him: a loaded handgun.

Whoever was on top in the tussle that ensued when Zimmerman, explicitly violating a police warning, left his SUV to pursue Martin with a loaded firearm for nothing more than walking while black, male and young, Martin met all the ALEC-NRA written criteria for "standing his ground." Were he a concealed carry vigilante such as Zimmerman, he would have, according to the ALEC-NRA law been within his right to shoot Zimmerman if he felt his life in danger, if he even had the perception that he was physically in threat.

Zimmerman's impulsive, vengeful, racial sterotyping actions that day would have by any standards justified Martin shooting him, had he had a gun -- given that the "Stand Your Ground" law comes into play when you "reasonably believe that your life and safety is in danger as a result of an overt act or perceived threat committed by someone else toward you."

But were this scenario to have transpired -- that Martin had a gun and shot Zimmerman who was stalking him with a firearm and abruptly jumped from his SUV to confront Martin -- and Martin stood his ground, based on the law, and perceived that Zimmerman was threatening "his life and safety" -- and shot Zimmerman dead, does anyone doubt that a Sanford jury would have convicted Martin of second degree murder or manslaughter?

Because the "Stand Your Ground" law is all about race. Thom Hartmann has best described this in articles in Truthout that historically tie cruel and often murderous white militias that pursued runaway slaves to the current Florida law (which has also been enacted in other states). The first column "The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery" (which has received 100,000 Facebook likes) begins with essential historical perspective:

The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says "State" instead of "Country" (the Framers knew the difference - see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too....

After a detailed historical recounting of the Second Amendment compromise to placate the slave holding states, Hartmann concludes:

Little did Madison realize that one day in the future weapons-manufacturing corporations, newly defined as "persons" by a Supreme Court some have calleddysfunctional, would use his slave patrol militia amendment to protect their "right" to manufacture and sell assault weapons used to murder schoolchildren.

So Trayvon Martin is dead because he followed the letter of the racist ALEC-NRA "license to murder law" and protected himself against an unstoppable, insatiable deadly force: George Zimmerman. But "Stand Your Ground" laws aren't meant to give blacks the same rights as non-blacks; quite the opposite, they are, as they did in the case of George Zimmerman, meant to give whites (or half-whites in this case) the right to pursue blacks with impunity.

Historically, if we go back to the founding and expansion of what is now the United States, if there had been a legal entity existing at that time, Native Americans (as the illustration for this article points out) would have been entitled to stand their ground against the colonizers from Europe who were stealing their land and massacring them.

We would be subject to Native American law right now if indigenous tribes had had the enforced right to stand their ground as European conquerors expanded westward, creating what is now the United States.

There would have been no development of the Southern tyranny and abomination of slavery, which imported Africans as property and the source of wealth for aristrocratic plantation owners.

There would have likely, ironically, been no "Stand Your Ground" laws aimed at de facto allowing the murder of non-whites as BuzzFlash at Truthout wrote about in a July 6 column, "It's Not Just George Zimmerman on Trial, It's America's Acceptance of Killing 'the Other'."

[seemslikeadream]

Hollywood couldn't write this stuff

George Zimmerman helps rescue family from car wreck
John Bacon, USA TODAY 2:31 p.m. EDT July 22, 2013


George Zimmerman, the man whose acquittal on murder and manslaughter charges in the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin set off a wave of protests across the nation, helped rescue a family from an overturned SUV four days after the verdict, the Seminole County Sheriff's Office said in a statement Monday.

The statement said that on Wednesday, at approximately 5:45 p.m. ET, the sheriff's office responded to a single car accident at an intersection in the Sanford, Fla., area not far from where Zimmerman, 29, shot Trayvon, 17, in February 2012. The statement said a blue Ford Explorer had run off the road and rolled over with a family of four inside.

When a deputy arrived at the scene, two men had already helped the family out of the SUV. One of the men was Zimmerman, a former neighborhood watch coordinator in Sanford.

"Zimmerman was not a witness to the crash and left after making contact with the deputy," the statement said. "There were no report of injuries."

[rollingstone]

^ Are you sure about that? Sometimes it looks like Hollywood writes all this stuff.

[Luther Blissett]

Did he stalk and kill any of the children that were in that accident?

[justdrew]

How does a single SUV overturn in an intersection all by itself?

[seemslikeadream]

I want to see a police report

smells set-upppity


ok I just heard on the tv that all he did...as heard on the police scanner is call and report the accident


He's such a helper

such a hero

[ShinShinKid]

Next week on the Zimmerman files, George goes hunting with a friend!