Trayvon Martin

[beeblebrox]

I'm new here, so forgive me if this is in the wrong category.

I didn't see any threads on this case, so I thought I'd start one.

Anytime the MSM cherry-picks a story such as this, out of the multitude of shitty things that happen in this country on a daily basis, and then proceeds to focus on it with laser-like intensity I am suspiscious of their motives.

I don't have an article or a blog to link to, I am just curious as to everyone's thoughts on this issue here at RI.

Thanks in advance for shaing your thoughts, that is if anybody chooses to respond.

[Wombaticus Rex]

I watched the hip hop community build awareness on this since it happened in February so I don't buy it as a staged distraction. A lot of good activists made a lot of noise to make Trayvon national news.

[Simulist]

Trayvon Martin's murder highlights a number of realities in America that most-assuredly should not exist. While I do not think it's a "staged distraction" either, I do think it is already proving USEFUL to those who shape opinions in America — useful especially on the would-be "Left," as do-nothing "liberal" politicians once again try to woo their base back into believing this election year that there really is a functional two-party system in America, that there really are appreciable differences between these "two" political parties two wings of the Republican Party, and that Obama and the Democrats really are "on our side."

So I fully agree with Beeblebrox: "Anytime the MSM cherry-picks a story such as this, out of the multitude of shitty things that happen in this country on a daily basis, and then proceeds to focus on it with laser-like intensity I am suspiscious of their motives."

Good for you, Beeblebrox. And you should be.

(Oh. And hi. )

[seemslikeadream]

Welcome Beeblebrox


here's the NYT's timeline

For Martin’s Case, a Long Route to National Attention

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
People gathered for a rally in support of Trayvon Martin in Washington on Saturday.
By BRIAN STELTER
Published: March 25, 2012

Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old, was fatally shot on Feb. 26 in Sanford, Fla. The next day his death was a top story on the Fox-affiliated television station in Orlando, the closest big city to Sanford. Within a week it was being covered by newspapers around the state.

But it took several weeks before the rest of the country found out.

It was not until mid-March, after word spread on Facebook and Twitter, that the shooting of Trayvon by George Zimmerman, 26, was widely reported by the national news media, highlighting the complex ways that news does and does not travel in the Internet age.

That Trayvon’s name is known at all is a testament to his family, which hired a tenacious lawyer to pursue legal action and to persuade sympathetic members of the news media to cover the case. Just as important, family members were willing to answer the same painful questions over and over at news conferences and in TV interviews.

Notably, many of the national media figures who initially devoted time to the shooting are black, which some journalists and advocacy groups say attests to the need for diversity in newsrooms. The racial and ethnic makeup of newsrooms, where minorities tend to be underrepresented relative to the general population, has long been a source of tension for the news industry.

“On this story, there is a certain degree of understanding that comes from minorities, and particularly African-Americans, just because we’ve lived it,” said Don Lemon, a CNN weekend anchor who has covered the case extensively for the last two weekends. He recalled that in a planning meeting for his program, one of his producers, a black mother of two teenage boys, was “almost in tears” as she said, “We’ve got to do something on this story.”

As the case was catapulted onto the national agenda and calls for Mr. Zimmerman’s arrest increased, prominent black journalists and commentators wrote about it in highly personal terms. “This is the fear that seizes me whenever my boys are out in the world: that a man with a gun and an itchy finger will find them ‘suspicious,’ ” Charles M. Blow of The New York Times wrote on March 17.

A day later, Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post wrote of the rules he was taught as a teenager: “Don’t run in public,” “Don’t run while carrying anything in your hands,” “Don’t talk back to the police.”

“One of the burdens of being a black male,” he wrote, “is carrying the heavy weight of other people’s suspicions.”

Mr. Zimmerman, a volunteer for a neighborhood watch group, has claimed self-defense and has not been charged with any crime, causing an uproar that was readily apparent on social media Web sites. But for the first 10 days after Trayvon’s death, the story was covered solely by the Florida media.

