Posted on 05/10/2012 8:24:32 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Eighteen. That’s how many black people are murdered per day in America.. If you don’t have the misfortune to live near one of those eighteen, you didn’t hear about any of them.
There are nearly 7,000 African American homicides a year, but only one has grabbed us by our eyeballs and won’t let go. The Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman killing has propelled itself to the front of our national consciousness, while the others go virtually unnoticed.
Why all the attention? What so different about this case?
Nothing. It’s not about the case; it’s about the cast.
It doesn’t even matter if George Zimmerman is guilty or innocent, that’s beside the point.
The point, of course, is race. When a gangbanger bangs one out, it’s a simple, common crime. But when a sort-of-white wannabe cop and neighborhood bully kills a black teenager, a couple of strange, powerful things happen.
First, the victim becomes a choirboy by popular acclimation. It’s as if the populace couldn’t understand the narrative if the kid had a pot bust in junior high.
And second, the killer becomes a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Look, I don’t want to trivialize this, or offend anyone’s sensibilities, but there is a direct parallel here with the use of the N word.
Nobody likes it, but if you use it, you better be black. A black man killing another black man is an all-too-common tragedy. A white man killing a black man is an act of race war.
Our collective memories know that there is something especially heinous about this kind of crime.
We hate murderers, but not all murders are considered equal. A killing in the hood is a shame. A serial killing is an outrage. If the details are particularly gruesome we make a movie about it.
But even an interracial school slaughter like Virginia Tech, where one person killed 32, has less impact on the nation than the Zimmerman case. The murderer was a disturbed Asian boy, most of the victims white. But race didn’t seem to be a factor in that crime, and it’s the act that sticks in our minds four years later, not the perpetrator.
I’m willing to bet not ten percent of my readers can bring the name Seung-Hui Cho to mind when thinking about Virginia Tech. I know I had to Google it.
But George Zimmerman’s name will be remembered in four years; those of us still alive will remember it in forty. Whether he’s guilty or not.
My wife pointed it out; whenever they talk about this case it’s always Trayvon and Zimmerman. We know the victim, affectionately, by his first name, the killer by his last. Why? Because we take this case personally. Otherwise the wall-to-wall coverage wouldn’t be there.
Even among hate crimes, this one is special. When some homophobes kill a gay man, it’s news, it’s an outrage, we hear about it. But the coverage and concern don’t reach Martin/Zimmerman heights. The history is entirely different. Gay people have been harassed and killed for years in America, but, as horrid as that history is, cities did not burn. A civil war wasn’t fought over that issue, six hundred thousand Americans didn’t die because of it.
Race has unique, terrible power over America’s moral conscience and with good reason. When a white man kills a black man it’s something more than a crime in our eyes, it’s something unspeakably worse. Which is why we must speak about it.
White people may not want to see it that way. In our hearts we may think, we are not racist, we elected a black president, we hate not. And all that is probably true for most white Americans.
It doesn’t matter. Some lessons must be relearned whenever something terrible happens that reminds us all of our nation’s original sin.
I hope justice is done to Mr. Zimmerman. If his version of that tragedy is the truth, I hope he doesn’t suffer for it any more than he has already. If he’s lying and killed that kid on purpose I hope they throw the book at him.
But either way, I know that justice is being served by all the saturating, 24/7 coverage and conversation. I know we need to work this out slowly, one painful step at a time.
Because, to white America, this is a case, a killing, a mystery, maybe even an annoyance. But to black America it’s one six-millionth of a genocide.
No goggle Malcolm x ,see for yourself. There was one photo of X that looked exactly like Barack. It has since been deleted
We can “pull the plug’ on the mainstream media. We do not have to watch their lying so-called news and we do not have to watch any propaganda laced entertainment. I have boycotted the msm news for many years and I have not watched any comedy or drama from the msm. There are programs that are not filled with propaganda which I sometimes watch. I think the msm has become so over-the-top in their efforts to propagandize that there must be many people each day who are changing the channel on the msm.
I listen to the local radio station that carries Limbaugh. Fox news and Coaat to Coast AM in the evening. I have a TV simply to watch Bluray and DVD in high definition. Even that is limited to once or twice each month.
“It has since been deleted”
I wonder why???;) But seriously, how would he and Stanley Ann Dunham have possibly crossed paths? I thought X spent most of his time around Boston...
Zimmerman is only 1/8 black/Afro-Peruvian. He appears to be 3/8 hispanic.
>ObaMao’s black half is at least one quarter to three quarters Arab. A dirty little family secret is that the Lao tribe enjoyed privileged status in Kenya because they intermarried with Arabs.
From what I know, the Arabs in Kenya all live in the coastal region, while the Luo all live in Western Kenya, near Uganda. Furthermore, they didn’t seem to intermarry with other ethnic groups much, if at all. Does he have Arab ancestry? I suppose anything’s possible, but IMO it’s rather unlikely.
This is entirely consistent with the custom of slave traders being able to cherry-pick the best female captors to add to their harems.
Further, any divide or lack of mixing between coastal Arab Muslims and inland Lao Tribal Muslims, who largely did the dirty work of capturing the slaves to sell to their Arab trading partners, is almost entirely due to racism, not religious prohibition on interracial marriage.
Islam has traditionally no prohibitions on interracial marriage, only inter-religious. In fact, a common way to advance oneself socially was to marry into Arab lineages.
The Arabs consider themselves the top of the racial heap in Islam with a pecking order roughly identical to the order in which they embraced Islam. The Persians, of course, would be an exception as would Arab Shiites which are viewed as some sort of sub-class (at best) or apostate (at worst) in much the same way Biblical Jews views Samaritans or extreme fundamentalists view Mormons.
One reason Arabs consider themselves racially superior is that many of them are able to trace their genealogies back thousands of years, some even to Adam (or so they claim). Their view is that their ancestor Esau did not sell his birthright to Jacob but was merely cheated out of it by the ancestor of Jews and Christians in collusion with his mother Rebekah. See Genesis 27, which the Arabs regard as a Jewish/Christian version of what really happened.
A close friend of mine is the son of a Jordanian Muslim father and an American Christian mother. He's told me stories which would curl your hair. I won't go into them all, but the bottom line is that among some Arab tribes, they view one of the best ways to spread Islam and their superior seed is to intermarry as much as possible among late comers to their faith so they may enjoy the blessings of being both Arab and Muslim.
My friend also tells me that Obama is also a name of Arabic origin. This doesn't necessarily prove an Arab bloodline since Laos would Arabize their names over generations as a social prestige thing, given the fact that Islam and Arabs have been in Kenya since the 8th century, the chances of interracial marriage is quite high.
>My friend also tells me that Obama is also a name of Arabic origin.
From what I know, the origin of the name Obama is a matter of dispute. Some say it’s of Luo origin, derived from the verb “to be bent” or “twisted”. Others say it was from Swahili. How do you know he wasn’t mixing up “Obama” with some other word?
>A couple of generations further back, Obama’s progenitors are on the coast and paternal matriarchal ancestry is unknown.
It didn’t say Obama’s ancestors were on the coast. All it said was that Hussein Onyango Obama (Barry’s grandfather) was born in a ethnic Luo village. And his dad was born at Kendu Bay, which is on the shores of Lake Victoria.
>This doesn’t necessarily prove an Arab bloodline since Laos would Arabize their names over generations as a social prestige thing,
The same is true about non-Arab muslims in general. They often take Arab or Arab derived names.
>given the fact that Islam and Arabs have been in Kenya since the 8th century, the chances of interracial marriage is quite high.
Yeah, but the Luo, I believe, live some distance from the Arabs.
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