[Content Note: Racism; guns; eliminationist violence.]
Also: In November of last year, I wrote about the murder of 17-year-old Jordan Davis, a black boy who was shot by 45-year-old white man Michael Dunn after Dunn asked the car full of teens in which Davis was a passenger to turn down their music in a public parking lot and they refused. Dunn shot at the car "eight or nine times" and then fled the scene.
Dunn, who "has been charged with first-degree murder in Davis' death and also faces three counts of attempted first-degree murder for shooting at the three others in the vehicle who survived," pleaded not guilty and has claimed self-defense because "he felt threatened."
By a car full of unarmed teenagers in a public parking lot who were listening to music loudly than Dunn wanted.
Dunn's Florida trial is scheduled to begin in September.
Let me reiterate why these laws, which justify murder if the killers can prove they "felt threatened," are wholly unjust: Privileged men—like George Zimmerman, like John Henry Spooner, like Michael Dunn—don't learn how to sit with fear.
One of the things that privilege does is insulate one from legitimate fear.
Most very privileged men—white, straight, cis, able-bodied, middle- or upper-class men—spend their lives without knowing sustained fear. Every person knows individual moments of fear—the sort of fear that grips a human moments before a car accident one can see coming but cannot avoid, or in the moment one begins to choke on a bit of lunch while eating alone, when one isn't sure if a cough will dislodge the intruder. Privilege doesn't insulate any of us from that kind of fear.
But the sustained fear of being hurt, being victimized, being exploited—unexpectedly, at any moment, and most frequently by people one trusts—is something that the very privileged do not know intimately, the way the rest of us do.
Privileged men's lives and the lives of marginalized people are very different in that way—and that difference underlines privileged men asserting that they have a right to feel safe. And law enforcement, and the courts, agreeing with them.
Because of this difference, most marginalized people learn how to live their lives against a backdrop of present threat, to a soundtrack of the dull roar of constant fear. For the most part, we learn to ongoingly process fear as we move through our days on such a subconscious level it's as natural as our hearts beating without conscious thought—women, for example, position our keys in hand as a potential weapon and scan deserted parking lots for signs of danger and size up dates in search of anything dangerous with the ease that we execute any one of thousands of other routine daily tasks.
Privileged men don't understand this reality, and, upon having it explained to them, will often react with disgust, with contempt. They accuse marginalized people of being oversensitive, of having a pessimistic view of the world, of profiling men, and yawn gaslight blah fart.
Fear—or, perhaps, fear management—is a central part of marginalized personhood in a way it is simply not a central part of privileged manhood.
So boys, especially privileged boys, don't learn how to sit with fear the way girls do. We tell boys explicitly not to be afraid; we tell them that being afraid makes you a pussy. They learn that to be afraid is to be like a woman, and to be not a man.
And then we structure the world so that privileged men don't have a lot to be afraid of, so that it is easier to maintain an identity that is rooted in not being fearful, even though fear is a normal part of human experience.
So, there are large parts of the male population in this country who don't know how to process fear. And then there is this entire industry that is dedicated to planting manufactured fear in those very people. The Republican Party. Fox News. Conservative Christianity. A vast weapons industry whose marketing is based on the specious premise that there is Something to be afraid of, Something from which you need to protect yourself.
The same people whose privilege affords them the luxury of never having to learn how to sit with, how to live a life in the echo of, how to process fear are the target demographic for manufactured fear.
And the less privileged among their ranks—the working class men of otherwise undiluted privilege—have real fear about job insecurity or healthcare access or how the fuck they're going to pay the mortgage next month. They are fears that are out of their personal control, and for which the Fear Manufacturers are happy to provide scapegoats—immigrants and brown people and feminists and kissing boys—lest anyone notice the Fear Manufacturers have been the architects of that real insecurity, too.
What is one to do when one has no capacity to process fear, no ability to sit with it and live with it, no developed strategies for coping with fear?
Well, in a lot of cases, one buys a gun.
And when that doesn't make the fear go away, one buys another one. And another. And another. And magazine clips that shoot more bullets. And more deadly bullets. And so forth and so on.
Only privilege masks the material difference between feeling safe and being safe, to only the latter of which is one actually entitled. A threat to one's privilege is not actually a lack of safety. It's a feeling of insecurity, which is the closest thing to the existential threat with which marginalized people live every day that many privileged men will ever experience.
