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What follows was written by Carolyn Edgar of CNN and by Michael Skolnick of GlobalGrind. I found these excerpts posted together at Racialicious. I have inserted my own commentary in bold and brackets.
Trayvon Martin was a teenaged boy who was walking home from a convenience store. He was not engaged in an unlawful activity. [Other than being Black in the US and walking in a place where non-Blacks live.] He was in a place where he had a right to be – near the home of his father’s fiancée. [He should have had the right to be there.] George Zimmerman followed him [read: stalked him with the intention of doing harm], even after being told by the 911 dispatcher not to. [His fragrant disregard for the counsel of the 911 dispatcher demonstrates to me that he was wanting some form of public attention, or applause, for what he was about to do.] Zimmerman left his vehicle holding a loaded gun and began pursuing Martin on foot. It is plausible to infer that Zimmerman, not Martin, initiated the attack. The tapes indicate that Zimmerman may have been the aggressor in initiating contact with Martin. ["Plausible"? "May have been"? In what moral universe does disregarding the advice of someone trained to deal with crime and crisis, and instead stalking--with a deadly weapon--an innocent person, NOT constitute "initiating an attack"? How could a boy walking from a store where he purchased Skittles to the home of family constitute, and then screaming for help when his live was threatened, constitute "intitiating an attack"? The boy, by all accounts, was not seeking to engage in any way with the virulently white supremacist George Zimmerman. Would anyone think that a Black or Brown man similarly going after a white boy armed with Skittles would be regarded as anything other than behaving with an intent to kill?] Assuming the published reports are true, Martin, not Zimmerman, was exercising his lawful right to “stand his ground and meet force with force” by engaging in an altercation with Zimmerman. [Florida apparently has a law which allows (wealthier and whiter) people to murder (poorer and darker) people who are in their neighborhood if deemed "threatening". But last I heard, carrying Skittles and minding one's own business, such as by talking with a girlfriend on the phone, isn't threatening behavior to residents of a neighborhood.] By questioning why Martin didn’t simply stop and answer Zimmerman’s questions, and characterizing Martin as the aggressor [aren't we supposed to teach kids not to talk to strangers?], Sanford Police Department Chief Bill Lee Jr. appears to have assessed the Martin case using the standards that apply to law enforcement officers. [This puts aside the rather unavoidable issue of white supremacist police forces systematically harassing and mass murdering people of color in the US.] This is wrong. Martin was under no legal duty to obey or to cooperate with Zimmerman in being questioned, because George Zimmerman is not a law enforcement officer. [And if he were? What right should a law enforcement officer have to stop such a youth?]
I got a lot of emails about Trayvon. I have read a lot of articles. I have seen a lot of television segments. The message is consistent. Most of the commentators, writers, op-ed pages agree. Something went wrong. Trayvon was murdered. Racially profiled. Race. America’s [uber-white] elephant that never seems to leave the room. But, the part that doesn’t sit well with me is that all of the messengers of this message are all black too. I mean, it was only two weeks ago when almost every white person I knew was tweeting about stopping a brutal African warlord from killing more innocent children. [Yeah, about that: white celebs and news people, and their followers, are upset about human rights atrocities when whites don't commit them against Black and Brown people; let's see George Clooney speak out against white and male supremacy in the U.S.A.] And they even took thirty minutes out of their busy schedules to watch a movie about dude. They bought t-shirts. Some bracelets. Even tweeted at Rihanna to take a stance. But, a 17 year old American kid is followed and then ultimately killed by a neighborhood vigilante who happens to be carrying a semi-automatic weapon and my white friends are quiet. Eerily quiet. Not even a trending topic for the young man. [Thank you. And in a report about two kids who very negligently threw a shopping cart over a railing, causing a white woman below to be seriously injured, I took note of how many whites made sure to characterize the two youth as "thugs". The first comment on this story at Huffington Post reads as follows:
Again, thank you, Michael.
What I take from all of this is that the genocide of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people is on-going without relief across the Americas, across Central Asia
(including the mass murder of an Afghan family by Sgt. Robert Bales),
and across the globe, by wealthy white male supremacists and their
imperialist militias. We know, too, that millions of women and girls
will be raped, tortured, and murdered by men again this year, for the
"crime" of being female, and that the gynocide will not be reported or understood in these terms.
The
issue of what constitutes crime (including hate crime), terrorism, and human rights violation and who is
immune from any and all laws supporting human rights, will not likely be
discussed by the most structurally powerful members of my society who
engage in criminal and violating behavior. What will be defended in
court by supremely well-paid attorneys is the rights of militias and
rich folks and whites--disproportionately male--to threaten, harass,
terrorise, and mass murder Black, Brown, and Indigenous people by any
means "necessary" to sustain and affirm het white male and imperialist
corporate power.
To sign the petition calling for the arrest of the assassin of Trayvon Martin, please see *here*.
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