Requiem to Trayvon Martin

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Requiem to Trayvon Martin
 by Pachamama

Trayvon Martin

A black child walking to his father’s home in a gated community of Florida is gunned down with malice and forethought yet an all-white jury finds a murdering Hispanic-Jew not guilty by reason of self defense.  This is not the America of the Jim Crow era. It is not the America of the slavery period. It is not the American of the Reconstruction epoch. It is Barack Obama’s America of 2013. 

It took a public outcry to even get the racist government of the State of Florida to even charge the assailant in the first place, in what to most observers seemed a clear cut case for the arrest and charging of Zimmerman, police and District Attorney had to be brought under heavy public pressure for charges to be lodged in the first place. Aldon Maddox, of the Trawana Brawley case in New York, correctly predicted seven months ago that Zimmerman would be freed. How could this be? What is the nature of the American judicial system that a great but illegally disbarred attorney could foretell events with precision.   

Forgetting the institutionalization of racism in the USA and especially in the Southern States we still have a black population that is yet to enjoy equal (human) rights, not civil. For if you are black in Obama’s American and even being less than 13 percent of the population, Blacks males have a 90% higher chance of being stopped and frisked in America’s major cities. Blacks under 30 are 4 to 5 times more likely to be unemployed in Obama’s America. Blacks have a higher morbidity rate than whites. Blacks suffer disproportionately higher incidence of HBP, diabetes, AIDS etc. The negative socio-economic indicators all point in a similar direction and sometimes include other non-white population segmentations. These indicators have all worsened under Obama. 

  

The internecine wars fought by Blacks on Blacks, Blacks on Hispanics, Hispanics on Hispanics for drugs and turf in America’s inner cities has been eating away at the fabric of the American nation for decades. When we add 300 million guns to the mix we have a near civil war. Not that this people who 'founded’ the country possessed any higher moral standers than seen today. The Irish, the Jews, the Italians, the Russians and other major national groupings have, from the very beginning, sought to get ‘theirs’ by the establishment of a range of unlawful activities. It is this history that haunts the American of Barack Obama and will condemn him as utterly useless to the community from which he pretends to come.    

This is the context in which a political action committee (ALEC) can engineer, in 25 states, the passing of conceal and carry legislation, called Stand Your Ground. These fixers represent the gun manufacturing companies. Any day on the streets of any inner city any number of guns could be bought for as little as US$150.00 each. The irony is that the Florida court never seemed to consider that Martin had the same rights as Zimmerman to stand him ground. He was Black and implicitly, in its mind, could not be considered equal. It was Zimmerman, in their minds, with the rights to carry a gun, approach Martin because he was Black, pretend to be a quasi-cop, repeatedly ignored the specific instructions of the 911 dispatcher and initiated a belligerent confrontation with Martin. This cold hearted murderer, Zimmerman, is yet to show any sense of remorse for killing a teenager.  

To say that the Florida prosecutors were inept is an understatement. Racism could be another explanation for the prosecutors treating Martin as the aggressor and Zimmerman as the aggrieved party in their weak defense. Seems everybody wants to pretend that Martin was approached for reasons other than that he was Black. Few want to say that had roles be reversed those same prosecutors, judge and jury would have found ways to bring a guilty verdict.  

The lives of Black people in Obama’s America are even more expendable. This is the same Barack Obama for whom Blacks are his most reliable voting bloc. Yet, Blacks have received nothing from Obama while he will expend lots of political capital, in a faux project, to further entrench the Democratic Party within the Hispanic community.  

The right wing Tea Party types, like Alec Jones, are very comfortable seeing this matter within a false context. Jones lacks any sense of history that is not predicated on white domination. His outfit prefers to see this as an opportunity to protect gun rights and locate this human tragedy within a misconceived coming race war as part of some scheme. The Martin family has rightly steered clear of a characterization that avoids justice as a legal concept.  

The world can see vast contradictions within the American body politic. It should tell us that the historical issues are still raw. Martin joins a long list of innocent young Black American males that have died in tragic circumstances through state sponsored murder, most often at the hands of the police. But even when it is not a police illegal shooting other arms of the criminal justice industrial complex step in to make the results the same. How else can we explain the modern slave system were 80% of all people in American jails are either Blacks or Latinos? Let’s revisit the forces at work within these phenomena. 

We may ignore racism all we want but it will never go away because we simply pretend it doesn't exist!