Re Trayvon case: Civil War never ended

~ odd man out

From the New Yorker:

…The shooting death of Trayvon Martin (black, male, seventeen, unarmed save for a packet of candy and a bottle of iced tea) did not so much raise questions as it confirmed suspicions: that we remain stratified or at best striated by race, that “innocent” is a relative term, that black male lives can end under capricious circumstances, and that justice is in the eye of the beholder—ideas that are as cynical as they are applicable. At this juncture, events in Sanford, Florida, suggest the benefit of the doubt in the shooting of a black teen-ager extends even to unauthorized, untrained, weapon-toting private citizens who pursue unarmed pedestrians.

That the Justice Department announced a probe and a grand jury has been convened is likely a result of the outrage seething across multiple social-media platforms, television, and traditional corporeal protesting. Yet the failure of the Sanford police department to make an arrest nearly a month after Martin’s death, and the fact that if it weren’t for half a million petition signatures and national outrage this shooting would have gone uninvestigated, has already confirmed yet another assumption: our worst problem is not cynicism, it’s the frequency with which that cynicism proves accurate.

Published by odd man out

7 thoughts on “Re Trayvon case: Civil War never ended”

  2. I don’t think so, lless. Cynics are everywhere; I’m a cynic, you’re a cynic, and there are as many cynics as there are assholes. That doesn’t mean we’re all wise, now does it?

  3. I was nodding my head until this point:

    “that black male lives can end under capricious circumstances.”

    Could we, just once, be aware of female lives at the same time as male ones? Huh? Could we? Go check the statistics, Mr. or Ms. Cobb. Black females are in huge danger all the time, often from crimes most males outside of prison don’t even face. Was it necessary to say “black males”? Wouldn’t the sentence have been truer if you’d said “black lives”?

    Aargh.

    (Sorry, Susie, for going off on a tangent. Nothing wrong with the main point of the article. I couldn’t agree more. But I’ve had it to here with eliding half the human race from discussion. Especially when the article is about the evils of bigotry.)

  4. I’m reminded of a special quote by M.L.K.,Jr. in a letter from a Birmingham jail in 1963, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”. It’s especially relevant these days as we look around the country and witness the Neo-Naz/Jim Crow thinking thats prevelant in the draconian laws being approved in federal, state, and local councils of government supposedly done in the name of “freedom”.

  5. The legalized murder of blacks will not stop as long as Republicans are allowed participate in the electoral process.

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