The first national attention appears to have come from CBS News, on March 8, after the network’s southeast bureau, based in Atlanta, was tipped off. Mark Strassmann, a correspondent, and Chris St. Peter, a producer, contacted the family’s lawyer, Benjamin Crump, and then sent an e-mail suggestion to a group of “CBS This Morning” producers. “We can interview the victims’ parents tomorrow,” they wrote in the e-mail, promising an exclusive. Within 40 minutes, the producers had said yes.

Mr. Strassmann and Mr. St. Peter “knew a story when they saw it, they sniffed it out, and they did all the legwork,” said Chris Licht, the executive producer of the morning show and vice president for programming for CBS News.

Also on March 8, The Huffington Post and TheGrio.com, an arm of NBC News, covered the case. By the end of the week, CNN and its sister channel HLN were also on the story, as were some black radio hosts and bloggers.

National coverage increased somewhat the week of March 12, but really intensified only after March 16, when tapes of 911 calls were released, showing that Mr. Zimmerman had been told by a dispatcher that he did not need to follow Trayvon. Having the audio — which the police had previously declined to release — was critical because it gave radio and TV reporters more material for their segments and because it aroused more suspicion about Mr. Zimmerman.

Within days of the national media scrutiny, the Justice Department said it would investigate the case, and on March 23, President Obama addressed it directly, furthering the media dialogue.

Some reporters and anchors, like Mr. Lemon and Mr. Blow, said they were urged by their followers on Facebook and Twitter to find out about the shooting — evidence of the effect that the Web can have on news coverage. “People started sending me tweets saying, ‘What are you going to say about this case?’ ” Mr. Blow recalled.

He then looked up local stories about it, contacted Mr. Crump, and arranged for an interview with Trayvon’s mother, Sybrina Fulton. “They were very open to talking, and that was very important,” he said.

On television, the family spoke early and often to the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist who has radio shows and an MSNBC television show. He was made aware of the shooting by Mr. Crump, who had previously enlisted Mr. Sharpton to speak out against the death of a Florida boy at a boot camp in 2006.

“The attorney called and said, ‘I need you again,’ ” Mr. Sharpton recalled in a telephone interview from Florida, where he staged a rally Thursday night to call for justice. He took his radio and TV shows with him, thereby amplifying his call.

Mr. Sharpton has used his shows for all manner of advocacy He analogized radio, with its hours of airtime and calls from listeners, to “ground forces” and MSNBC as “air strikes” and said, “If you have a war, you’re going to need both.”

Mr. Crump has publicly thanked the media for paying attention, and so, too, has the family. Trayvon’s father, Tracy, told Gayle King on CBS last Friday, “The world knows Trayvon now.”

[Twyla LaSarc]

In light of the Trayvon story this article originally posted by WRex makes a lot of sense.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=34301

After all what was Zimmerman doing but enforcing obedience using profiling and violence?

[American Dream]

I like this article:

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2012/03/ ... ching.html

SATURDAY, MARCH 24, 2012
Trayvon Martin and the history of lynching posted by lenin




What is lynching? In its prevalent forms in American history, it appears as the administration of racial formations through terror. The mutilation, shaming and degrading of black bodies, and also the corpses being retrieved and displayed as trophies, was intended to maintain the symbolic subjection of black people to, in bell hooks' formulation, "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy". I stress the symbolic as a material element in racial oppression, because the problem of etiquette, of racial manners, was invariably central to such violence. Night-riders and lynch mobs were the enforcers of this etiquette. We know it's a peculiar problem in Jim Crow, the thousand and one rules and codes that crowded the field of sociality, exchange, transport, production and so on.

As Howard Winant explains, black people were expected to "remove their hats in the presence of whites, to step off the sidewalk (where one existed) into the muddy street at the passage of a white, and to wait in such shops as would serve blacks until all whites had been served, no matter who had arrived first". One finds this everywhere. Not just in the segregated public accomodations, but in the sites of production, the factories, the textile mills, where black labour was menial and expected to be deferential. If there is a white woman walking down a corridor, you step out of it until she passes. You don't speak to a white person unless they address you. If you need the toilet, you walk out of the building and several hundred yards to the facility marked "colored". So much, we all know. And what does it tell us about the social order? The South's theologians, ideologists and apologists hailed the region as a sort of classical, Athenian structure, a gentle, stable and aristocratic community. Yet the first infringement of one of the region's rituals could result in an explosion of violence, as if the antagonisms pervading the whole formation were suddenly displaced onto one symbolic crux.

