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.
They can't give up their false narrative.
They think no one will notice.
Mr. Zimmerman is 1/4 Hispanic, 1/2 white and 1/4 black, from most accounts I’ve read.
Guns save lives and the lives of those who want to keep on living. That is the problem democrates have.
Not a bad article, but if the bl@cks are so poorly treated here, what’s keeping them from going back home? LEAVE if you don’t like it.
And who else is Obama, or Sharpton? Aside from being some sort of half-black wannabe cops?
The elephant in this world wide media room is, "how many of these 18 blacks were killed by other blacks?"
If that question cannot be dealt with honestly, within the real context of the cultural problem that exists within the black community, then complaining about the 'number' of blacks killed is pointless and all the other suppositions, bias and conjecture is meaningless.
It’s not about the crime...
It’s not about the cast...
It’s about how Jesse and Al and NOI and the rest can make money
there is no evidence (not even hearsay) that Zimmerman was a ‘neighborhood bully.’
They won’t drop that narrative.
I don't give a rat's ass about any of that. When I see 3 consecutive black females at my local Target whip out their EBT cards, as I did on Tuesday night, and every white customer is paying cash, it pisses me off. BIG time.
....the writer better be careful...the Democrats started and ran the Ku Klux Klan.
"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."
What a twisted mind it must take to forget history, accept "tragedy" and blame whitey...just because they are white.
Because those are near-unique identifiers, unlike "Martin" and "George".
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. Further, those engaged in the slave trade had the additional advantage of being able to cherry-pick women captives to add to their harem.
This is why Obama researchers are able to trace his father's patriarchial lineage back several generations, but data on his father's matriarchial lineage peters out rather quickly. This is just one such source, fairly well done.
Yes, I picked up on that “neighborhood bully” aspect, as well.
"If his version of that tragedy is the truth, I hope he doesn’t suffer for it any more than he has "
Wow... finally ...but:
Zimmerman was NOT a cop wanna-be or neighborhood bully- by some reports he was a humanitarian who has come to the aid of people several times in the past- at his own personal risk, AND he was doing what he was supposed to be doing that night as part of a community watch - he was watching over his community
What was St. Trayvon of Sanford doing? Not skipping home from choir practice. His house was a straight 850 foot walk home from the store- he could have been home in 2 minutes
Instead he was walking in the dark in the rain BETWEEN the houses.
Zimmerman was not looking to gun down someone- you dont call the police in advance of committing your crime if you want to kill someone... He was reporting a suspicious person who appeared to be casing the place.
I rarely see it noted that Trayvon has a history of being caught with burglary tools and suspicious female jewelry on him (that he claimed "he didnt know" who it belonged to)
Boy we screwed the pooch on that move didn't we? Did we eliminate white guilt? Not as evidenced in this case. We also got arguably the most incompetent, affirmative-action hire the world has ever seen.
Actually there is testimony that, far from being a neighborhood bully, he was a neighborhood hero, going out of his way to help others. He wasn’t worried about the guy acting strangely breaking into his own home on the fatal night, but that he was about to break into some neighbor’s home.
Ping.
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.
.
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