"He felt threatened." That isn't good enough. It can't be. Not in a culture where we fail utterly to teach privileged male people that it's okay to be afraid, and how to live with fear.
Fear is a part of a mortal life. Only privilege makes it seem like it could ever be otherwise.
Michael Dunn's Trial Begins in September
John Henry Spooner's Trial Begins This Week
[Content Note: Racism; guns; eliminationist violence.]
Last June, I wrote about the murder of 13-year-old Darius Simmons, a black boy who was shot point-blank with a shotgun by his then-75-year-old white neighbor, John Henry Spooner, because he believed Simmons had stolen $3,000 worth of guns from him. Simmons, who was in school at the time of the robbery, was taking out the garbage when Spooner confronted him. When he denied having stolen the guns, Spooner killed him.
Spooner's trial begins this week in Milwaukee, with only one black juror.
Spooner, who is charged with first-degree murder, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. This, despite the fact that, the morning of the murder, he told a local alderman, "There are other ways to deal with situations," after complaining that police had not arrested his young neighbor.
There are supposed to be "no similarities" between this case and George Zimmerman's killing of Trayvon Martin, "except for the race of the victims," as if that's irrelevant. Of course it is relevant. It's also not the only similarity in the cases.
Both unarmed black boys were specifically targeted by not-black men carrying guns who suspected them of robberies they had not committed. Both of the not-black men carrying guns had a habit of calling 911 to report "suspicious activity" in their neighborhoods. Both of the victims were treated like criminals: Trayvon is black boy who went on trial for his own murder [credit: Syreeta McFadden], and Darius is a black boy whose body laid on the sidewalk for two hours, while his mother was questioned in a police car, their home was searched, and his older brother was arrested for having truancy tickets.
Will there be justice for Darius Simmons? Milwaukee, we are watching.
Transcripts!
An update on the on-going project to transcribe the Wendy Davis filibuster and (volunteers willing!) the Senate debates, House debates, and citizen testimony.
1. I have sent out thirteen hours worth of filibuster to transcribe. That's a lot of hours! If your codename was reasonably low on the assignment list, check to see if you have something, because you very well might!
2. The filibuster was 16 hours of footage but the last 3 hours or so was mostly milling about while the senators talked behind closed doors. So I'll probably put up a big in-which-nothing-happens block on YouTube that won't need to be transcribed.
3. Speaking of empty space! If your assigned video goes all quiet while they argue up at the dais for a looooong time, I probably cut the video off before they started talking again. So zip to the end and if there's still talking, you're done with your clip.
4. I'd like to do the remaining videos in the following order: The House debate, the Senate debate, and then the citizen testimony. This is slightly out of order from how events transpired, but I'd like to get it on record with the Republicans turning down amendments that would save lives. Campaign posters will need this stuff, I think. (I hope!)
5. I continue to be the bottle-neck and I apologize. I've been working this day and night, but it just takes a tremendous amount of time to cut, upload, send out, and take in everything. I know bunches of you are still waiting for an assignment and it will come. I apologize for the delay.
6. If you'd like to help in the meantime, I could very much use eyes and ears on the mega-file on Google Docs. Do all the links lead to where they're supposed to lead to? Are all the words right? Is something confusing that needs an editorial note? That sort of thing.
I think that's all for now. I cannot thank everyone enough for the overwhelming amount of support you have all given. Thank you so, so much.
Question of the Day
What is your favorite hidden (or not so hidden) unusual talent?
I am really good at replicating other people's handwriting. Not so good that it would pass an analyst's muster, but to the casual eye, I can copy pretty much anyone's handwriting after just looking at it, especially if I watch them write and see how they hold the pen(cil). I've never used it for nefarious purposes (and never would), but it's a fun party trick! And useful when I forget to have Iain sign a card before I need to mail it, heh.
Daily Dose of Cute
Zelda
Two years ago today, Iain and I walked into the local humane society and fell in love with a little black-and-tan mutt who didn't even have a name. We brought her home and gave her the name Zelda, which is either a variation on the German name Griselda, meaning "dark battle," a forever reminder of where we found her, or a Yiddish name meaning "happiness," a forever reminder of what we've promised her.
She is a splendid companion, and such a happy wee thing that it is almost impossible to be grumpy in her presence. I just look at that grinny face and those big brown eyes and try to remember, always: "It's a day!" Especially on hard days.
