Justice for all, p.11
Justice for All, page 11
In fact, Martin was estimated by his mother to be six-foot-two, and had been recently suspended from school three times, for drugs, graffiti, and suspicion of burglary. His social media was filled with references to drugs, guns, and sexual aggression. Zimmerman, who was actually five-foot-eight, was widely condemned as a racist “white Hispanic,” though he is visibly nonwhite, and dozens of people who knew him well came forward to say that he never displayed any racial prejudice whatsoever.
The media embraced the narrative that the killing of Trayvon Martin was a case of racial profiling, white vigilantism, and another instance in America’s long history of murderous hate against black people. Constant comparisons were made between the death of Martin and the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a black teenager from Chicago who was killed while visiting family in Mississippi, after he allegedly sexually harassed a young white woman. The killing of Till became a national scandal, especially after the acquittal of his suspected murderers in a trial that was widely believed to be slanted in favor of the defense.
Noted civil rights leader, popularizer of the term African American instead of black, and erstwhile presidential candidate Jesse Jackson was among the first to compare Martin to Till. “We mourn Trayvon Martin, the young African American who, armed only with candy and a soft drink, was shot dead for the offense of ‘walking while black,’ ” wrote Jackson in late March 2012. “George Zimmerman, the vigilante who shot him, has not been arrested, apparently protected by Florida’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ law, which ‘authorizes’ anyone to shoot someone whom he or she feels is threatening.”
Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law means that people don’t have a “duty to retreat” if they feel threatened, but are allowed to use force to defend themselves. After the Trayvon Martin killing, many pointed to the alleged absurdity of these laws, implying that they provided white southern racists a “fire at will” license to kill black people if they felt obscurely threatened by them. In fact, Stand Your Ground laws provide no such blanket immunity, and there is no racial implication to their application in the real world. Moreover, George Zimmerman did not appeal to Stand Your Ground in his defense—he didn’t have to, because Trayvon Martin was savagely beating him up when he got his gun out and shot him, in a simple use of force in self-defense.
This annoying phrase “X-ing while black,” incidentally, has become a cliché, but in 2012 it still sounded fresh and shocking. “Driving while black,” “shopping while black,” “jogging while black”… any black person who gets in trouble can make the claim that they were merely minding their own business when they were sucked into the vortex of racial brutality that supposedly defines American history and continues to drag innocent people into its whirlpool.
Jackson continued, pronouncing, “Now we must choose: We will decide if Trayvon Martin’s death is a moment, or becomes the spark for a movement. We can’t bring him back. But we can make his voice louder in death than it could be in his short life. Emmett Till’s murder sparked a movement. After he was brutally beaten, his mother put him in an open casket to show the horror that he had endured. Although he was crucified as a warning to others who might demand freedom, his murder gave some the courage to join the civil rights movement.”
The case of Emmett Till remains shrouded in some mystery about what really happened. He appears to have sexually harassed, and probably assaulted, Carolyn Bryant, but it’s unquestionable that the men who killed the teenager in 1955 were not being threatened by him. It was certainly a revenge killing and a lynching. Such qualifying factors did not enter the Martin case at all. Linking Martin—a marginally delinquent youth who seemed to aspire to becoming a gangster—to one of the martyrs of the civil rights movement was grotesque, but also established a new model for representing these sorts of cases to the public.
Barack Obama—facing a tight campaign for reelection later that year—decided to step directly into another local police blotter matter, legitimizing and amplifying the atmosphere of racial hostility around it. In an unrelated press conference a few weeks after Zimmerman killed Martin, the president spoke out about the case, inflaming tensions and passions. “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids, and I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this,” said Obama, who then added his famously fatuous, inflammatory, and unnecessary statement, “If I had a son he would look like Trayvon.”
A year later, Zimmerman was acquitted of charges of murder. This was no surprise: political pressure had led the prosecutors to overcharge Zimmerman. Violent protests broke out across the country. In Mississippi, a white jogger was kidnapped by black motorists, who beat him badly, telling him, “This is for Trayvon.” In Toledo, Ohio, an elderly man was beaten almost to death by six black juveniles who also yelled, “This is for Trayvon!” Los Angeles saw days of rioting, and a news crew was set upon and beaten by a mob.
Obama spoke up again. “You know,” he said, “when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me, thirty-five years ago.” Could it really have been him? Did Obama lurk around neighborhoods, peering into windows? Did he aggressively confront neighborhood watchmen, and pummel them on the ground, raining down punches on their faces?
What’s most pernicious about Obama’s comments is his repetition of the idea that his son “would look like” Trayvon Martin, or that Trayvon Martin “could have been” Obama. In our society it is considered the height of disrespect to imply that people of the same race “all look alike.” But Obama insisted just the opposite. He reduced his and Martin’s identities to their skin color, demanding that everyone participate in the fiction that American society is so mired in reductive stupidity that we refuse to look at anyone past the most superficial element of racial presentation. Barack Obama went to Ivy League schools, became a U.S. senator, and then was elected president, but according to what has become the dominant narrative among the Left, it is only by the grace of God that he isn’t shot dead every day by white vigilantes out for blood.
