The national horror currently directed at the murder of Trayvon Martin is a reaction that our White supremacist society has when it is occasionally reflected back at us. This is what you’ve become. This is where your thoughts and actions lead. Your bad-cop fantasies don’t lead to heroics, but rather the murder of your brothers and sisters. Martin and Zimmerman are symptoms. Symptoms of a society fooled into suspecting and hating each other instead of banding together against the real criminals leading us astray.
Immediately most of us feel a sick revulsion at the murder of Trayvon – there’s that piece of humanity that still understands that an African American youth is not the walking crime-spree we’re taught that he is. But there are those who would use this as an opportunity to reinforce the daily dose of racism our culture feeds us. Members of the reactionary Right will tell us absurdities that either make Martin’s murder a logical conclusion or a more innocent, easier to swallow “wrong time, wrong place” scenario. That Trayvon, being a Black teen (wearing some sort of “gangsta” affiliated “hoodie” sweatshirt) wandering (looking suspicious) a gated community (usually code for rich and White, though not entirely correct in this circumstance) was an obvious target. Zimmerman’s history of violence will be discounted and his act given a silent nod.
I’ve already seen propaganda created by neo-nazis like StormFront that try to use false images of Martin to depict him as a “gangsta” youth found more often in White nightmares than in our communities. Trying to distill Zimmerman’s racial ancestry in order to turn this into minority-on0minority crime that vigilant Whites must be prepared to protect (read: attack) themselves from. But these are extreme cases. When Fox News can tell us that Martin’s sweatshirt was as much to blame for his death as was Zimmerman’s bullets, it packs the same message as a Klan’s burning cross; that Trayvon was an other, and a dangerous other at that. Fox’s is just a bite size helping.
Until we can recognize that the our gated communities are nothing more than a symptom of a people so frightened of each other as to seek the leadership of actual psychopaths and monsters to protect them, we will continue to attack ourselves and suffer. When we can recognize that a hooded sweatshirt in a gated community is exponentially less dangerous than a business suit in a financial district, we will watch our livelihoods diminish and our brothers and sisters become criminals.
To deny it is to be intellectually dishonest. To not see it is to be part of it. The simple truth is that U.S. society has cultivated a disgusting racism to Arabs and a hypocritical prejudice to Islam. These blights do nothing to protect us, but rather excuses the crimes our government has committed and continues to commit in our names; it provides excuses for our imperialist campaigns; and blinds us to institutional genocide. If a better world is something you seek, you know it cannot be achieved while we are divided amongst ourselves and the real thieves of our era run free.
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It’s been a little longer than my usual writing interval and I’m feeling comfortable blaming it on work being very busy and the summer heat making me feel lazy. Lately, everything I see in the news lately is about this bullshit mosque controversy and the midterm elections. I guess the campaign to keep us in line for the coming election is in full force.
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There’s a host of great reasons why the mosque being constructed near Ground Zero delights me. Despite my atheism, the construction of this holy place is really quite a great symbol for the culture of our country. Not because of some romantic idea about healing or tolerance. If we were going to pat ourselves on the back and congratulate one another over ideas like that we would only serve to increase whatever intellectual dishonesty we care to indulge ourselves in. No, there is no healing or tolerance for the individuals building this mosque and the “controversy” surrounding its construction only proves it. With conservatives doing everything but donning white gowns and burning the site (and let’s be honest, they can’t always hold back), liberals are either too afraid or racist to stand up for what’s right. Even “the nation’s premier civil rights/human relations agency”, the Anti-Defamation League, has come out against the mosque with the cowardly rebuttal that “ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right.” Suddenly, when Arabs are involved, those “rights” become quaint.
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Helen Thomas’ recent comments, however inartful they may have been, are essentially correct. The Zionist government of Israel needs to be dissolved. While the Rachel Corrie and her passengers were not killed like previous attempts to bring aid to Gaza, the aid supplies were again prevented from reaching a people that desperately need them. The crimes against humanity Zionism has been responsible for eliminate any possibility that it can or should be party to any “two-state” solution and like any reactionary, repressive, superstitious, racist ideology – it should be removed from power. That Israel’s modern origins spring from the events of the holocaust, makes the holocaust it imposes on Palestinians all the more disgraceful.
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Apparently not. I saw this on Matthew Yglesias’ blog a bit ago and didn’t immediately do anything with it as I was curious whether it would ever be widely reported. Much to my dismay it wasn’t and had it not been for Yglesias’ report on it, I unfortunately would not have seen it at all. What its lack of reporting means to us makes it all the more unfortunate.
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While conservatives said we were overreacting and helping to put America in danger, we tried to warn that Arizona’s new racist immigration bill would lead to increased racial profiling and harassment of Latinos. Unfortunately, Republican Governor Jan Brewer signed this bill into law over the weekend. However this bill, now law, only strengthens the police’s ability to discriminate and intimidate minority groups.
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Arizona’s new racist immigration law targeting Latinos has so many dark historical precedents it’s hard to see how it could be proposed in our time. The “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” has until Saturday to be signed or vetoed by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and is widely viewed as the most anti-immigrant proposal in recent years. Now anyone who is or looks like an immigrant will have to carry papers declaring their status in our country at all times.
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How has this not become an unacceptable symbol in our society? How is it that people are allowed to use some bullshit excuse of “heritage” or “pride” regarding this? I’d compare it to Nazism and swastikas but that’s really lost it’s meaning with the banal, ad nauseum usage they receive and because no one needs to prove Godwin’s Law to make this point. So how is it that elected officials who are, at least in theory, supposed to represent all his or her constituents allowed to embrace such a hateful and divisive symbol?
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Since around the summer of 2008, a group of angry people who have currently coalesced under the banner of the Tea Party have been using every opportunity to obstruct much needed progress in our country. They march under demands and vague calls for smaller government, for “real” Americans to “take back” America, a rollback of every aspect of the welfare state, and lower taxes. They endorse mythical conspiracies about Obama’s birth place, his religion, czars, his supposed role in biblical prophesy, “big government”, and a series of other bogeymen they’ve been told to be very scared of.
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