She is a bright light in my world. I can't say it any more plainly that that. And I am so grateful that she is part of our family.
Zelly and me, snuggling on the couch last night.
This Is Not a Post About Trayvon Martin
[Content Note: White supremacy, violence and murder against Black people, white privilege, judicial injustice.]
This is not a post about Trayvon Martin.
It’s a post about Emmett Till, a Black teenager who went to the store for some candy and unknowingly transgressed a white rule about Black men’s behavior. For that, vigilantes murdered him. When his grieving mother demanded justice, whites rallied around the murderers they had previously denounced. No one was ever convicted of his murder or as an accessory. Despite the fact that the killers of a Black boy walked free, newspapers focused on the anger of the Black community and their dangerous potential for retaliatory violence.
But of course that was all back in the Bad Old Days, and it was terrible, and we can rest easy that things aren’t like that anymore. So this definitely has nothing to do with Trayvon Martin.
It has to do with Herbert Lee, a Black Southern Civil Rights worker, murdered by a white state legislator who claimed self-defense. The jury believed him, and when a Black witness, Louis Allen, attempted to tell the truth, he was murdered too. It’s a telling story of just how much the law and judicial system was tilted in favor of white aggression masked as “self defense,” and how little justice Black folk could expect from that system.
But that was then, not now, and we all know how very wrong those people were. White people are ever so much more enlightened now. So we should learn this story, but we certainly shouldn’t think it has anything to do with Trayvon Martin. Because this post is not about him.
It is about Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, two teenage boys lynched in Marion Indiana, in 1930. As Shipp and Smith’s bodies, gruesomely mutilated, hung on display for the large white crowd, a white photographer snapped a picture. Ironically, that picture has become an iconic representation of a “Southern” lynching. But lynching was not just a Southern problem, as the Marion case graphically illustrates. Calling it one erases the role of whites across the country in maintaining white supremacy.
Of course, Black teenagers only had to fear for their lives back in the Bad Old Days, not now. (And even if they do, which they don’t, it would probably only be a problem in some other part of the country, because the North is more racist than the South, or is it the other way around?) But this definitely has nothing to do with the way white people talk about the treatment of Trayvon Martin, because no white person has said his death was just a Southern thing or “what do you expect from Florida?”
Because white people have come a long way! Back in the days of abolition, white people were often indifferent to slavery, when they weren't downright positive about it. Even people who weren’t slaveholders defended slavery. It benefited them in other ways, notably by reinforcing the race hierarchy that granted even the poorest whites status. Only when Northern whites felt themselves threatened (by the provisions of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act) did abolition become a fairly popular cause in free states. So large swaths of white people could only get worked up about Black oppression when it started affecting white people too. Because the Bad Old Days were bad like that.
Fortunately, it’s not like that any more; we certainly don’t hear white people saying things like “it’s about class, not race!” as a strategy of re-centering oppression around themselves. So none of this has any bearing on Trayvon Martin’s case.
After all, white people have totally changed. It’s not like it was when Martin Luther King Jr. penned his Letter From a Birmingham Jail. Too often we don’t learn about how King was viewed as a dangerous, un-American radical. And not only by Southern white racists, but by ostensible white moderates. If Black people broke unjust laws, even in peaceful protest, well, that was a terrible thing and could riots be far behind? King chided these moderates for insisting that Black people remain patient, for insisting that law and order must be carried out rather than justice be done.
Fortunately, today everyone—even Glenn Beck!—loves Dr. King. So we definitely won’t find “reasonable” white moderates defending bad legal decisions by saying “well, the law had to be carried out, even if it was bad” or explaining that Black people just have to be patient with this stuff or mislabeling peaceful protests as “race riots.” You’d have to be silly to think that had anything to do with the outcome of Trayvon Martin’s case.
And white progressives have definitely come a long way too! Can you imagine that where was a time when white reformers simply gave up on the cause of justice for Black people? Most of the Republican party was happy to abandon Reconstruction in the 1870s, leaving Southern black people in the care of ex-Confederate state governments. White violence, whether legal or extralegal, returned as an accepted tool to keep Black people “in line.” Terrorism against Black people was the rule of the day, abetted by apathy among white progressives.
Thankfully, white progressives would never become apathetic about racism today. Never! So this definitely has nothing to do with Trayvon Martin.
