Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 4: Trayvon Martin (3)

Charlie Pierce gives us a great description linking the Lost Cause ideology of white supremacy to the climate in which the lynch-murder of Trayvon Martin took place (The 'Color-Blind' Delusions of the Trayvon Backlash Esquire Politics Blog 03/27/2012:

It Is Never About Race. All those people arguing down through the years that the Civil War was about dueling conceptions of nationhood, or a clash of incompatible economic systems, or the ramifications of the 10th Amendment were all arguing, after all, that It Was Not About Race. Massive Resistance in the South in the 1960's was about resistance to overweening federal power because It Was Not About Race. The Wallace campaigns, and the politically profitable adoption by modern conservatism of the leftover tropes and trappings of American apartheid was about the embattled white middle-class in the North and not About Race because It Is Never About Race. Ronald Reagan kicked off his campaign talking about states rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, not far from where they dug three civil rights workers out of a dam, because he wanted to show that a new paradigm had been established in American constitutional history, and it was not About Race because It Is Never About Race. Amadou Diallo was Not About Race. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, which tracks such things, dozens of children are currently serving sentences of life without parole, of whom two-thirds of them are children of color, as a result of laws passed by legislators wanting to look tough on crime, and those statistics are not skewed because of race because It Is Never About Race. George Zimmerman saw a black kid with a hoodie and gave chase with his gun in his hand. But that was not about race, because Joe Oliver and the Sanford police and the oh-so-very fair-minded media are telling us, hell, don't worry, It Is Never About Race.

I despair now of there ever being justice for this dead boy. (Joe Oliver, the enthusiastically televised friend of the accused, is peddling the line that, during the fight, "the gun went off." Pity.) The wagons are circling and the mainstream media are settling into their two-sides-to-this-terrible-tragedy mode, as though losing a fistfight, if that's what actually happened, is an excuse for blowing away an unarmed teenager. This Cannot Be About Race. It's about a terrible misunderstanding, not dissimilar to the tragic mistakes made by the NYPD when it shredded Diallo, or when it ventilated Sean Bell on Bell's wedding day in 2006. It's just another one of those awful events in which nobody's really to blame because we're all human and to err is human, even with a gun, and even when you have no earthly reason but your own fear and poisonous assumptions to stalk a black kid for the crime of possession of snack foods with intent to eat them in the wrong neighborhood. It must be difficult to be a black person in America. You live in a universe replete with unfortunate coincidental events.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2012, lost cause, neo-confederate