Trayvon Martin's "Crime" - Walking While Black (2 posts)

1. Walking While Black - Marian Wright Edelman, Children's
Defense Fund

2. Trayvon Martin - Suspicious Person in the U.S. Empire -
by Dr. Lenore J. Daniels, The Black Commentator

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Walking While Black

by Marian Wright Edelman

Children's Defense Fund
Marian Wright Edelman's Child Watch Column

March 21, 2012

http://cdf.childrensdefense.org/site/MessageViewer?em_id=27281.0&dlv_id=26561

Every parent raising Black sons knows the dilemma: deciding
how soon to have the talk. Choosing the words to explain to
your beautiful child that there are some people who will
never like or trust him just because of who he is -
including some who should be there to protect him, but will
instead have the power to hurt him. Training him how to
walk, what to say, and how to act so he won't seem like a
threat. Teaching him that the burden of deflating
stereotypes and reassuring other people's ignorance will
always fall on him, and while that isn't fair, in some cases
it may be the only way to keep him safe and alive.

But sometimes it isn't enough. It wasn't enough to protect
Trayvon Martin. Seventeen-year-old Trayvon's English teacher
said he was "an A and B student who majored in
cheerfulness." Trayvon loved building models and taking
things apart, his favorite subject was math, and he dreamed
of becoming a pilot and an engineer. Instead, he was gunned
down by a self-appointed neighborhood watch captain
vigilante who profiled him, followed him, and shot him in
the chest. His killer, George Zimmerman, saw the teenager on
the street and called the police to report he looked "like
he's up to no good." At the time Trayvon was walking home
from the nearby 7-11 carrying a bottle of Arizona iced tea
and a bag of Skittles for his younger stepbrother, leaving
many people to guess that the main thing he was doing that
made him look "no good" was wearing a hooded sweatshirt in
the rain and walking while Black. George Zimmerman's
decisions made that suspicious enough to be a death
sentence.

Now there is widespread outrage over the senseless killing
of a young Black man who was doing nothing wrong and the
fact that the man who killed him has not been arrested.
People are trying to make sense of the series of gun laws
that allowed George Zimmerman to act as he did - starting
with the Florida laws that allowed someone like Zimmerman,
who had previously been charged for resisting arrest with
violence and battery on a police officer, to get a permit to
carry a concealed weapon in the first place. Many more
questions are being raised about Florida's "Stand Your
Ground" law, which also has been described as the "shoot
first, ask questions later" law, and gives the benefit of
the doubt to Zimmerman and others claiming "self-defense" by
allowing people who say they are in imminent danger to
defend themselves. Some states limit this defense to
people's own homes, but others, like Florida, allow it
anywhere.

As Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop
Gun Violence, says, this law "has turned common law - and
common sense - on its head by enabling vigilantes to provoke
conflicts, resolve them with deadly force, and avoid ever
having to set foot in a courtroom." The fear in Trayvon's
death is that this is exactly what has happened so far: that
the story told by witnesses, phone records, and Zimmerman's
violent past and earlier complaints during his neighborhood
patrols shows an overzealous armed aggressor who followed
Trayvon even after police told him to stop, chased Trayvon
down when the frightened boy tried to walk away from the
stranger following him, and then shot the unarmed, 100-
pounds-lighter teenager while neighbors said they heard a
child crying for help. The prospect now that Zimmerman might
never set foot in a courtroom for the shooting has caused
widespread frustration and fury.

Just as sadly, Trayvon's death was not unique. In 2008 and
2009, 2,582 Black children and teens were killed by gunfire.
Black children and teens were only 15 percent of the child
population, but 45 percent of the 5,740 child and teen gun
deaths in those two years. Black males 15 to 19 years-old
were eight times as likely as White males to be gun homicide
victims. The outcry over Trayvon's death is absolutely right
and just. We need the same sense of outrage over every one
of these child deaths. Above all, we need a nation where
these senseless deaths no longer happen. But we won't get it
until we have common-sense gun laws that protect children
instead of guns and don't allow people like George Zimmerman
to take the law into their own hands. We won't get it until
we have a culture that sees every child as a child of God
and sacred, instead of seeing some as expendable statistics,
and others as threats and "no good" because of the color of
their skin or because they chose to walk home wearing a hood
in the rain. And we won't get it until enough of us -
parents and grandparents - stand up and tell our political
leaders that the National Rifle Association should not be in
charge of our neighborhoods, streets, gun laws, and values.
In Trayvon's case, his father Tracy speaks for what his
family needs: "The family is calling for justice. We don't
want our son's death to be in vain." I hope that enough
voices will ensure that it is not.

[Marian Wright Edelman is President of the Children's
Defense Fund whose Leave No Child Behind mission is to
ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair
Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful
passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and
communities. For more information go to
www.childrensdefense.org.

Mrs. Edelman's Child Watch Column also appears each week on
The Huffington Post.]