Nor does it have anything to do with Marissa Alexander. Or Jordan Davis. Or CeCe McDonald. Or the 120 Black people killed by police, security guards, or self-appointed law enforcers since January 2012. Or any of the Black children for whom gun violence is a leading cause of death.
Because it’s simply impossible that white USians could be repeating the sins of the past.
I have been teaching history for 10 years; when they enter my classroom, the students all know that the Bad Old Days were bad! But (say the white students) everything is fine now!
They have learned to say how bad things were. But they have also learned never to draw a connection to today. They can read it, they can mark it, they can even learn it, but they refuse to inwardly digest it.
(My Black students don’t seem to have that problem. Curious.)
And it is not just my students. White people across the United States have learned the fine art of castigating the past while ignoring the present. They know what the patterns of racism look like; they just refuse to see them. So the gutting of the VRA is fine, gun owners are the really oppressed people, Black people are just too angry and unreasonable about the death of their children, and white control of the media, government, and finance is all JUST and GOOD and the way it should be!
And so. This can’ t possibly be a post about Trayvon Martin.
Although I certainly hope you think it is.
Quote of the Day
[Content Note: Guns; racism.]
"The NRA and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the conservative lobbying group responsible for drafting and pushing 'Stand Your Ground' laws across the country, insist that an armed citizenry is the only effective defense against imminent threats, assailants, and predators. But when George Zimmerman fatally shot Trayvon Martin, an unarmed, teenage pedestrian returning home one rainy February evening from a neighborhood convenience store, the NRA went mute. ...Where was the NRA on Trayvon Martin's right to stand his ground? What happened to their principled position? Let's be clear: The Trayvon Martins of the world never had that right because the 'ground' was never considered theirs to stand on."—Robin D.G. Kelley, in "The U.S. v. Trayvon Martin: How the System Worked."
[H/T to Tressie.]
CeCe McDonald Still In Jail
[Content note: Racism, trans* phobia, violence, rape]
This seems to me like as good a time as any to remind folks that CeCe McDonald is still in jail.
Two years ago, McDonald and her friends were attacked on a Minneapolis street by people yelling racist, homophobic, and transphobic slurs. One of the attackers stabbed McDonald in the cheek, leaving her with stitches. One of her attackers died after being stabbed with a pair of scissors, although McDonald and her attackers differ in their accounts of what happened.
CeCe McDonald is black.
CeCe McDonald is a woman.
CeCe McDonald is trans*.
While one of her attackers was charged with assault and sentenced to 6 months in jail, CeCe McDonald was charged with second degree intentional homicide. McDonald pled down to a manslaughter charge, and is currently serving 41 months in jail. In a men's jail.
I've seen a lot of the people in the media (and otherwise) imply that what happened in George Zimmerman's trial a) had nothing to do with race, and b) was largely a function of Florida's conservative laws. I call bullshit.
--
For more information on how you can support CeCe, click here.
Thanks to @crunkfeminists for the reminder.
In The News
I will be getting all up In The News while Dr. Deeky W. Gashlycrumb is on holiday in an undisclosed location.
[Content Note: Fat bias; rape culture.]
Senators have reached a tentative deal to avert a filibuster showdown. I wish I had one iota of energy left to care about this! Because it is important! But Congress is so broken and the Republicans so unethical and the Democrats so craven that I am zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz whoops I fell asleep for a second!
An aide to Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann has been charged with second-degree misdemeanor theft after getting caught stealing cash from her office. Oops!
A survey of Wall Street employees has found "a ticking economic time bomb" based on the pervasive lack of ethics among financial professionals. Neat!
The Boy Scouts continue to be totally fucking terrible: "Extremely overweight Boy Scouts are banned this year from the scouts' annual Jamboree."
I am not a fan of Sarah Silverman's tweet at the center of this story, but I am VERY AMUSED that it inadvertently tricked Republicans into admitting that mandated transvaginal ultrasounds are rape.
Would you rescue Dave Matthews from the side of the road? I would! As long as he promised not to sing "Crash" while he was in my car!
If you would like to meet the cast of MTV's "Teen Mom 3," here they are! That show seems to be working out pretty great for almost everyone who's on it, so I'm super excited they're doing another season. Also: That was sarcasm, in case I wasn't laying it on thick enough.