But this doesn't capture the whole problem. For the organization of political violence in American history is unusual in some respects, in that the whole history of countersubversive (anti-radical, anti-union, anti-immigrant, anti-black) violence is one in which the state's monopoly on legitimate violence is deputised to sections of the citizenry. The invocation of the 'right to bear arms' has almost always been made in this sort of context, as during the trials of Klansmen in the Reconstruction period. And it is in this sort of area of political violence, where citizens were de facto deputised by states according to illicit hierarchies and instructions, whether it was Klan, minute men, FBI mobs, or Pinkertons, that parapolitics has a peculiar role in American history and politics. Occasionally, the logic has been subverted, as when Black Panthers invoked this right to defend themselves against police criminality - one of the few such invocations of the 'right to bear arms' where the state's monopoly of the legitimate use of force has genuinely been challenged. But this violence was precisely not legitimized, whereas lynchings, employer violence, the 'disappearing' of militants, and so on, often has been legitimized. In the shift from Jim Crow to the penal administration of race, which required that the black criminality be identified through increasingly sophisticated classifications, codes and statutes, the 'right to bear arms' has most often been raised in the context of white self-defence. Citizens have often been allowed to wield punitive or capital violence when certain social norms or classifications were tested and defied; their violence has been legitimized because at the very least they have not been sanctioned.

But there is one other facet of this, which is the spatial re-ordering of American cities and towns. The racial aspect of this is familiar enough that I don't need to rehearse it here: the construction of 'the ghetto', 'white flight', the displacement of segregation from county to neighbourhood level. But of course this spatial re-organization is also way of structuring class power, as well as of preserving certain (patriarchal, conservative) social forms. The emergence of 'private towns' signals another twist in the delegation of state power sanctioned by the doctrine of property rights. In a previous post, I mentioned 'Leisure World' of Arizona, where constitutional protections are seemingly suspended, where the board of directors censors published material at will, precisely as one might in one's own household, or one's own company. In these zones, Mexicans and other people of colour may work, but in total silence. If they say anything to the whites who live there, they're out. The so-called 'gated community' is a related phenomenon, not quite as extreme in the internal controls available to its owners, but obviously protected with civilian violence - security guards, neighbourhood watch, armed citizen vigilantes, all do their share. It is in the context of territorial property rights, concerning households especially, but certainly gated communities and private towns, that stand-your-ground laws allowing for killing in 'self-defence' have been most available to legitimize this kind of violence.

Trayvon Martin was murdered while walking through a gated community in Miami known as Twin Lakes. His killer, George Zimmerman, has not been arrested. In fact, judging from witness statements, the police have taken quite extraordinary steps to avoid arresting him. Zimmerman had a long-standing relationship with local police, inasmuch as he was constantly in contact with them to report disturbances, suspicious sightings, windows left open and so on. It seems likely that they knew who he was, and what a vigilant citizen he was. Indeed, it seems probable that they shared many of his concerns, as their officers were known to have worries about black vagrancy and criminality. Neighbourhood Watch knew Zimmerman well, knew that he was always alert to the possibility of young black men who may be outsiders coming into the gated community. The security guards who defend local properties have displayed similar concerns, in one case shooting a black man while he was in his vehicle. They cited self-defence, claiming that he was driving toward them and about to run them over, although autopsy reports show that he was shot in the back. The judge threw out the case for lack of evidence. Of course, we have abundant examples, of which the execution of Troy Davis is just one, of just how racialised the question of evidence is.

But the point to make here is that while Zimmerman acted alone, he did not act in isolation, at odds with the expectations of police, or with the social norms current in the gated community. He saw a young black man walking around the gated community. To him, as to any officer, or security guard, or citizen vigilante, this was 'suspicious'. His presence was not in keeping with racial etiquette. His behaviour, walking slowly and looking at the houses of the well-off in the rain, suggested a deranged, drugged mind - because it is not done. Not in this neighbourhood, not in this community, and not in this town. Zimmerman acted expeditiously to suppress this symbolic infringement. Perhaps he spoke to Trayvon Martin, perhaps he challenged him about his behaviour, queried his motive for being there, instructed him to move along with more haste. But, whether because cooperation was not forthcoming, or because it was too late for the infringement to be remedied, he resolved the problem finally by putting an end to Martin's life, blasting his chest open.