HOW DARE YOU?
Michelle Obama has made similar remarks. In 2011, the First Lady received some criticism for her love for high fashion and expensive jewelry, so her office arranged for her to go “shopping” at Target, dressed in normal clothes, which a veteran news photographer who was detailed to the White House just happened to be present for. This is the kind of transparent photo op that celebrities regularly engineer to make it look like they’re just plain folks, heading out to buy cotton swabs and dish detergent “on special,” and nobody took it as anything else.
But a couple of years later, the Obamas gave an interview for People magazine about “How We Deal with Our Own Racist Experiences.” Michelle Obama recounted that during her trip to Target she was racially targeted by a shopper. “I tell this story—I mean, even as the first lady—during that wonderfully publicized trip I took to Target, not highly disguised, the only person who came up to me in the store was a woman who asked me to help her take something off a shelf. Because she didn’t see me as the first lady, she saw me as someone who could help her. Those kinds of things happen in life. So it isn’t anything new.”
The idea that First Lady Michelle Obama, possibly the most famous woman in America at the time, regularly celebrated for her beauty, style, and physical fitness, attended (no doubt) by a heavy Secret Service unit and a personal entourage, was expected to do menial labor for a Target shopper who saw her only as a black woman and thus a servant is absurd. The whole thing is nonsense. But it’s exactly the kind of preposterous nonsense that the Obamas demanded we accept, and which the media continues to demand we accept every time the chronicle of injustice against blacks is extended by some new incident.
MAKING THE NARRATIVE WORK
George Zimmerman was not a police officer, so in a sense the Trayvon Martin case doesn’t fit perfectly within the usual narrative. But it’s close enough, since Zimmerman was acting in a kind of auxiliary law enforcement role, so the story was made to fit. The Narrative as it is properly defined involves a (preferably) white police officer who kills a (preferably) black civilian. Ideally, the officer is depraved and vicious, and the victim is totally innocent. As it happens, these criteria are seldom if ever met. But the media keeps trying, doggedly, to find a situation in which a racist white police officer can be found to kill—for no good reason—a black pillar of the community.
I’m not going to belabor the long list of failed efforts to make the Narrative work, but I will run through a few of the more notable cases. In July 2014, a massively obese career criminal named Eric Garner was selling loose cigarettes on Bay Street in Staten Island, in New York City. Local shopkeepers had complained about his presence, and police were detailed to investigate. As officers approached the middle-aged Garner, he indicated that he would not consent to be arrested and insisted that he was being harassed. “This ends today,” he said. Garner resisted arrest, and in the process of being detained, during which he was brought to the ground, he went into cardiac arrest. He died on his way to the hospital.
The Garner case resulted in a series of protests around the country. In New York City, members of the City Council interrupted their own meeting to walk outside and block traffic on lower Broadway, lying on the ground while chanting “I can’t breathe,” which were Garner’s last words as the exertion of fighting several police officers initiated an asthma attack. In the end, a grand jury refused to indict the officers involved in Garner’s arrest, and the U.S. Department of Justice similarly declined to pursue charges.
A few months later, in Ferguson, Missouri, a teenager named Michael Brown stole a box of cigars from a convenience store by use of force; cameras captured him shoving the owner of the store. A police officer saw Brown walking in the middle of the street a short time later and tried to question him. Initial reports emerged that Brown raised his arms in the air and begged, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” after which police officer Darren Wilson assassinated the teen in cold blood, for no reason at all.
This case exploded. Protests were held around the country, and riots in Ferguson led to the burning of the city’s downtown business district. President Obama (predictably) weighed in and dispatched Attorney General Eric Holder to Ferguson to monitor civil rights violations against rioters and arsonists.
After lengthy investigations by the DOJ, it was determined that nothing about the initial reports of the Michael Brown case was correct. He did not raise his hands and say, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” He reached into Darren Wilson’s car and tried to take his gun, which went off in the car. Brown charged at the officer after being told to stop. It was at that point that he was shot.
FERGUSON EFFECT
Hostility toward the police intensified around the country starting around this time. Former NYPD commissioner Howard Safir described anti-police sentiment as at a fifty-year high. Crime began to spike, and police, reluctant to pursue crime proactively, adopted a reactive posture vis-à-vis fighting crime, which then continued to rise. This vicious cycle became known as the “Ferguson Effect,” and while academic sociologists bicker about whether it’s real or not, street cops have no doubt that it’s happening. Now that everyone with a cell phone is a photojournalist, every police interaction, no matter how normal or justified, can be taken out of context, edited, and amplified by liberals in the media to promote the narrative that police are violent, racist brutalizers. If you are a cop, are you going to volunteer to leap into a tense situation, knowing that you could be the next to be vilified as a civil rights violator, or will you sit back, “work to rule,” and let the brass figure out the next steps?