Would you like to see Nicolas Cage as your favorite Disney princess? I can't imagine why you wouldn't!
Richard Cohen vs. Reality
[Content Note: Racism.]
Under the truly amazing headline "Racism vs. Reality," which implies right from the outset that the two are mutually exclusive, the Washington Post's Richard Cohen (who may not have chosen the headline, in which case the responsibility for this fetid mess is simply broader), writes one of the most heinous pieces of racism apologia I've read in a mainstream paper in years. It opens thus:
I don't like what George Zimmerman did, and I hate that Trayvon Martin is dead. But I also can understand why Zimmerman was suspicious and why he thought Martin was wearing a uniform we all recognize. I don't know whether Zimmerman is a racist. But I'm tired of politicians and others who have donned hoodies in solidarity with Martin and who essentially suggest that, for recognizing the reality of urban crime in the United States, I am a racist. The hoodie blinds them as much as it did Zimmerman.Wearing a uniform we all recognize. Richard Cohen, I am a 39-year-old white woman married to a 37-year-old white man, and between us we own at least five hoodies. No one—no one—looks at either one of us wearing a hoodie and imagines that we are wearing "a uniform" of "urban crime." The only reason anyone would look at Trayvon Martin and call a hoodie "a uniform" is because he was a black kid. That is the reality of racism.
Where is the politician who will own up to the painful complexity of the problem and acknowledge the widespread fear of crime committed by young black males?Naturally, Cohen is not looking for a politician to acknowledge this fear because it is detrimental to the lives of young black men, like Trayvon Martin who is dead as a result of this very fear-driven hatred. Instead, Cohen is looking for a politician who has the courage, ahem, to acknowledge this fear on behalf of terrified white bigots who are desperately oppressed by people thinking they're racist just because they happen to regard young black men as a violent monolith.
Indeed, where are all the powerful white people with the will to be HEROES by publicly talking about how dangerous young black men are so Richard Cohen and his precious, trembling white cohorts can feel better about their rank bigotry?
No one understands how terrible it is to be so demonized, whines Richard Cohen, as he begs for more white people to publicly demonize black youth.
This does not mean that raw racism has disappeared, and some judgments are not the product of invidious stereotyping. It does mean, though, that the public knows young black males commit a disproportionate amount of crime. In New York City, blacks make up a quarter of the population, yet they represent 78 percent of all shooting suspects — almost all of them young men. We know them from the nightly news.And if there's one thing we know about the New York City Police Department, it's that it isn't compromised by institutional racism. So we can definitely take their suspect stats as sure-fire evidence of how disproportionately violent black men are. Ahem.
Cohen makes not even a cursory attempt to give context to crime statistics: Not demonstrable police bias, not victim statistics (a gang member's life is not worth less, but a gangland shooting is a critical contextual difference elided by white elites publicly wringing their hands about the alleged violent nature of young black men), not the link between poverty and crime, not the myriad potential effects of lifelong dehumanization on one's emotional health, not existent racist frames about violent black men, nothing. Nothing.
And then this:
Crime where it intersects with race is given the silent treatment. Everything else is discussed — and if it isn't, there's a Dr. Phil or an Oprah saying that it should be. Crime, though, is different. It is, like sex in the Victorian era (or the 1950s), an unmentionable but unmistakable part of life. We all know about it and take appropriate precaution but keep our mouths shut.What in the everloving fuck is he even saying?
1. White people—especially older white male liberals!—talk behind closed doors ("whites only") about "crime where it intersects with race" (which is a nice way of saying "I am scared of young black men in hoodies because I believe they are all violent") ALL THE TIME. I have heard these conversations on dozens of occasions in my life, had in my presence by people who presume that I will agree, and they sound exactly the same whether it's white conservatives who are naked racists proudly braying their prejudice or white liberals who are closet racists conspiratorially whispering what they frame as "the reality" about which they're "not allowed" to speak publicly.
2. Unapologetic racists talk about "crime where it intersects with race" ALL THE TIME. Go to a gun show, Richard Cohen, and see if you can find anyone there talking about "crime where it intersects with race."
3. Black community leaders, and black community members, talk about "crime where it intersects with race" ALL THE TIME. Cohen's pretty obviously not in the habit of listening to black people, or crediting them with being experts on their own lived experiences, so I suppose this is not of much interest to him. But it is white privilege as thick as custard to assert that this is a subject "given the silent treatment," full-stop.
