George Zimmerman, the overzealous member of a neighborhood watch, who shot and killed unarmed teen Trayvon Martin was acquitted by a jury of 6 women. He admitted to the killing but the jury decided he was not criminally responsible for his actions. I can tell you this, if the teen had been white and the shooter black, Zimmerman would be in shackles waiting for sentencing right now.
The verdict goes completely against the way actions that cause deaths are handled in other cases. I appreciate the thoughts of Josh Marshall, editor and publisher of Talking Points Memo:
Singer Kelly Clarkson tweeted that she supported Republican/Libertarian Ron Paul for the GOP nomination. After some push back she clarified that she didn’t support his more homophobic, anti-woman, anti-poor, anti-minority views. Clarkson is entitled to her views but her love of Ron Paul while seeming to ignore the extreme side of him, is troubling.
In covering the news last week that President Obama had the State of Hawaii release his “long form” birth certificate, Jon Stewart and the Daily Show took some shots at several talking heads on MSNBC saying the whole birther issue was racist. I love Jon and the show but this time his quest for equivalency led to a false conclusion.
The tag line for the video clip says it all:
Larry Wilmore claims that the birther controversy isn’t racist — it’s just an opportunity for Republicans to scare old people. (05:11)
The problem is that Stewart and Wilmore ignore the 800 lb gorilla in the room. The questions about Obama’s citizenship would have NEVER come up if he was a WHITE MAN named Steve.
Professor Harris-Lacewell was on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” and she said something profound that will help me explain in the future how you can be racist and not use the N-word or join the Klan and why many white people claim not to see racism, or claim it doesn’t exist, unless it is overt like that.
[I]f you regularly support public policy which will have a disparate impact, creating greater inequality for people of color, that that is racially biased.
OLBERMANN: I was going to ask you about this sincerity of misperception. I`ve always wondered if we`re dealing with the kind of mental euphemism that in previous — when there have been previous backlashes against advances in relations between races, they were still in a time when it was OK to come out and campaign on the “we`ve done enough for them” platform, which was essentially done in 1966 by the Republicans. They won a boat load of seats in the House running on those platforms after the Civil Rights Acts. You can`t say something like that anymore in almost any aspect of society. The fringes, obviously, but not anywhere in the mainstream. Is this inability to see racism and to need to provide a euphemism for it internal? They need to believe there`s no racism, and therefore they don`t see it?
HARRIS-LACEWELL: Maybe, but it could also be simply that we`ve done a really bad job in this country talking about what racism is. So many may feel that if they don`t use the ” N” word or if they don`t actively keep a black person from getting a job or spit on a black person when they see them, then they`re not racist. And we haven`t done a very good job of talking about the fact that if you regularly support public policy which will have a disparate impact, creating greater inequality for people of color, that that is racially biased. And we haven`t talked about, for example, privilege, or we haven`t talked very well in the public about privilege. So that many white Americans feel like, well, I have a difficult circumstance; I`m losing my job; bad things are happening to me. So why should we be talking about race and racism? And we haven`t talking about, for example, how white privilege operates in the context of even, you know, an economic downturn. So it could be, in part, just sort of our fault in terms of a collective incapacity to talk about what racism really is.
The right wing propaganda machine spit out another manufactured outrage about an incident involving the New Black Panther voter-intimidation case from 2008. Not only is it a continuation of the GOP “southern strategy” but it’s also based on false information and omissions. Shocking, right???
The “southern strategy” is basically race baiting to win elections – scare white people about blacks and other minorities.
What the conservative biased media fails to tell you is that there was action taken in the New Black Panthers case and the Bush Department of Justice failed to act on a similar case in 2006.
But Perez noted DOJ’s decision to proceed with default judgment against the man with a weapon [in the New Black Panthers case]
Perez: “[T]hey made the judgment on the merits that we should proceed with the default judgment against the gentleman who was — who had the stick.” Adams’ attack is completely undermined by comments Perez made that were edited out by Kelly. Perez specifically discussed the DOJ’s decision in the Black Panther case to “proceed with the default judgment against the gentleman who was — who had the stick and that the evidence didn’t sustain the case against the national party or the head of the national party for the reasons that we have discussed.”
Perez: “[T]he Department declined to bring any action for alleged voter intimidation” in 2006. In the very testimony Kelly cited, Perez highlighted a case that completely undermines the notion that the DOJ’s decisions in the Black Panthers case were unprecedented or racially motivated. Perez testified that in 2006, the Justice Department “declined to bring any action for alleged voter intimidation” “when three well-known anti-immigrant advocates affiliated with the Minutemen, one of whom was carrying a gun, allegedly intimidated Latino voters at a polling place by approaching several persons, filming them, and advocating and printing voting materials in Spanish.” [U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 5/14/10]
Biased media like FOX News regularly trumps up any incident involving minorities but ignores any incident where the perpetrator is white. Here are racists they don’t show you on FOX.
