[I have received some very kind emails in response to my series of pieces on the George Zimmerman trials and his killing of Trayvon Martin. I have been following this case since the beginning and will continue to offer my thoughts and observations on it through to the duration.
Those essays here and on the Daily Kos have brought quite a few new readers to We Are Respectable Negroes. As I do during such moments, I inaugurate an informal fundraising drive.
I do not advertise or monetize my work here on WARN. I also choose not to run advertisements or sponsorship because I want to remain independent. Random monies thrown into the tip jar Paypal bucket are however always appreciated. My work here and elsewhere are labors of love. However, I never refuse encouragement.]
A trial should be a crucible for the truth. While the legal outcome
remains much in doubt, George Zimmerman’s murder trial is a reminder of the
semi-permanence of race and the reality of the color line in post civil rights America .
Those essays here and on the Daily Kos have brought quite a few new readers to We Are Respectable Negroes. As I do during such moments, I inaugurate an informal fundraising drive.
I do not advertise or monetize my work here on WARN. I also choose not to run advertisements or sponsorship because I want to remain independent. Random monies thrown into the tip jar Paypal bucket are however always appreciated. My work here and elsewhere are labors of love. However, I never refuse encouragement.]
****
The Zimmerman trial has revealed several truths so far.
Young, dark-skinned, black women testifying in court about life and death
matters--and who happen to be “working class” or “poor”--are to be savaged and mocked. The myth of the
welfare queen lives on; black, female, and “poor” is to be less than a human
being. She is most certainly not due the most basic amount of human respect or
dignity.
White America is fascinated by black vernacular speech and
how people of color talk in private spaces and among ourselves, as opposed to in
public spaces or other interactions where we are subjected to the White Gaze.
The comments on Twitter, other social media, and the
Internet at large, have revealed how one’s relationship to the truth is also
very much a function of racial attitudes and political orientation.
Zimmerman’s supporters believe that he is a “victim” and
black folks are existentially obligated to submit to white people (and those
who identity with White Authority) at all times and in every situation. Most of
Zimmerman’s supporters do not know about America ’s long history of slave
passes, white slave patrollers, or Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney’s
infamous ruling in the Dred Scott case that black people have no rights that
whites are obligated to respect. Yet, they echo such sentiments across time and
space with ease.
Trayvon Martin’s advocates see in his killing one more
example (among many thousands) where in the United States, black life is deemed
to be cheap and expendable; African-Americans are presumed guilty until proven
innocent—even while walking down the street and minding their own business.
While ostensibly a means of getting at the truth of what
happened that rainy and dark evening, Zimmerman’s trial has also been a
spectacle and a carnival sideshow in America ’s centuries-long racial
theater.
While talking on the phone to his friend Rachel Jaentel, Trayvon Martin apparently called George Zimmerman, the man who followed him in a
vehicle, exited it with a gun, and pursued him against police instructions, a “creepy ass cracker.” In a twist of thinking, and an inversion of what studied, learned,
and reasonable people understand about the realities of race and power in
America, for colorblind conservative racists, George Zimmerman has been
magically transformed into a victim of “reverse
racism.”
Such a troubled relationship to the truth would be the stuff
of a great comedy sketch if these serious matters did not involve a young
person shot dead by a wannabe cop who imagined himself as possessing a license
to kill.
The truth can also be inconvenient: by virtue of his actions
and character, George Zimmerman is in
fact a "creepy cracker."
The origins of the word cracker are uncertain. What we do
know is that Trayvon’s use of “cracker” drew on a long history of mass racial
violence by whites against African-Americans that began with the transatlantic
slave trade and the plantation system in the “New World .”
“Cracker” is
evocative of the sound of the whip, wielded by a white overseer or slave owner,
as it lashes and tears black flesh. Cracker is a word that embodies white on
black racial violence and tyranny.
Cracker is in no way equivalent to the word nigger.
Were millions of white people killed and enslaved by blacks
holding the lash and calling them “crackers?” Were there signs that segregated
whites from blacks that read “no crackers need apply” or “crackers sit in the
back of the bus”? Were white people burned alive, their bodies defiled,
postcards taken of their corpses, and public gatherings where blacks killed
“crackers” by the thousands? Were there racial pogroms where blacks running
amok, pillaging, raping, murdering and destroying property at will, yelled out
for the blood of “crackers” in places like Tulsa ,
East St. Louis , Chicago , and Rosewood? Were there sundown
towns that had signs on their outskirts which told "crackers" “not to let the sun
set on them here” or they will be killed?
No. To suggest that the words "cracker" and "nigger" are at all similar is
an act which is both intellectually dishonest and a lie.
History is rife with cruel coincidences and ironies. For
decades, Sanford , Florida Sanford , Florida
When Trayvon Martin called George Zimmerman a cracker he was
channeling a sense of existential dread and fear of white racial violence. Trayon’s
worries were prescient. George Zimmerman would later shoot and kill Trayvon
after racially profiling him.
George Zimmerman is
also a creep.
George Zimmerman stalked and followed an innocent person on
a rainy night. Strangers with loaded
guns following innocent people around in the dark are almost by definition
“creepy.” George Zimmerman has been accused of sexually molesting a relative.
He has been visited with a restraining order for domestic battery. Zimmerman has also been in fights with the police. On the evening he shot and killed Trayon Martin, he was taking a medication which can cause anxiety, violent impulses, aggression, and
hallucinations.
As demonstrated by his many phone calls to the police,
George Zimmerman is obsessed with harassing and confronting black people who he
feels do not “belong” in his neighborhood. Zimmerman is such an extreme Negrophobe that he has even called the police on a black child who was walking down the
street.
The throaty rasps of his call to the police and anger that “fucking punks. those assholes they always get away” was that of an obsessive, one whose exhalations
were more suited for a phone sex line than a 911 call. George Zimmerman’s
obsession with black people and vigilante-ways were that of a deviant, and yes,
a creep.
The efforts by colorblind racists, the White Right, and
Zimmerman’s defenders to invert reality so that he is a “victim” of “black
racism” in the guise of the word “cracker” is part of a larger social dynamic
in the Age of Obama. Recent public opinion research has revealed how white folks now believe that “anti-white” "racism" is a bigger problem than systematic discrimination against people of
color in the United States .
Fantasies of white oppression are not just the product of
disinformation circulated by the Right-wing media. They do serious political work by legitimating the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and affirmative
action, as well as distracting the public from how white racism and white
privilege continue to systematically disadvantage people of color to the detriment of the country’s economy.
A yearning for a belief in the lie of “white oppression”
also fuels the rise of the militia movement and domestic terrorists who believe
that Obama is not a legitimate and democratically elected President. The logic
which tries to falsely equate “cracker” and “nigger” is also operative in the Herrenvolk
dreams of the Tea Party and the Republican Party’s efforts to resuscitate the Confederacy and Civil War era controversies about secession, nullification, and “states
rights”. Ultimately, the lie of “reverse racism” and “white oppression” is a
means to rewrite history in order to legitimate White power and dominance.
The simplest definition of racism is that it consists of
power plus prejudice. On the night when George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin,
it was Zimmerman with both the power of the gun and who prejudged an innocent
person walking down the street by virtue of their skin color as a threat.
Such behavior has been the modus operandi and habit of
“creepy ass crackers” in the United
States for centuries.
