The politics of language are rich here as they advance a multicultural, conservative, colorblind racial agenda that imposes contemporary standards onto the past in an effort to remove the grounds of historical grievance in the present. Melvinia did not give birth to a “biracial” child. She was raped and had a black child who would be considered human property unless freed by his “father.” The Slaveocracy and America’s racial order was based on the “one-drop rule” where a child’s racial status and freedom was determined by that of the mother. Thus, a white man (and slave owner) could rape, exploit, and do as he wished with black women (and men). The children would be born slaves. The logic of hypodescent was also operative as well. Race is not about the reality of genetic makeup and admixture. Racial identity is about perceptions by the in-group regarding who belongs and who does not. Slavery, Race, and Reunion: The NY Times White Washes the Rape of Michelle Obama’s Ancestors (Again) ☀
racism
The social control problem of the 1970s was decidedly different. It was as much if not more Northern and Southern, it was as much if not more urban than agrarian – indeed the urban race riots of the late 1960s and early 70s were a key precipitating event, alongside racial mutinies on the front lines of Vietnam, the rise of the Black Panthers, and the civil rights struggle. But in the background, the key political-economic shift was not from slave to proletariat, but from proletariat to lumpenproletariat. The flight of middle class blacks from desegregating inner cities, deindustrialization, the loss of jobs in the North, and increasingly concentrated urban unemployment among black males produced a surplus labor population. The role of the criminal justice system in this context was to police an underclass, not make workers out of slaves. And it became increasingly so as other, more benign, modes of social control – like welfare, public housing – sputtered. This new carceral regime invovled the state taking on direct responsibility for control of a population now that it lacked a strong tie to economic life. And it did so by criminalizing one of its few economic activities: drugs. The war on drugs was the pivotal instrument for introducing this new form of social control. It not only massively increased the prison population, but subjected them, and urban black communities more widely, to the continual supervision of public coercive authority. The Political Economy of Mass Incarceration ☀
Since the mid-60s Republicans have seen an electoral opportunity in appealing to the basest, racist sentiments of a section of the white electorate. What became known as the “Nixon strategy” aimed to use the dog whistle of racial symbolism – like “Welfare Queens” and “Willie Horton” – to draw white southerners into the Republican fold and peel off disaffected whites in the north too. It worked. Since the second world war, Democrats have won the presidency with the white vote alone only once – in 1964. One of the appeals for some whites of voting Republican is a desire to maintain whatever limited racial privileges they have acquired over the years combined with a fear that what little they have will be taken away by feckless non-whites and undocumented migrants. While in Nevada in 2010 I asked a white Republican without health insurance why she wouldn’t support a candidate who might give it to her. “I never really got into that Obamacare insurance stuff,” she said. “My mind is focusing 250% on this illegal immigration.” None of this means all Republican supporters are racist. But it does suggest they make their appeal on racial grounds and, as the poll shows, it is effective. Gary Younge ☀
Many would like to believe that race doesn’t matter. That we as a country have moved beyond disliking others because of the color of their skin and instead feel free to despise people for the content of their wallet. This is not the case. Trayvon Martin, the young black boy, hunted, and gunned down, was killed in his “gated community” not on the “streets”. Regardless of his family’s “class” which allowed them to take their kids snowboarding, fishing, and provided them with a home in a suburban gated area, their young black boy was still gunned down — their economic status did not change George Zimmerman’s or society’s perception of a young black boy in a hoodie. Our Collective Truth: Race Matters ☀
(CNN) — Isolated in the moment, the shooting death of Trayvon Martin may seem a singular tragedy: a teenager mistaken for a criminal by an overzealous neighborhood watchman armed with a gun and backed by a state law that gives greater latitude to people to defend themselves when they feel threatened.
But that moment in February in the central Florida town of Sanford was steeped in a history that has haunted the state, the South and the country for generations.
No matter the state, the circumstances are eerily familiar: a slaying. Minimal police investigation. A suspect known to authorities. No arrest. Protests and outrage in a racially charged atmosphere. Florida is known for its amusement parks, beaches and pensioners from the North. But history bears out that Florida has been as much a part of the South and its vigilante-enforced racial caste system as Georgia and Alabama.
