young until death

bawsism:

“Bullshit gets up and walks around. Bullshit gets shot.” - Agoraphobic Nosebleed

1. Gawker’s usefulness is severely limited, but this is a really insightful piece that telegraphs all of the exploitative, hackneyed attempts by conservative media to poison the Martin well, except for one: right wingers have gotten into the habit of claiming that the left is constantly looking for dog whistles that aren’t actually there. Coincidentally, this is the exact same tack that the right takes when level-headed people attempt to point out any racism that is even one iota more subtle than the Niggerniggernigger School of Superobvious Bigotry. By making the discourse surrounding Martin less about facts/context and more about debate qua debate, reactionary conservatives make stillbirth out of substance.

2. I think most reasonable people on either side of this “debate” can agree by now that vacuum-arena speculation about whether Zimmerman would have approached a white Tray Martin are neither readily ascertainable nor remotely helpful. We have to deal with the facts are they are - maybe Zimmerman would have approached a white kid and did the same thing that he did to Martin, but we know he approached a black kid and killed that black kid in cold blood. That fact, irrespective of what is in Zimmerman’s heart, is damning enough. It’s absolutely peripheral to anything in this case - even the issue of whether the crime was racially motivated - to expend energy on photo negatives of reality.

3. Speculation, however, is not useless to all tendrils just because it fails to elucidate one.  Note that the right has consistently tried to paint Martin as some sort of thug. Think carefully about the bits of information that they gleaned to declare judgment - a middle finger here, a golden grill there, and some marijuana who knows here. I won’t spend much time on the obvious point - that yes, these things just make Martin sound like an ordinary millennial teenager, regardless of race or gender. Instead, consider this: nobody on the right that I am aware of is calling Zimmerman a thug. The same Zimmerman who was arrested for assault on a police officer. The same Zimmerman who was once fired for hitting a woman. The same Zimmerman who strutted around a neighborhood with a loaded firearm and declared himself watch captain in contradiction to Neighborhood Watch guidelines - which is some life-imitates-Wire shit if I have ever seen it. The same fucking Zimmerman who killed somebody in a confrontation of his own making. Now, imagine the race of Zimmerman being switched, a la Black Like Me. Under the exact same circumstances that transpired in Real World, being called a “thug” by conservatives would more than likely be least of a black Zimmerman’s concerns in Hypo World. The right-wing hypocrisy has - as always - written itself.

4. All of this “discourse” about who is and is not a thug is little more than a bunch of racist/classist prattle that dehumanizes everything it touches. Sorry, but the criminal record or lack thereof of a victim, by itself, says very little about what that victim did on a given day, much less whether the victim “deserved” to die (a sociopathic turn of phrase that says far more about the self-proclaimed arbiter of a stranger’s life span than it does about the person who is too fucking dead to defend himself). In a society where ALEC and the for-profit prison industrial complex tightens their grip on the future of the populace with every phone call, we run a real risk of having a reverse No True Scotsman problem, where everyone can be considered a “thug” in some insignificant way or another. This is real. The fact that Martin is being called one for possibly having possessed marijuana speaks for itself.  For now, white conservative America is complicit in the mass well-poisoning because it drinks from a different stream, but capital has a way of giving back to those who most deserve it and least expect it. I’d tell you to ask Kenneth Lay, but like Martin, he is too dead to defend himself.

modernistwitch:

Because I’m on this dang site all day anyway and our blogspot never ever gets updated. 

population rules and is definitely not biting our band-tumblr steez ;)

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