I haven't commented on the murder of Trayvon Martin because I didn't think there was anything I could add to the conversation. And because this is where I live. My home is in Central Florida. I don't live in Sanford, but I serve on a board there with some of the most prominent members of the Sanford and Seminole County communities. I got my first Barack Obama for President sign in Sanford while attending the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Parade.
Because of the connection with Sanford, I didn't want to make this into something personal. But it is. That's why I - although much more infrequently of late - have this blog. Because shit like this is personal. If it's not, why bother talking about it, or thinking about it? If it doesn't become personal, we can detach, think of it simply as information, data points in our preconfigured conceptions. Put it in that box and move on.
But Trayvon's killing - and the public response - has been gnawing at me. It doesn't belong in a box, tucked away for safekeeping.
Recently I sat in a Sanford meeting where, in connection with a comment about holding people accountable for "one mistake," a passing reference to Joe Paterno led to a chorus of angry defenses of the late Penn State coach, of how he was railroaded, hung out to dry, scapegoated. Paterno was the victim there, and in a room full of thoughtful people, nobody - myself included - felt comfortable with stepping in and saying, enough! What about Sandusky's victims? What about leadership and responsibility and ownership and doing the right thing when the neediest of our society were being attacked in the most horrible way? But those kids didn't figure in. Outraged, I pulled one of my colleagues aside a few minutes later - why do we want people who think like that leading our organization? - but the comment hadn't impacted him. That's is the mindset in small-town "conservative" Florida. Those in power are always the victims, and those others - women, children, African Americans, hispanics - if they're not irrelevant, they're not so important either, except as to how they impact the power players. How dare they try to hold the boss accountable. How dare they pretend to rights. How dare they matter? Tragedy, it seems, must always dress up as political statement.
On Wednesday I finally heard the tapes from that fateful night a few weeks ago, where pretend-a-cop George Zimmerman called 911 to report the dangerous sight of a kid walking down the street - obviously with something wrong because, well, because - as he began to hunt down the Skittles-toting child, holster loaded with Arizona's finest tea, because this time
those people aren't going to get away with it. And then I listened to those other tapes of a neighbor hearing fighting and screaming for help and,
pop!, that single pointless gunshot that unplugged tears that I didn't know were locked up in my eyes, that clap that serves in this absurdist history as Zimmerman's absolute defense in his crime, the terrible irony of the killing itself constituting the unassailable proof, per the Sanford police and their interpretation of the Stand Your Ground law, that Zimmerman was acting in self-defense. The police had no choice, they said, but to believe the gunman, because the gunman's own belief is paramount and the dead boy lay right there, evidence of Zimmerman's state of mind.
That's not enough for the commentariat class, though, out to prove justification and justice, rather than a tragically flawed law. So if the need to be killed didn't prove the threat that Trayvon posed, under a terribly flawed law, then certainly Trayvon's hoodie did. Hood is in the name, for crying out loud. "I'll bet you money," Geraldo Rivera tells us, "if he didn't have that hoodie on, that -- that nutty neighborhood watch guy wouldn't have responded in that violent and aggressive way." The flaw isn't in a law that grants permission to be a vigilante; the fault lie in the victim. I'm not the first to notice that sexy-dressed rape victims have it coming to them, too. How much are we willing to bet that those women are out to get them some, too? That's what women do. They provoke men to have nonconsensual sex with them. They provoke their bosses to ask them to bend over and pick up that box. They make us do it to them. Because: That's. What. Women. Do.
We know that, just like we all know the up-to-no-good that dark-skinned boys in hoodies do. Skinny boys of color, out at night, in a hoodie, doped on Skittles, trafficking in fear and cries for help from men a hundred pounds heavier than they. There's something wrong with those kids. He looked at me with those crazy eyes. He's not going to get away this time. Not this time.
Against this backdrop, the President offered up a few words of understanding and concern and sympathy: "Obviously this is a tragedy. I can only imagine what these parents are going through. And when I think about this boy, I think about my own kids." Then a call for everyone to work together to figure out what happened and to keep things like this from happening again, and then, making it personal himself, added, "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon."
That was too much for
Newt Gingrich to bear. Taking a break from contemplating (because he's a thinker) why someone claiming to be a Christian would be so concerned about always "
apologizing" to Muslims, it's left to the man who calls Barack Obama the "Food Stamp President" to also be the last remaining defender of a color-blind society. And what kind of color-blind society can we have when we keep seeing a President who happens to be, you know, so obvious about being, uh, black.
No, the buck stops here and now. Newt is the firewall in these times when a race-baiting President fails to rebuff
Robert De Niro for denigrating white First Ladies ("Callista Gingrich. Karen Santorum. Ann Romney. Now do you really think our country is ready for a white First Lady?" he asked the crowd. "Too soon, right?"). Newt is the last great defender of Dr. King's vision. The GOP is the Party of Lincoln, you see, and the only form of racism is the kind where
those people use it as a wedge against real Americans. Stung by charges of historic racial - uh -insensitivity, the conservative cause would have us know (and as Steven Colbert would tell us) that they don't see color. Only liberals see race, and awareness of skin color is clearly a partisan issue. Only liberals want to divide us. Rodney King as the Republican model citizen: why can't we all just get along?
“What the president said, in a sense, is disgraceful,” Gingrich said on the Hannity Radio show. “It’s not a question of who that young man looked like. Any young American of any ethnic background should be safe, period. We should all be horrified no matter what the ethnic background.
“Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK because it didn’t look like him. That’s just nonsense dividing this country up. It is a tragedy this young man was shot. It would have been a tragedy if he had been Puerto Rican or Cuban or if he had been white or if he had been Asian American of if he’d been a Native American. At some point, we ought to talk about being Americans. When things go wrong to an American, it is sad for all Americans. Trying to turn it into a racial issue is fundamentally wrong. I really find it appalling.”
Appalling, indeed.
(Note: To be clear, this is not a post about George Zimmerman.)