It is predictable that conservatives are complaining about too much attention being paid to the shooting of Trayvon Martin. There is no racial problem that I know of that conservatives would like more attention paid to. Think about it. The Trayvon Martin case becomes a big story and suddenly conservatives want to focus on the murder rate in our cities? When was the last time they cared about that? They care about it if it will help them win an argument. But actually doing something about it, by ending the drug war or equalizing school funding, well, that’s too much to expect. For the conservative movement, race is not a serious issue affecting real people on a daily basis. It is something to be used to win an argument. As Drum said, liberals use race as a cudgel at times too. The great difference is that, generally, liberals take the reality of racism seriously, while conservatives do not. Jesse Curtis ☀
Instead of arguing over who’s a racist, let’s shift the conversation to more important questions. Let’s debate instead the underlying tensions and tendencies that contributed to Trayvon Martin’s shocking death. About the implications of living in a society in which White parents rarely talk to their kids about race, but Black parents have to warn their sons to bend over backwards to avoid so much as the whiff of suspicion at the convenience store or routine traffic stop. About what it means when our laws (and our culture) shift from duty to retreat to stand your ground.
These are tough, unsettling questions. It’s less threatening to ponder who is and isn’t a racist, especially since we’re all so confident that this label doesn’t apply to us. But arguing about who the racists are–fruitless tilting at windmills that it may be–remains the easy way out because it preempts wrestling with the harder questions raised by Martin’s death.
In short, I don’t know whether or not George Zimmerman is a racist. And frankly, I don’t much care.
I do know that Trayvon Martin’s death is a tragedy.
I do know that while it’s unthinkably terrible to lose a child of any background, tragedies like this one are far too likely to befall African-American families (and even when not fatal, that similar outrages and indignities are suffered daily by a wide range of people of color in this country).
And I do know that to suggest that race shouldn’t be a factor in talking about Trayvon Martin’s death is at the very least hopelessly naïve and at worst a disingenuous effort to change the topic to one less threatening to the status quo.
Is the threshold for avoiding a charge of prejudice really as low as having a few Black friends? And, while we’re at it, did you tell those Black people when you befriended them that they’d be serving as your get-out-of-racism-free card? Sam Sommers ☀
So this is who we are now: a nation that doesn’t give a damn for anybody else, because Trayvon Martin was wearing a hoodie, after all: he asked for it! And “illegal immigrants” aren’t really people, they’re something less than dogs and cats, so they don’t deserve the protection of our laws and our 14th Amendment (which speaks of “persons,” not “citizens.” The major Constitutional distinction between those classes is that the latter gets to vote; nothing more.), and should be hounded out of our country because we have no room for them, and no compassion, either. This is the country where dumping people from E.R.’s onto Skid Row is just good stewardship of public funds. This is now a country where we aren’t obligated to anyone but ourselves and our sense of justice, and if we want to shoot somebody, well that’s our God-given right because we have to defend ourselves from black children in hoodies by chasing them down behind a row of townhouses, or just to recover our property, because obviously personal property is more important than human life. Adventus ☀
I feel an obligation to preserve the sayings of Free Republic for posterity. All too many liberals do not know what goes on in Red America and imagine that Congress would somehow magically reform itself if people would vote for Dennis Kucinich for President.
The reality is that Congress knows its constituents. The problem is that both liberals and conservatives pander to their constituents rather than educating them. In a country where the real left has been destroyed by decades of assault, many liberals pretend to be moderates and many ::cough:: conservatives pretend (or not) to be neo-Nazis. Neither of them seem to believe anything at all. No one does what is right for the country. Read these posts understanding that they represent perhaps one third of Republicans (and only a few of the 20 or so threads about the Martin case). Other posters occasionally make weak protests against the sort of hate-the-victim comments, and surely many stay silent in the face of this evil. What comes to the fore during cases like the murder of Trayvon Martin is the racialist wing of the Party.