4. People who are trying to dismantle institutional bias talk about "crime where it intersects with race" ALL THE TIME. There are countless black writers and/or activists who advocate against the racist tropes around black criminality. There are not-black anti-racism allies who advocate against them. There are poverty advocates, educational advocates, nutritional advocates, healthcare advocates, employment advocates, welfare reform advocates, prison reform advocates, immigration advocates who talk about the intersection of crime and race, even if only to point out that institutional neglect begets higher rates of (not white collar) criminality, and communities of color are disproportionately affected by institutional neglect. Of course, none of them/us are having the kind of conversation that Richard Cohen wants to have. The one where "reality" and "racism" are mutually exclusive.
Richard Cohen isn't interested in reality. He's interested in maintaining his white privilege, which entitles him to call "reality" the corrupted information he's filtered through his Validity Prism.
Two Facts
[Content Note: Misogyny; patriarchy.]
1. David Brooks is still being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column.
2. This week's garbage column is like a trophy to garbage.
You really have to read the whole thing, including his extended opening waxing romantic about the John Wayne movie The Searchers, to fully comprehend the scope of the garbagosity of his latest masterwank on the plight of male unemployment, because I'm only going to quote two bits:
The definitive explanation for this catastrophe has yet to be written. Some of the problem clearly has to do with changes in family structure. Work by David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests that men raised in fatherless homes, without as many immediate masculine role models, do worse in the labor force. Some of the problem probably has to do with a mismatch between boy culture and school culture, especially in the early years.Ha ha that sounds familiar! Except I'm not so
But, surely, there has been some ineffable shift in the definition of dignity. Many men were raised with a certain image of male dignity, which emphasized autonomy, reticence, ruggedness, invulnerability and the competitive virtues. Now, thanks to a communications economy, they find themselves in a world that values expressiveness, interpersonal ease, vulnerability and the cooperative virtues.
Surely, part of the situation is that many men simply do not want to put themselves in positions they find humiliating.This is a particularly interesting observation, given that Brooks' "communications economy" is really a service economy. And women are entrained to serve, while men (at least privileged men, which are the only ones about whom Brooks gives a shit) are entrained to be served, so naturally taking a service job after the Patriarchy has assured you your whole life that you are entitled to service, to be expected to provide it instead, is humiliating.
Women, on the other hand, who have long filled service roles, while patriarchal forces conspired to keep women out of manufacturing, construction, and other traditionally "male" jobs, are not meant to find that work humiliating, but instead the natural outgrowth of a biological imperative.
As Erik Loomis notes here, the terrible irony is that the offshoring of traditionally "male" jobs is thanks to the politics of conservatives like Brooks: "The reason why male employment hasn't recovered is because the jobs men used to have no longer exist. That the 20th century economy was inherently sexist cannot be questioned. Men had industrial jobs that became high paying after decades of union organization. The middle-class of salesmen, middle managers, etc., was also dominated by men. Women were in service positions. Now you tell me, which jobs still exist in the United States in 2013? ...What remains is a service economy, with jobs long defined as female. Housekeeping, nursing, child care, entry level office work, Wal-Mart—these are jobs that are available."
Whoops.
Federal Civil Rights Case Might Be Tough
[Content Note: Racism; violence.]
So say anonymous Justice Department officials, even as US Attorney General Eric Holder promises to continue the investigation:
Current and former Justice Department officials said Monday that bringing civil rights charges against George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black 17-year-old in Florida, would be extremely difficult and may not be possible.An acquittal that itself was based on jurors' belief that Trayvon Martin's race was irrelevant to George Zimmerman's actions. In her interview with Anderson Cooper last night, Juror B37 reported that the jury did not believe "race played a role" in the case:
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. vowed to continue a federal investigation of the matter, but other officials said in interviews that the government may not be able to charge Zimmerman with a federal hate crime because it's not clear that he killed Martin because of his race.
..."The Department of Justice couldn't bring this case unless they believe they could prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin because of his race," said Rachel Harmon, a law professor at the University of Virginia and a former prosecutor in the Justice Department's civil rights division.
"It's not enough to show that Zimmerman followed Trayvon Martin because of his race," Harmon added. "They would have to show that he attacked Martin for that reason. ...Proving that motive is why it's hard to bring hate crime charges in general and why it is likely to be hard to bring them in this case."