Shortly after the death of Eric Garner, the new mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, organized a “roundtable” on police–community relations. De Blasio put himself at the head of the room, with NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton to one side, but surprised everyone by seating the notorious race-baiter Al Sharpton on his other flank. The message was clear: Al Sharpton, who made his name condemning the police, promoting the Tawana Brawley rape hoax in the late 1980s, egging on violent protests in Brooklyn and Harlem, and defending rapists, thugs, and all sorts of scum, was equal to the city’s top cop in the eyes of the mayor.
Sharpton punked the mayor and the NYPD at that meeting, saying that Garner’s death was a racially motivated murder. “I heard the commissioner say race wasn’t involved,” scoffed Sharpton. “We don’t know that. How do we assume before an investigation that a policeman with two civil rights violations didn’t have race involved? So we gonna prejudge what we want and tell the community to wait on the results?” The image of Sharpton, who had spent the last three decades doing everything he could to poison race relations in New York City, scolding the mayor and police commissioner told New Yorkers who was really in charge when it came to public safety and law enforcement in Gotham.
“THE TALK”
Things got even worse a few months later after the grand jury declined to indict Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who pulled Eric Garner to the ground while subduing him. At a press conference, surrounded by black council members and other dignitaries, de Blasio referenced his son. As he never tired of reminding everyone, de Blasio had married a black woman (Chirlane McCray) and had two black children, including his son, Dante, a legitimate honors student who was on his way to Yale University. De Blasio made great hay over the fact that his son was black; in fact, when he ran for president in 2020, he noted during one of the debates that he was the only candidate to have raised “a black son in America.”
Speaking about his great disappointment that Pantaleo was not going to face charges—yet, anyway—the mayor compared his son, Dante, to Eric Garner, and the shared danger they faced from the police as black men in America. “Chirlane and I have had to talk to Dante for years about the dangers he may face,” he explained, referencing his mixed-race son, whom he characterized as “a good young man, a law-abiding young man, who would never think to do anything wrong.” De Blasio continued:
Yet, because of a history that still hangs over us, the dangers he may face—we’ve had to literally train him, as families have all over this city for decades, in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him.… So I’ve had to worry, over the years, Chirlane’s had to worry—was Dante safe each night?
This stung the NYPD like a slap in the face. The mayor, who effectively commanded the nation’s largest and best police department, was accusing it of targeting his own son for racist abuse. Speaking of the “officers who are there to protect him” was especially pointed, because the entire de Blasio family had twenty-four-hour personal protection from the NYPD. De Blasio was basically saying that his own security team might lash out against his son.
The next few days saw violent protests in New York. Protestors on the Brooklyn Bridge attacked cops, punching and kicking them. One protestor, a poet and professor in the city university system, was charged with dropping a heavy garbage can on two lieutenants, injuring them both. But the real fruit of de Blasio’s poisonous harvest was when Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley, a Baltimore criminal, shot his girlfriend before hopping a bus to New York. He posted on Instagram his savage plans, swearing that “I’m putting Wings on Pigs today.”
When Brinsley got to Brooklyn he quickly sought out and found a target for his anti-cop rage, shooting and killing Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, two uniformed offices sitting in a patrol car on Myrtle Avenue.
Cops were furious and aggrieved, as they always are when their brothers fall in the line of duty. And they were especially angry at Mayor de Blasio, whom they perceived as having invited the assassination of Liu and Ramos with his inflammatory rhetoric about police violence and his association with Al Sharpton. Cops turned their backs en masse on de Blasio when he went to the hospital where the cops’ bodies lay, and later, at their funerals as well.
Leaders like Barack Obama and Bill de Blasio, along with dozens of other politicians around the country, could have worked to cool tempers around this issue. There is always a radical, jumped-up segment of the population that is hot to blame society for any trouble that some scoundrel elects to cause. These types love to scream and holler outside police stations, and throw rocks and bottles—or worse—if they think it could lead to violence and disorder. We should elect leaders who can calm these passions, not roil them up further.
The fact that Obama is black and de Blasio the father of a black son could have actually given them additional legitimacy among people sympathetic to the plight of blacks in America. They could have talked about the essential role that police play in black communities, and pointed to the fact that law-abiding residents of those neighborhoods beg police leaders to send more cops to patrol their streets. Obama and de Blasio could have pointed to the real statistics regarding crime in America—which I will get into in the following chapter—and noted that blacks have disproportionately more interactions with the police because they commit disproportionately more crime than whites, Latinos, and Asians.
Instead, Obama and de Blasio each personalized the unfortunate deaths of two lowlifes, insisted that Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner were virtually members of their own family, and thus implied that they were murdered. And that contributed heavily to anti-police sentiments over the next decade, which would result in more bloodshed.
OBAMA’S FAVORITE SUBJECT
I will end this chapter about Barack Obama—whom I actually voted for in 2008, imagining like so many others that he would set America on a new unified course where race could fade into the background as we got on with the business of living—with a look at one of his last major speeches about the police and racial prejudice. He gave it at the funeral of five Dallas police officers who were murdered—assassinated, really—on July 7, 2016, during a protest against the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philandro Castile, in Louisiana and Minnesota, in the days prior.
