The George Zimmerman verdict has been the headline story since it was announced last Saturday night. In my opinion most of what we have heard and read thus far has shed nothing new to the opposing views about the verdict the jury reached.
The one exception is Martin Bashir. Instead of focusing on the trial and verdict, Bashir took time on his MSNBC television show to call out the people engaged in character assassination of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by exaggerating prior offenses to suggest he had a criminal character that inevitably led to the confrontation with Zimmerman that cost him his life. This, Bashir suggests, is nothing more than stereotyping Trayvon as a typical black youth looking for trouble the night he was killed. What these people ignore, he says, are three known facts: (1) a man with a gun chose to pursue an unarmed teenager who’d done nothing wrong; (2) the man with the gun chose to initiate a confrontation with the teenager after he was advised not to; and (3) as a result of the confrontation the man with the gun shot the teenager to death. These are the facts we know, period. Thus, Bashir rightly suggests these despicable efforts to make a 17 year old kid into a heretofore unknown criminal are because of one thing – Trayvon Martin was a black youth. I urge you to watch the video of Martin Bashir’s illuminating commentary.
Of course, not everything is about race. We don’t know that the jury’s verdict was influenced by race. It is possible that the prosecutors failed to make their case and the six women jurors believed they could not convict Zimmerman because of it. But what is about race is new media personalities who draw unwarranted conclusions about Trayvon’s character or go further and imply that he got what he deserved. They have no way of knowing what they are talking about. What they are doing is making assertions and conclusions based on racial profiling. Had Trayvon Martin been white, it is possible that none of this would be happening. There would have never been a trial because there would have never been a killing. And there would have never been a killing because had Trayvon been white, George Zimmerman would have never followed him in the first place.
As I said, not everything is about race. But that doesn’t mean racism is not widespread in our nation. It is. But what makes this fact worse is that racist attitudes have somehow become respectable enough to be aired on television, spoken on the radio, and appear in papers and journals without the slightest worry that there will be hell to pay for airing them. I think what makes this possible is that racism is now more subtle than it was when the bubbas I grew up with didn’t know how to hide theirs. Indeed, whenever I go home and run into one of them they still cannot hide it.
But the news media is smarter than the bubbas from my old neighborhood. They hide their racism by asking questions such as: Is Obama a real American? Does Obama hate white people? Was Trayvon Martin an angry black youth out for a fight? Isn’t affirmative action just another name for wanting special treatment because of race? Aren’t most welfare recipients black single mothers?. “I’m just asking,” they say. No they’re not. They are promoting racial profiling and stereotypes.
This is, as Martin Bashir understood, the issue the Zimmerman trial and verdict should lead us to focus on. As a nation we can be better than the media personalities who try to divide us, who promote the notion that we are becoming a nation of welfare loafers living off the rest of us, that whites are the real victims of discrimination today, who whitewash our nation’s past to make it better than it ever was. We can make racism so unacceptable that no one would dare even hint at it in public. We were once on that road, but the bubba’s in our land didn’t go away and are now a core constituency for media and political hacks willing to exploit an unfounded fear of “the other” to promote their self-serving agenda.
We really can be better that these voices want us to be. Here’s how. By realizing that there are other voices like that of a British journalist with Pakistani heritage who daily tell us the truth about what is going on, who expose the vicious intent of pseudo journalists whose agenda is to divide us as a people. If we take the time to pay attention to these other voices, it will be yet another step toward becoming the kind of nation most of us want for ourselves and future generations, a nation where a 17 year old kid can walk to the store in any neighborhood to buy some Skittles and get home without being shot, no matter the color of his skin.
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