Geraldo Rivera thinks the murder happened because Trayvon Martin was wearing a hoodie, and thus sending out a signal that he was a gangster. However morally cretinous this suggestion is, give Rivera credit for having some intuition about the politics of racial symbolism. He means that the murder victim is partly to blame for his death, because this symbolic action, wearing a hoodie, identifies one as someone who should be killed. He cannot help partially sharing the point of view of the killer, understanding the anxiety and horror that such sassing, such brazen boldness, such reckless wearing, walking and looking, provokes. He partially shares the point of view of the killer and that's why gets it: hey, if you don't want to get shot, don't go out looking like a punk. If you don't want to get shot, don't loiter, stand up straight, dress properly, show some manners. For there are points in the administration of America's increasingly jittery racial class system, where it seems that everything rides on this symbolic order and its maintenance.

[beeblebrox]

Hmmm, thanks for the responses everyone.

It appears the cynicism and contempt with which I usually regard the MSM may not be entirely merited in this particular instance.

[82_28]

Here's some random background to this and the breezy nature the media of the past treated shit like this over time. Certainly not comprehensive in any way, but enough to give a birds eye view.

http://classifiedhumanity.com/tagged/lynching

http://classifiedhumanity.com/tagged/racism

[wordspeak2]

It's great that activists have brought this to light and made a media issue out of it. I'm still clueless as to how Zimmerman could possibly get away with this legally. Am I missing something? I know Florida has this "stand your ground" law, but the kid didn't do anything.

I do, though, wish that more cases of actual cops killing people of color in Drug War-related instances received national media attention. It happens with great regularity in America.

[Marie Laveau]

I think it's interesting how the media is really pushing the Hispanic heritage of the shooter.

The Cubans in Florida are as right-wing as any Sarah Palin/Tim Tebow follower. They've been waiting for the GOP to invade Cuba and kick Castro out for years and years.

[seemslikeadream]

3/22/2012
The NRA and Florida Legislators Killed Trayvon Martin as Surely as a Gun Did:
Well, what the fuck did you expect, Florida, you limp, useless cock of the diseased body America? You make guns as easy to get as a package from Amazon (regular shipping), you pass concealed carry laws, and you pass a law that says that if people "have a reasonable belief that they are in danger of death or great bodily harm" they can kill the fuck out of someone out in public. No need to run away. No need to call the cops first. Just Spidey senses a-tingling. Did you not expect that at some point, some creepy vigilante wouldn't get the chance to live out his Batman fantasies? Of course, George Zimmerman, not being in the physical shape of Batman, was just a stupid asshole who shot a skinny, unarmed teenager because he felt threatened by black guys in hoodies walking through his 'hood.

Back on April 13, 2005, when the "Stand Your Ground" bill had just passed the Florida legislature, Bo Dietl, the former cop who appears on TV constantly to support law enforcement in his deranged goombah way (thus leading him to be a regular Daily Show and Colbert Report punchline interview subject), said on MSNBC's Scarborough Country that the new law was "idiotic" and a "ludicrous and ridiculous law. And Jeb Bush must be smoking a crack pipe...If you have a feeling, if you have a belief or that you are threatened, that you can react and react first, then you open up a whole Pandora's box here."

Anybody with a fucking brain, and even a few without, knew what was going to happen. In early 2005, when the bill was quickly debated and savagely passed, State Senator Steve Geller, a Democrat, warned, "I don't think you ought to be able to kill people that are walking toward you on the street because of this subjective belief that you're worried that they may get in a fight with you." The street, he said, is not your castle. (Note: Pat Buchanan said in 2005 on The McLaughlin Group that the law's passage was a "Great victory for Bush and for America." Is he dead yet?)