Privately, several Justice Department officials agreed that such charges would be difficult to bring for several reasons, including the difficulty in proving motive and the challenge posed by Zimmerman's acquittal in state court.
COOPER: So you don't believe race played a role in this case?So, to recap: George Zimmerman stalks and then kills Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman is thus left the only person alive to share his version of the shooting, and he says he did not pursue Martin because of his race. And a bunch of white people take his fucking word for it and give him his gun back and acquit him of any crime because they believe he had a right to stand his ground and do not believe that Martin had a right to stand his. And now it's just that much harder for the Justice Department to prove racial motivation.
JUROR: I don't think it did. I think if there was another person, Spanish, white, Asian, if they came in the same situation where Trayvon was, I think George would have reacted the exact same way.
COOPER: Why do you think George Zimmerman found Trayvon Martin suspicious then?
JUROR: Because he was cutting through the back, it was raining. He said he was looking in houses as he was walking down the road. Kind of just not having a purpose to where he was going. He was stopping and starting. But I mean, that's George's rendition of it, but I think the situation where Trayvon got into him being late at night, dark at night, raining, and anybody would think anybody walking down the road stopping and turning and looking, if that's exactly what happened, is suspicious. And George said that he didn't recognize who he was.
COOPER: Well, was that a common belief on the jury that race was not — that race did not play a role in this?
JUROR: I think all of us thought that race did not play a role.
Because a bunch of racists colluded to abet a racist who engaged in eliminationist violence and defend it with the bullshit fantasy that George Zimmerman would have done the same thing "if there was another person, Spanish, white, Asian."
And let's be frank here: If the white jurors actually believed that shit, they wouldn't have let him go. Because if they actually believed Zimmerman would shoot any fucking person he thought looked suspicious, they wouldn't feel safe themselves with his gun-toting ass on the street.
They know damn well why he targeted, pursued, and killed Trayvon Martin. And I know damn well, too.
No Book Deal for Juror B37
(Background here.)
Sad trombone. I'm so sad (I am not sad) that a woman who told Anderson Cooper last night that she thinks both Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman "were responsible for the situation they had gotten themselves into. I think they both could have walked away," won't be getting lots of money to write a book about all her neat ideas about how unarmed black children who are stalked by gun-toting vigilantes are responsible for any harm that comes to them.
Fuck off, Juror B37.
Question of the Day
It's that time again: What would you like to see asked as a future Question of the Day? Either something that's never been asked, or something that I haven't asked for awhile and you really enjoyed the first time around.
News from Shakes Manor
The good, the bad, and the ugly or pretty, depending on your opinion!
1. The Good: We have air conditioning again! Yay! The new thermostat was finally put in this morning, and the house is cool again, and I no longer look nor feel like a hot tomato that is about to explode at any moment. Thank you so much to everyone who has inquired after us.
2. The Bad: Our garage door broke. Because when it rains, it pours. Coincidentally, we had just been at the feed store picking up dog food and were sympathizing with the owner because one of the cables had snapped on his garage door. And then we went home, and the cable snapped on our garage door! Maybe you shouldn't be reading this if you have a garage door.
3. The Ugly or Pretty, Depending on Your Opinion: As I mentioned last week, Iain had gotten me a tattoo for my birthday. (Obviously, I got to pick the tattoo, lol.) As promised, here's a picture of the new ink, also done in the watercolor style of my previous tattoo:
I gave the basic concept of the thistle and the bee to my tattoo artist, and he designed it. The details of the thorns and of the bee are just amazing. The picture doesn't even do it justice: There are three different greens and three different pinks on the thistle. And the little reflective bit on the bee's eye is just extraordinary. He is ridiculously talented. And just the nicest guy.
The thing I love most about it is the juxtaposition of his precise line-work with the messy color. It's just exactly what I wanted. And he gets it, utterly. I am super lucky to have a tattooist with whom I have such great communication and abundant trust.
Boycott ALEC Corporations
For those who haven't seen me talking about ALEC this morning and what it is, it's a right-wing organization that writes and shops laws like Stand Your Ground and the recent round of anti-abortion legislation sweeping the country. It's hugely well-funded by corporations and is something to be legitimately concerned about if you're not sold on the whole corporate dystopia thing. (More information here and here.)
