Obama saw it.
That sound you heard back on March 23, 2012 was the sound of America being racially divided once again. "If the president of the United States sees it and I [personal pronoun and group pronoun] don't, maybe I ought to see skin color more often." Personally, I was fine with being color-blind.
Always sounded tinny to my ear, the president's statement, but in a way I couldn't explain. It was inappropriate, yes, It was inappropriate for a president to take sides in an on-going criminal investigation. It was irrelevant. And that gets to the tinny sound of it. There was something beyond irrelevancy. What is "beyond irrelevant"? "Counter-relevant." (I'm not too good about putting this into words).
Turn it around. If the statement, "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon" is relevant then the statement, "If I had a son, he would not look like Trayvon" would be relevant. And it's not! Imagine a White president saying "If I had a son, he would not look like Trayvon." That would be outrageous; it is so callous, it suggests that because a homicide victim does not look like the president of the United States, he's not fully a victim, not fully one of us, we Americans.
Like him:
If Barack Obama had a son he would not look like George Zimmerman. That has nothing to do with the price of tea in China. Obama's statement and every variation of Obama's statement is contra-indicated for relevancy.
Obama should not have said it. It was a mistake. He personalized the case. He took sides with that statement and he took the side of the Black 17-year old over the White 28-year old.
What Obama's statement did was restore sight to the color-blind and White Americans saw. They saw that George Zimmerman looked a lot like them and Trayvon Martin and Barack Obama, not so much.
It is fact, not conjecture, not the product of my own unreliable cogitation, that most White Americans believed George Zimmerman innocent of any crime in killing Trayvon Martin and most Black Americans thought Zimmerman guilty.
I (White (severely so) thought Zimmerman guilty, predicted the jury would convict him, but thought it was a close case. We, the public, didn't know about Zimmerman's injuries at first. Weren't told that at first.
But I digress. This is not about the undersigned, it is about the Trumpists and the origins of their racial rage. And let us stipulate before moving on to other dots, let us stipulate now and for all time that racial anger toward Barack Obama did not begin in March, 2012. As if. Racial anger began the day that Barack Obama became president. That night, as the Inauguration Ball was going on a group of elite Republican racists (okay, redundancy) met and decided they would stand athwart history and thwart the new president in anything he attempted. The Tea Party was birthed soon after and with it was birthed a twin, racial hatred that America had never seen exhibited toward a president.
So stipulated.
It is fact that that just over five months after making that statement Barack Obama was reelected president of the United States so if, as the undersigned has asserted, the beginning of the proximate cause of the piss-poor race relations in America in 2016 was that statement, there were other dots, the Trayvon Martin case was the first dot, a big dot but the only and not the biggest.
Now we may move on. How did Trumpists feel about Trayvon and the other dots?
(to be continued)
But I digress. This is not about the undersigned, it is about the Trumpists and the origins of their racial rage. And let us stipulate before moving on to other dots, let us stipulate now and for all time that racial anger toward Barack Obama did not begin in March, 2012. As if. Racial anger began the day that Barack Obama became president. That night, as the Inauguration Ball was going on a group of elite Republican racists (okay, redundancy) met and decided they would stand athwart history and thwart the new president in anything he attempted. The Tea Party was birthed soon after and with it was birthed a twin, racial hatred that America had never seen exhibited toward a president.
It is fact that that just over five months after making that statement Barack Obama was reelected president of the United States so if, as the undersigned has asserted, the beginning of the proximate cause of the piss-poor race relations in America in 2016 was that statement, there were other dots, the Trayvon Martin case was the first dot, a big dot but the only and not the biggest.
Now we may move on. How did Trumpists feel about Trayvon and the other dots?
(to be continued)