Politicians, on the right and in the middle, are to blame for Trayvon Martin's execution. All over the nation, but especially in Florida, the National Rifle Association threatens to destroy any legislator who refuses to bend over and let it shove cash into their assholes. The NRA wants an exception to the 3-day waiting period for people with concealed carry licenses, as they did in the Sunshine State? The Republicans in Tallahassee line up and open their asses for that cash to be shoveled in, along with the promise that the almighty motherfucking NRA will support them in a primary. And then, their asses full to their lower intestines with filthy money, the legislators get on their knees in front of NRA lobbyist Marion Hammer as she holds a pistol between her legs and they suck on it until the barrel has rubbed her kooz to orgasm. Then they pass every idiotarded law the gun nuts want under the umbrella of "rights." That's how the NRA works, motherfuckers, and then they tell us it's to keep us safe.

Seriously, if the ACLU were as deranged in defending the First Amendment as the NRA is in defending its distorted version of the Second, you'd be able to walk up to a crucifixion statue in the middle of St. Boyrape's Cathedral, shit on Christ's face, and claim "freedom of expression," and the laws would back you up and how dare anyone be such a pussy as to claim that shitting on Christ's face isn't free speech.

Trayvon Martin was killed by a gun. No, guns alone don't kill people. People with guns do, though. And, chances are, if George Zimmerman wasn't carrying one, he wouldn't have pursued Martin. He wouldn't have ignored the 911 operator's call for him to stand down. And Martin would still be alive.

[JackRiddler]

The question should be why this isn't always a big story - why and how the corporate media and the dominant cultural and societal institutions have successfully distracted from and ignored widespread systemic, group and sometimes (as in this case) exemplary individual violence that serves to maintain racist stratification, starting from the top with the racial targeting of the bogus "war on drugs" to feed the prison-industrial complex with young black men (mostly) who are as a general result punished, disenfranchised and cut out of the economy for life.

Otherwise, please give credit to the movement and the struggle involved in getting a national spotlight for the Trayvon Martin case. There is no seamless totalitarianism in place. There never has been, other than for a few of the ugliest historical moments, and there never will be for very long. It's an unfair playing field wherein money and cultural hegemonies hold sway, but thousands of people working together passionately and persistently with solidarity can and do move things large and small.

[seemslikeadream]

[Freitag]

Witness: Martin attacked Zimmerman

Updated: Friday, 23 Mar 2012, 6:19 PM EDT
Published : Friday, 23 Mar 2012, 5:47 PM EDT

ORLANDO - A witness we haven't heard from before paints a much different picture than we've seen so far of what happened the night 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed.

The night of that shooting, police say there was a witness who saw it all.

Our sister station, FOX 35 in Orlando, has spoken to that witness.

What Sanford Police investigators have in the folder, they put together on the killing of Trayvon Martin few know about.

The file now sits in the hands of the state attorney. Now that file is just weeks away from being opened to a grand jury.

It shows more now about why police believed that night that George Zimmerman shouldn't have gone to jail.

Zimmerman called 911 and told dispatchers he was following a teen. The dispatcher told Zimmerman not to.

And from that moment to the shooting, details are few.

But one man's testimony could be key for the police.

"The guy on the bottom who had a red sweater on was yelling to me: 'help, help…and I told him to stop and I was calling 911," he said.

Trayvon Martin was in a hoodie; Zimmerman was in red.

The witness only wanted to be identified as "John," and didn't not want to be shown on camera.

His statements to police were instrumental, because police backed up Zimmerman's claims, saying those screams on the 911 call are those of Zimmerman.

"When I got upstairs and looked down, the guy who was on top beating up the other guy, was the one laying in the grass, and I believe he was dead at that point," John said.

Zimmerman says the shooting was self defense. According to information released on the Sanford city website, Zimmerman said he was going back to his SUV when he was attacked by the teen.

Sanford police say Zimmerman was bloody in his face and head, and the back of his shirt was wet and had grass stains, indicating a struggle took place before the shooting.

Link

A big question is whether Zimmerman initiated the confrontation. Because if so, then it can't be self-defense. The law says if you pick a fight and lose, you're at fault and you can't do things like sue the other guy for medical bills or shoot him dead and claim self-defense. And he was told by the police not to pursue Martin, but he did it anyway.

[wordspeak2]

But we have the audio from the 911 call, so it's clear that Zimmerman started following Trayvon totally un-instigated.