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Trayvon Martin - Suspicious Person in the U.S. Empire

by Dr. Lenore J. Daniels

The Black Commentator

March 22, 2012 - Issue 464

http://www.blackcommentator.com/464/464_ror_martin_cover_share.html

    Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be
    truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the
    functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking
    questions.

    -Primo Levi

    Nihilism is a direct consequence of the helplessness and
    powerlessness that unrelenting class exploitation and
    oppression produce in a culture where everyone, no
    matter their class, is socialized to desire wealth - to
    define their value, if not the overall meaning of their
    lives by material status.

    -bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters

White House Press Secretary, when asked by a reporter if the
President has any response to the murder of an unarmed 17-
year-old Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, 28, an armed
with a 9mm gun, referred the reporter (and us) to the law
enforcement in Florida and to the U.S. Justice Department.

This is the same law enforcement who thought nothing of
bagging the body of this child, Trayvon Martin and writing
in place of his name, "John Doe."

Self-defense, cried Zimmerman, and, of course, given the
gated community in which law enforcement picked up the
child's body, Zimmerman would be right, would he not? Arrest
for murder - what country do you live in? And besides, and
even most importantly, Martin was Black and Zimmerman is
white!

Of course to Zimmerman, as with most citizens in the U.S.,
Martin would be a suspicious person.

So what crime took place?

The imperialist mindset of the average citizen of the U.S.
is best observed in more towns and cities where the average
Mr. and Ms. Zimmerman defend self, family, neighborhoods,
their right to conqueror and murder, children, too, indeed
the American Way, without the 9 mm.

The imperialist mindset that picks up a gun to patrol a
gated community in Florida is the same mindset that murders
16 unarmed Afghani civilians and conducts illegal wars,
shock and awe. It is the same mindset that murders, maims,
tortures, imprisons and impoverishes millions, causally and
daily, and labels all this carnage progress.

Again, what C.R.I.M.E. took place?

Given all that we citizens are taught to know in this
country, tell me, what crime took place?

In my own neighborhood, in the very liberal and high-minded
town of Madison, Wisconsin, neighbors, neighbors feel
obliged to place the adjective "Black" before the gender
description of a man or woman. "That Black woman" or "That
Black man" is a trigger pulled. It is a body, head in noose,
swinging from a tree, and it is causal and daily - so what
crime took place in Florida?

Remember Oscar Grant and an acquitted Oakland law
enforcement department and Troy Davis and a justified U.S.
Justice system!

After Police Chief Bill Lee's "fair and thorough"
investigation, what more is to be considered? Lee dismissed
charges of "irregularities" (The Miami Herald, March 20,
2012). "Investigators found no probable cause to arrest
Zimmerman because there was no evidence to disprove his
version of events." End of story, right? After all, this is
America!

When the reporter continued his questioning of Carney, he
recalled how Obama reached out to brother Professor Henry L.
Gates. There was kinship every citizens of the U.S. could
recognize. Brothers of the same elk, huh - brothers for the
same cause - protectors rather than protesters - without the
9mm. Many Black women are sisters, too. They are a league,
uncomfortable in their own skins, hateful, as any good
citizen of an imperialist mindset of any threat to the
system.

Only the abnormal accepted as the norm.

What could possibly be criminal in this country, in this
world now where Obama can order the indefinite detention of
anyone, including Americans, anywhere in the world? What is
abnormal about law enforcement agencies and racial profiling
policies, the U.S. Justice Departments criminalization of
Black, Red, and Brown people, and the military-surveillance
apparatus seek out and destroy democracies and pillage the
resources from the majority?

The U.S. Empire sanctions the right to murder with impunity
on behalf of the powerful corporations who build the
detention camps and hasten the death of the majority. It
would be insane, except it is all so normal. This is what
most U.S. citizens are taught to know.

For those "allies" who join in U.S./Israeli imperialist
ventures, there will be contracts and profits! Material
gain, not morality, is the name of the game. You cannot
appeal to the morality of the capitalist rulers and
certainly not to the "appointed" "Black," "Red," "Brown"
leadership, surrogates, when money is the reward.

Suspicious persons, like suspicious nations, are mowed down!

You cannot start singing Gospel tunes and moaning and
channeling Martin L. King. It is a system, a mechanism out
of control, and its machine-like facilitators cannot hear
you because they are dead - morally dead!

It is greed and fear. Keep the "little people" in a state of
fear about each other and we collect all the wealth and
power in the world! No song sung by Mahilia or Aretha will
change this state of affairs, no acquittal-happy justice
system either. Only the people, the citizens themselves,
have the power to rise up and crush the imperialist mindset
from within and without. Then maybe there will not be
another Trayvon Martin or George Zimmerman or Oscar Grant or
Mehserle or 16 dead Afghani civilians or Staff Sergeant
Robert Bales.

[BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean
Daniels, PhD, has been a writer, for over thirty years of
commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and
short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of
cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance
narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and
equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and
community resistance projects that encourage the Black
Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator
of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia
for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern
American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory
(race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University,
Chicago.]

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