Thursday, July 25, 2013

is obama the same as george zimmerman?


nationalreview | He could have been me. I could have been out on neighborhood watch in my community performing my duties on a rainy night. It could have been me following a young African-American male around in my neighborhood because I did not recognize him, and because my neighborhood had been burglarized by young African Americans. It could have been me lying beneath a young black man who was striking my head against the concrete, my nose broken in a fight gone bad. It could have been me that tragic, deadly night.

It could have been me facing criminal charges for doing nothing illegal that night, presumed guilty of a crime I didn’t commit, and presumed guilty of being a racist, even though I had not an ounce of racism in me, and even though the way I lived my life was proof of that assertion.

It could have been me who, after being acquitted by a jury of my peers in a state trial that never would have happened but for the color of my skin — not even the color of my skin, but what my name suggested the color of my skin might be — soon became the target of an investigation by the federal government.
It could have been me facing a media so hell-bent on turning me into a monster that they said and did almost anything, including doctoring a 9-1-1 call, in order to turn me into something I wasn’t.  

It could have been me who will live with the fact that my actions led to the taking of a young life.

It could have been me. I could have been George Zimmerman.

That was the part of President Obama’s speech I was waiting to hear after his very good — but incomplete — speech about the Zimmerman case. It is true that President Obama could have been Trayvon Martin. But it is equally true that he could have been George Zimmerman.

That’s the thing about real empathy; you have to walk in the shoes of all people, not just the ones you agree with or relate to.

I was waiting for that part of the speech because President Obama is uniquely qualified to give it. Because he is half white and half black, just as George Zimmerman is half white and half Hispanic — just as most Americans are half something and half something else.

Part of the speech given by President Obama was sensitive and filled with the right kind of emotion and tone. The warehousing of young inner-city males in prisons for low-level crimes is a tragedy and also a national disgrace (one, by the way, that white Christian conservatives are working hard to rectify). Disparity in sentencing is a real problem; too many African-American males are sentenced far more stringently than whites who commit similar crimes. And the president was right to talk about the terrible disparity in unemployment rates between white people and African Americans, and the particularly high rate of youth unemployment in our inner cities. White people need to know more about these facts, and President Obama was right to talk about those things.

2 comments:

makheru bradley said...

Dr. West is correct. President Obama has no moral authority on the murder of Trayvon Martin, since he is killing young people in Afrika and Asia, including a 16-year-old American teenager who was eating dinner in an open air restaurant in southern Yemen. However, what moral authority do Smiley and West have to criticize Obama when they were both chained to the Obama plantation last November. They both voted for Obama, the child-killer.

Neither of these Obama critics could manage to break the monopoly which the corrupt two-party system had on their minds, nor could they liberate themselves from the false dichotomy of the greater or lesser evil. They simply could not bring themselves to see that Barack Obama is not the lesser of two evils. He is as Bro. Glen Ford so aptly states, “the more effective evil.”

CNu said...

lol, and he got in trouble for empathizing and giving voice to notions of "poetic justice" - ah well...., since the now increasingly fractious block of afrodemics-2nd/3rd line inheritors-boule gatekeepers can no longer mask their rivalries and contempt for one another and for the hood denizens they long ago left behind - there's nothing but air and opportunity for an avatar of John C. Jamison to reprise a significant change in collective consciousness http://subrealism.blogspot.com/2013/07/black-indians-forcibly-prevented-from.html

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