Fear of a Black (Male) Planet, Part IV

Remember, I said that I was almost finished.  From one of my favorite blogs, The Phil Dyess-Nugent Experience, There's No Riot Going On.  He's uniformly brilliant in his analyses of American culture, literature and politics.  I don't get there often enough.

And, from a humane perspective, and it dovetails with the work our own West River community is doing, a commentary by Michel Martin, on NPR's Tell Me More an audio essay entitled Is It Time To See Each Other's Tears?

Word.
 

Fear of a Black (Male) Planet, Part III

I'm almost finished.  One thing that saddens me is that as we've turned into an almost entirely secular culture, the voices speaking about the morality of actions exits, or at least merely whispers in, the public square.  In it's place is legalistic hair-splitting, high school debate tactics deracinated of any purpose other than to dominate an opponent.  Amy Davidson posted a thoughtful piece, What Should Trayvon Martin Have Done?, and for me the most valuable byproduct of it is a post by someone tagged theoutsider that comes as close to anything I've read so far of looking at what happened from a moral dimension:

OK, there are a lot of things that bother me about this case, but the thing that's getting to me the most right now is that a lot of people, when talking about how Martin behaved or should have behaved, are talking about him as though he was a fully-fledged adult. I don't personally believe he was a helpless innocent child, but he was also not a fully-grown man. And the reason I find this so irritating is because there are so many laws - not just in America but in many countries - which are predicated on the idea that until a person reaches a certain age (16, 18, 21, whatever) they are not allowed to do certain things largely because they lack the capacity to make good judgements in certain situations. It is assumed (sometimes correctly) that most people cannot make responsible judgements about things like alcohol, driving, sex, smoking, and enlisting until they reach a particular age.

Fear of a Black (Male) Planet, Part II

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Trayvon Martin and the Irony of American Justice.  For me it's this:
 

That conclusion should not offer you security or comfort. It should not leave you secure in the wisdom of our laws. On the contrary, it should greatly trouble you. But if you are simply focusing on what happened in the court-room, then you have been head-faked by history and bought into a idea of fairness which can not possibly exist.

The injustice inherent in the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman was not authored by a jury given a weak case. The jury's performance may be the least disturbing aspect of this entire affair. The injustice was authored by a country which has taken as its policy, for the lionshare of its history, to erect a pariah class. (n.b.: emphasis mine)  The killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman is not an error in programming. It is the correct result of forces we set in motion years ago and have done very little to arrest.

 And, for the record, yes, OJ was guilty as hell.
 

 

Fear of a Black (Male) Planet

When I turned on the radio this morning one of the first things I learned is that George Zimmerman had been acquitted.  I was not surprised.  Long ago I learned that criminal law -- either prosecutorial or defensive -- has little to do with ethics.  I was about to say justice but even that term is loaded.

After have read a few of the past days' postings and the subsequent comments I stopped.  There is very, very little more to be learned from the immediate commentary and too many people commenting think they know 1) exactly what happened and 2) that they passed the Florida bar and are qualified to practice law.  But here are a few, I'll call them psychosocial, thoughts: 

1. Males fight.  And fights escalate.  The presence of a knife or a gun changes the dynamic and it allows one of the fighters to become more aggressive, or at the very least turn defense into disproportionate offense.  When that occurs, 2 things happen:  a) one of the aggressors de-escalates so much so that both parties internal "threat" switch is turned off, or b) extraordinary physical harm and/or death happens to the unarmed fighter.
2. Black males are the King-Kong of the American landscape.  And we all know it.  Charles Stuart knew it.  Susan Smith knew it.  Both used that knowledge to great effect.  Extreme examples, I know, but there was little or no initial skepticism of their claims in each instance that black men had been the perpetrators of the crime because it seemed so plausible.
3. A 17 year old kid is dead.  With an acquittal of the man who killed him, how do you possibly square that circle in a moral universe?

This Has Already Not Ended Well ...

from Esquire's Charlie Pierce who says what I've been thinking and says it 100 times better:

The sawhorses were comforting because the events of the past week are now getting fed into a number of gigantic maws, none of which are likely to do the rest of us any good. They are being fed into the big media maw, with speculation now completely rampant as to what launched the Tsarnaev brothers on their crime spree. While Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was still at large, with a few notable exceptions -- coughNewYorkPostcough -- big media went out of their way to appear responsible. Now, though, with the younger suspect on a respirator at Beth Israel, all the shackles were off, and we spent the day hearing wild speculation of what may have been behind the murderous doings in and around Boston last week. The events also are being fed into the maw of big politics with the federal government invoking the "public safety" exception to the Miranda ruling in connection with a 19-year old who is, at this moment, breathing through a tube and who, anyway, by all the evidence available at this moment, appears to be still little more than Dylan Klebold with a funny name and a pulse.