So remember that cool app that Deeky found a few weeks back that let you organize boycott campaigns? I've used their site (Buycott.com) and this listing of corporate members and sponsors of ALEC to create this handy campaign which lists known members of ALEC to avoid and known ex-members to support. (If you feel like it. Several of them are still pretty evil. Personal needs and teaspoons will vary.)
If you'd like to join my list (oh please oh please oh please do. It will make me so happy as I spent a lot of time on it), you can do so via the following steps:
1. Download Buycott to your smartphone. (Google Play Store & Apple Store have it.)
2. Create a login.
3. Click on the Campaigns tab.
4. Scroll down to All Categories.
5. Pick Civil Rights.
6. Pick Boycott ALEC Corporations. (It should have my name way down in the campaign description.)
7. Join!
Please note: Not everyone has the spoons or ability to boycott any or even all of the things on this list. (And that's okay because that's just how life is.) If you do have the capability and resources to write or call the organizations on this list to ask them to discontinue their ties with ALEC, that would also be hugely powerful. Several of these corporations are big enough that boycotting them might not make an dent, but convincing them that ALEC is too toxic to fund would be just as good in this case.
I Love This Story
[Content Note: Abduction.]
Fifteen-year-old Temar Boggs of Lancaster, PA, rescued a little girl who'd been abducted from his neighborhood last Thursday night:
Boggs, onscreen, a black teenage boy wearing a t-shirt with a pug on it: We were, um, helping an old lady move a couch, and so then, um, a guy came around the corner asking if we saw the little missing girl, and we said no, 'cause we didn't see her. So we went back into the house, and, um, we were watching TV for a little, and Cane's (ph) mother came and said that there was a bunch of cops outside, looking for a little girl, and so we should go look for her."I had a feeling in my stomach that I was gonna find her." I love this kid. Blub.
And so we got like a whole bunch of my friends that I know, like, around Lancaster Arms and Lancaster Green, to go search for her, and we walked a pretty good amount—distance, to look for her, like, in the woods [points in one direction] and where they said she could have been gone [points in the other direction]. And so then we came back, like, we couldn't find her, so we came back, and, uh, the whole block was filled with cops and firefighters.
And so then I was sitting on Joseph's bike—which is the boy you saw me with—uh, his bike, and I had a feeling in my stomach that I was gonna find her. And so then Chris was with me—Chris had a bike, too, so I was going and he said he was gonna come, so I said, "Okay, go, come with me." And so then I went over back there [gestures to an area near where he's sitting], uh, and like in the general area we were before, but I just went a little more deeper over there.
And so I saw this, like, suspicious car. And I looked into the passenger seat; it was a little girl, and I said, "I think that's her." And so we chased—we followed it for about five minutes, and then we noticed that it was—it was her! And so we chased it for like fifteen minutes—chased the car for fifteen minutes around like Gale (ph) Park and that area, like, down those like little streets.
Uh, and so then he went down Gale Park Road—ah, I chased him going down that hill, and he turned around, and I guess he got scared, or offended, or [shrugs] yeah scared, that we were chasing him, and so then he let her out, and she got out—she, like, stood there for a little and then she at—she ran to me. And she said that she needed her mommy.
And so then I put her on my shoulders, 'cause I had the bike—I put her on my shoulders and rode the bike halfway, and then noticed that it was too dangerous to ride like that, and so then I carried her for the past, um, couple meters that I had of getting her to a law enforcement—or her parents.
And so I took her and—well, first she didn't want to leave my arms, because she was scared they were going to do something to her, so I said, "No, they're not going to anything; they're gonna take you to your mom." And she said, "Okay." And she went with them.
CNN has video of five-year-old Jocelyn Rojas' grandmother Tracey Clay giving Temar Boggs ALL THE HUGS.
The suspect in the abduction, described as "a white male between 50 and 70 years old" has not yet been found.
The bravery and tenacity of this kid (and his friends). The decency. He almost certainly saved Jocelyn Rojas' life, on his bike, chasing a car through a series of cul-de-sacs. Wow.
[Note: I realize that the timing of this story will inevitably underwrite the urge to make some kind of observation that juxtaposes this story with the Trayvon Martin case, but it would be very easy for that to lead to a thread that disappears Temar Boggs' individual humanity, so let's keep the focus on him and how he is SO AWESOME. Thanks.]
