[Peace-discuss] On Killing Trayvons - The connection between racist police murders in the U.S. and the U.S. sponsored wars in the Middle East

Fri Oct 24 09:28:24 EDT 2014

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  On Killing Trayvons

By davidswanson - Posted on 20 October 2014

This Wednesday is a day of action that some are calling a national day 
of action against police brutality, with others adding "and mass 
incarceration," and I'd like to add "and war" and make it global rather 
than national. This Tuesday, the Governor of Pennsylvania is expected to 
sign a bill that will silence prisoners' speech, and people are pushing 
back 
<http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=10521>. 
A movement is coalescing around reforming police procedures 
<http://www.popularresistance.org/uniting-to-transform-us-policing/> and 
taking away their military weapons 
<http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=10264>. 
And a powerful book has just been published called /Killing Trayvons: An 
Anthology of American Violence 
<http://store.counterpunch.org/product/killing-trayvons/>./

Saving Trayvon Martin would have required systemic reforms or cultural 
reforms beyond putting cameras on police officers. This young man 
walking back from a store with candy was spotted by an armed man in an 
SUV who got out of his vehicle to pursue Trayvon despite having been 
told not to when he called the police. George Zimmerman was not a police 
officer, though he wanted to be one. He'd lost a job as a security guard 
for being too aggressive. He'd been arrested for battery on a police 
officer. He had left Manassas, Va., and its climate of hatred for 
Latinos in which he participated, for Florida, where he was a one-man 
volunteer neighborhood watch group in a gated neighborhood. He'd phoned 
the police on 46 previous occasions. He apparently expressed his 
contempt for Trayvon Martin in racist terms. When the police arrived, 
they let Zimmerman ride in the front seat (no handcuffs, of course) and 
never tested him for drugs, testing instead the dead black boy he'd 
murdered. When public outrage finally put Zimmerman on trial, his 
defense displayed a photo of a white woman living in the neighborhood 
who had nothing to do with the incident but who was used to represent 
what Zimmerman had been "defending." He was found innocent.

/Killing Trayvons/ is a rich anthology, including police records, trial 
transcripts, statements by President Obama, accounts of numerous similar 
cases, essays, poetry, and history and analysis of how we got here . . . 
  and how we might get the hell out of here.

Recently I was playing a game with my little boy that must have looked 
to any observer like I was secretly spying on people. I found myself 
thinking that it was a good thing I wasn't black or I'd risk someone 
reporting me to the police, and I'd find myself struggling to explain 
the situation to them rather than yelling at them, and they wouldn't 
listen. "What do I tell my son," wrote Talib Kweli, "He's 5 years old 
and he's still thinking cops are cool / How do I break the news that 
when he gets some size / He'll be perceived as a threat and see the fear 
in their eyes." I remember a character of James Baldwin's explaining to 
a younger brother on the streets of New York that when walking in the 
rich part of town you must always keep your hands in your pockets so as 
not to be accused of touching a white woman. But a set of rules devised 
by Etan Thomas in /Killing Trayvons/ includes: "Keep your hands visible. 
Avoid putting them in your pockets." Opposite advice, same injustice. I 
can recall how offended I was when, as a young white man, I became old 
enough for a strange woman in a deserted place to hurry away from me in 
panic. Maybe if I'd been black someone would have prepared me for that. 
Maybe I'd have experienced it a lot earlier. Maybe I'd have experienced 
it as racist. Maybe it would have been. But would I have come around to 
the conclusion, as I have, that there's nothing I have a right to be 
indignant about, that people's fear -- wherever it comes from -- is more 
important to reduce than other people's annoyance?

But what about fear that leads to murder? What about white fear of black 
violence that leads to the killing of so many African Americans -- and 
many of them women, suggesting that fear isn't all there is to it? 
Police and security guards kill hundreds of African Americans each year, 
most of them unarmed. In most cases, the killers claim to have felt 
threatened. In most cases they escape any accountability. Clearly this 
is a case of fear to be doubted and treated with appropriate skepticism, 
fear to be understood and sympathized with where real, but fear never to 
be respected as reasonable or justified.

We need a combination of addressing the fear through enlightenment and 
impeding the violence with application of the rule of law in a manner 
that does not treat murdering black kids as what any reasonable person 
would do. We need to rein in and hold accountable individuals and 
institutions -- groups like the NRA and ALEC that push racist policies 
on us. Police and neighbors should not see a black boy as an intruder in 
his own house 
<http://www.blacknews.com/news/black-teen-with-white-foster-parents-mistaken-for-burglar-neighbors-called-police-and-had-him-arrested101.html#.VEV0BYf2eGE> 
when his foster parents are white. They also shouldn't spray chemical 
weapons in someone's face before asking him questions.

The editors of /Killing Trayvons,/ Kevin Alexander Gray, Jeffrey St. 
Clair, and JoAnn Wypijewski put killing in context. What if Trayvon 
actually got into a fight with his stalker superhero? Would that have 
been a good reason to kill him? "It takes a jacked-up disdain for 
proportionality to conclude the execution is a reasonable response to a 
fistfight. And yet . . . high or low, power teaches such disdain every 
day. Lose two towers; destroy two countries. Lose three Israelis; kill a 
couple thousand Palestinians. Sell some dope; three strikes, you're out. 
Sell a loosey; choke, you're dead. Reach for your wallet; bang, you're 
dead. Got a beef; bang, you're dead."

This is exactly the problem. High and low includes supreme courts that 
kill black men like Troy Davis, and presidents who kill dark-skinned 
Muslim foreigners (some of them U.S. citizens) with drones, leading 
Vijay Prashad to call Zimmerman a domestic drone and Cornel West to call 
President Obama a global Zimmerman. Two bizarre varieties of murder have 
been legalized at the same time in the United States. One is 
Stand-Your-Ground killing justified by fear and applied on a 
consistently racist basis. The other is drone missile killing justified 
by fear and applied on a consistently racist basis. Both types of murder 
are much more obviously murder than other instances that have not been 
given blanket legalization.

Stand-your-ground murders are facilitated by racism; and racist 
propaganda that blames the victims protects the killers after the fact. 
Drone murders are driven by profit, politics, power lust, and racism; 
and the guilt of President Obama is sheltered by the prevalence of 
racist hatred for him -- which comes from generally the same group of 
people who support stand-your-ground laws. (How can Obama be guilty of 
any wrong in overseeing a global kill list, when racists hate him?) 
Millions of Americans think of themselves as above the ignorant whites 
who fear every black person they see, and yet have swallowed such a fear 
of ISIS that even giving ISIS a war it wants and benefits from seems 
justified. After all, ISIS is barbaric. If it were civilized, ISIS 
wouldn't behead people; it would have its hostages commit suicide while 
handcuffed in the backseat of police cars.

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