What if Trayvon Martin was a born again Christian white kid, and Zimmerman was a “black as the ace of spades” neighborhood watch captain? Does anyone out there think that the chain of events would have been the same? For all those white neighbors of mine who commented on the overactive crowds that rallied recently in Sanford, Florida: What if a sea of evangelist Christians and angry white folks marched and rallied over that same terrain? On the subject of “born again Christians”? The Great “What Ifs?” ☀
As the Trayvon Martin case draws national attention, we look at another fatal shooting of an unarmed African-American male that has received far less scrutiny. Kenneth Chamberlain, Sr., a 68 year-old African-American Marine veteran, was fatally shot in November by White Plains, NY, police who responded to a false alarm from his medical alert pendant. The officers hurled racial slurs at Chamberlain, broke down his door, tasered him, and then shot him dead. We’re joined by Chamberlain’s son, Kenneth Chamberlain Jr., and two of his attorneys. One of the attorneys, Mayo Bartlett, questions the police response to the shooting, comparing it to the official story that emerged after George Zimmerman shot the unarmed African-American teenager Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida last month. “It’s very similar to Mr. Zimmerman suggesting that he had a bloody nose, and now you look at the video and that doesn’t appear to be the case,” says Bartlett. “That really makes you question what we’re being told sometimes by government with respect to these types of matters.” Kenneth Chamberlain Jr. struggles through tears to recount his father’s final moments, including the way police officers mocked his father’s past as a Marine. “For them to look at my father that way, (with) no regard for his life, every morning I think about it,” he says.
Black children in America are never innocent. Innocence looks like Dick and Jane, our bright-eyed tour guides through the idyll of green lawns, lazy bike rides down hop-scotched sidewalks, and the mystery meat treasure of sandboxes under blue skies that sparkle into eternity. From the 1930s into the 1960s Dick and Jane taught America how to read the American dream. Picture book primers with these two characters snaked through every schoolhouse from the Deep South to the rugged West of African American “Promised Land” reveries. Before the mainstreaming of phonics, the Dick and Jane primers were the first to provide sight reading instruction supposedly grounded in average everyday life. In their sun-kissed freckle-faced average-ness, Dick and Jane schooled America in the cultural literacy of suburbia and the holy trinity of nuclear family, heterosexual marriage, and white supremacy. Neat, well-dressed, ever-courteous, they established the template for a “normal” childhood of perfect single family homes in segregated subdivisions that would be tethered to the world’s largest interstate highway system in 1956. Father was breadwinning and boozing. Mother was homemaking and Easy-Off sniffing. Spot the family dog brooded faithfully at brother Dick’s side, primed to rip off the balls of any intruder. Government subsidized Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loans and GI Bill funded college educations smoothed the pathway for Dick and Jane’s nuclear bootstrapping. Black vets and black families needn’t apply. White Picket Fences, White Innocence ☀
I don’t really have much to say about the whole Trayvon Martin case. I don’t know what happened. But I do think a lot of people misunderstand what is meant by the argument that race played a key role. If I accuse the Sanford PD of racism, a lot of people assume that this implies some sort of conscious, deliberate cover-up, a sort of hand-wringing villain situation. But, of course, that isn’t what I think most people really mean.
The racism is in the form of assumptions and predispositions. When the cops arrived on the scene, they found a dead black kid and an armed community watch volunteer, and the pieces all just seemed to fall into place. Of course, the kid had jumped the innocent citizen who had used self-defense. Now, once that was their mindset, they essentially set about defending it, tidying up loose ends, not asking too many questions, and so on.
But look, isn’t it obvious that had the dead kid been white, there would have been a lot of more questions asked? The cops would have arrived on the scene, and you would have an unarmed dead white kid, an armed hispanic dude with an arrest record. My guess is that their initial mindset would have been quite different.
Aside from the whole question of whether Zimmerman would have been as aggressive in pursuing a white kid, it seems hard for me to believe that Zimmerman would have been treated as kindly had he killed a white kid.
A GNT creation ©2007–2013
