Posted on 11/04/2013 12:23:19 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
My nephew Jake Silverman is a brainy, confident, energetic, and strong-willed six-year-old. He eats more food than I ever thought it was possible for a six-year-old boy to consume, loves my iPad with a passion, and sometimes has temper tantrums when he doesn’t get precisely what he wants. He already knows he wants to be a doctor, and I have no doubt that he will be an unruly teenager who will mature into a brilliant, handsome, and talented young man. At least that is my hope. You see, Jake was adopted from Ethiopia by my brother (who is white), and so Jake is black. After the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin on 13 July 2013, I thought about all the black parents having talks with their teens, and about all the vicious racial crimes of the past that went unpunished. But I also thought about Jake, who in a decade will be almost the same age Trayvon Martin was when he went out to buy skittles and ice tea and never came back. I have no doubt Jake will be a smart-talking, smart-aleck of a kid (like everyone else in my family) and when told to get out of the neighborhood he actually lives in, might just refuse. Will he be shot for this? It seems that being black in the United States allows vigilante-like acts by individuals who fear this blackness. In ten years, will skittles + ice tea + being black still = random acts of unpunished racial violence?
Street art protesting the acquittal of George Zimmerman. Artwork by Scott Peehl.
My neighbor’s white son was just sixteen last year when he stole his mom’s credit card, another neighbor’s car (which he hotwired and drove to Florida), and was pulled over for speeding on Daytona Beach. He was asked to show a driver’s license (he had none) and registration (upon which the officer realized the car was stolen). He had smoked some marijuana on the way down to Florida and when the officer said, “You are in big trouble, mister!” he sassed the officer, saying “Whatcha gonna do, call my momma?” at which point the officer threw him in the holding cell and left to in fact call his mother, my neighbor. My neighbor called her father, who had been a judge, who called a judge in Florida, and all charges (car and credit card theft, speeding, driving without a license, drug use, and possession of two ounces of pot he planned to sell in Florida) were ultimately dropped. When I heard this story, I thought: yeah, so it goes, white privilege. If he was black, he might have been shot, detained, or imprisoned. But so it goes and goes and goes.
A rally in protest of the Trayvon Martin verdict.
The Trayvon Martin case is the Emmett Till of our time. Or at least it should be. Remember Emmett Till, who was beaten to death on 28 August 1955 by four white men because he supposedly wolf-whistled at a white woman? He was fourteen, and his body was bloodied beyond recognition; his momma bravely insisted on an open casket so that the world could see what had been done to her baby. We do not know what happened on the evening of 26 February 2012 in Florida, beyond George Zimmerman’s words, for the only other witness to the violence is dead. But let us imagine that Trayvon Martin was a seventeen-year-old boy who liked some of the things other seventeen-year-old boys like, such as being a wise guy, swearing, and not always answering questions posed to him by adults (to say nothing of skittles and ice tea). Yet if he was a white teenager with these predilections, walking down the street in a hoodie, and was assaulted by a black man, would the black man have been found innocent of any crime? The statistics suggest not. Drawing on data from the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports: 1980-2010, John Roman shows that when there is a homicide with one shooter and one victim who do not know each other and a firearm is used, “less than 3 percent of black-on-white homicides are ruled to be justified [self-defense].” Yet when the races are reversed, the percentage of cases ruled to be self-defense jumps to a staggering twenty-nine percent in non-stand-your ground states and to almost thirty-six percent in stand-your-ground states. This means that whites are ten times more likely to be able to kill a black stranger with impunity in the name of “self-defense” than if these racial roles are reversed. We might think of differential justice systems as a product of the past and of Jim Crow, but they are with us now, in the present moment. So I mourn this verdict, this miscarriage of justice. It shows how divided and unfair our judicial system still is. We have one set of standards for crime and punishment of whites like my neighbor’s son and another set for Trayvon Martin, my (black) nephew Jake Silverman, and African Americans in general. Will it ever change? When will the scales of justice indeed be color blind? For they are clearly not. And so I fear for the future we all must live in, as well as the present we all must try to endure — together.
Martha J. Cutter is a professor of English and African American at the University of Connecticut. Since 2006 she has been the editor-in-chief of MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States and writes a quarterly column for the journal; her current column mediates on the Trayvon Martin Case and the “new Jim Crow”. Her articles on African American literature and mixed-race identity have appeared in many journals and several essay collections.
Well it could be “white privilige”, but equally it might be simple corrupt nepotism. All races can do that.
Not only that, but what is to say that anecdote is even real, that it really happened? We have her word for it. Nothing else.
Hey lady. Trayvon attacked Zimmerman, who was forced to shoot him in self-defense.
How is it possible that you don’t know this?
Oh, right. You’re a low-watt liberal.
Heaven help us.
Have to agree with you.
If this is the kind of informed, independent, and nuanced reasoning that tenure for university and college academics produces, we need to close them immediately.
Then we might get some educators who are actually focused on providing what they are being paid to teach: the knowledge, skills, and abilities that the trained professionals in American business and government need.
Fat chance.
“... and all charges (car and credit card theft, speeding, driving without a license, drug use, and possession of two ounces of pot he planned to sell in Florida) were ultimately dropped.”
I do not believe this bs for a split second. Does her neighbor know and love her enough to pass on this information of corruption between her own father and an unnamed judge and an unnamed police force in Florida knowing any/all would be felonies? I don’t think so.
It’s non-believable.
There’s a lot of it going around - - read Ann Coulter’s MUGGED; it puts it all in perspective with nearly forty pages of footnotes.
bttt
If she keeps her sister’s trophy adoptee off of “Drank”, he probably won’t be out buying skittles and tea (to cover the taste of the dextromethorphan he wants to get high off of), and as a corollary, won’t get hooked into the “gangsta” culture that almost certainly gave St. Skittles the overweening sense of self-entitlement that made him feel he didn’t need to answer to anyone, and therefore her precious nephew won’t commit assault against the guy who asks him why he’s wandering aimlessly in the rain at night, peering into other peoples’ windows.
Whoops, make that “brother’s trophy adoptee”.
No, it's not, Martha, you stoopid c*nt!
It was a set of facts. Which added up to a dead guy on history's ash heap and a massive injustice perpetrated upon the guy who put him there by our nation's cadre of race hustlers, libtards, and retarded academics, such as yourself.
The epic stupidity...
Knowing all the pitfalls of this racist society, why doesn’t she blame her brother for forcing this “trophy child” into such a society. He could have adopted a White child.
Liberals know no shame, nor accept any blame.
The word of a lib/leftist concerning any real event is virtually worthless. That does not mean everything a lib/leftist says is a lie (although as Obama proves they lie as a matter of course), but that everything they say/assert has to be thoroughly vetted. I wouldn’t trust this professor to tell the truth about what she had for breakfast much less some supposedly real event.
She is also as full of sh*t as a Christmas turkey.
So this delusional flake woman believes all whites are privileged like they are in her affluent neighborhood and all blacks are victims?
Very few blacks live in her world. The only ones she knows are affluent like the ones she has seen on the Cosby Show.
She is stereotyping.
I do not believe this bs for a split second. Does her neighbor know and love her enough to pass on this information of corruption between her own father and an unnamed judge and an unnamed police force in Florida knowing any/all would be felonies? I don’t think so.
I don’t believe it either. If he did somehow get off on a technically, she obviously wants to omit the details. She is lying by omission at the least.
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