BroadSnark

On Friday, Wayne LaPierre of the NRA held a press conference about the school shooting in Sandy Hook. Naturally, his suggestion was to put armed guards or police in every school. The liberal internets were immediately abuzz slamming one of their favorite bad guys. But nobody seemed to be mentioning the fact that this “crazy” idea from the “far right” NRA isn’t an idea at all. It’s already here.

“In 2009, according to the National Center for Education Statistics and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 68 percent of American students reported the presence of security guards or police officers, or both, in their schools,” says the NYT. But those students aren’t being protected by the “good guys” with guns. They are being abused.

A Houston cop broke a kids jaw on the school bus. Another Texas 12-year-old was arrested for spraying perfume. In Connecticut, a kid was tased for allegedly trying to steal a Jamaican patty in the lunchroom. A California 5-year-old was arrested and charged with battery on a police officer. (Yes. You read that correctly. A 5-year-old.) Another California child, this time 7, was pepper sprayed for climbing on a bookshelf. A New York 12-year-old was arrested for the terrible crime of doodling about loving her friends.

These are not isolated incidents. During a three month period in 2011, an average of 5 students per day were arrested in New York. The Southern Poverty Law Center is suing Birmingham schools for their consistent use of pepper spray on students. Civil rights attorneys are suing Meridian, Mississippi for abusing their students’ civil rights so egregiously that even our sad justice department had to intervene. And then, of course, there are all the students and parents who end up in truancy court.

I could spend the rest of my year finding and posting stories like this, despite that fact that most of the incidents don’t get media attention and juvenile cases are sealed for their “protection”. Not that getting rid of school police and security would make all the abuses go away. The Government Accountability Office found hundreds of cases of kids being abused or killed by school staff.

Some students are far more frequently targets for school cops and administrators. More than 90 percent of arrests in New York in the 2011-12 school year were of black and Latino students. All over the country, students of color and students with disabilities are arrested and disciplined at higher rates. “Gay and transgender youth, particularly gender nonconforming girls, are up to three times more likely to experience harsh disciplinary treatment by school administrators than their heterosexual counterparts.” 

And if those kids are unlucky enough to end up in juvenile detention, the abuse will only get worse. 12 percent of youth in juvenile facilities say they have been sexually abused, most often by staff. They are also beaten up, denied access to medical care, denied education, put in restraints, locked in solitary for days or weeks at a time, and sometimes killed. This state by state summary is just the tip of the iceberg.

After everyone started commenting on the NRA press conference, I tweeted that New York Times article and said, “Hey buttheads: 68% of students already have sec guards or police in their schools and it is a fucking disaster”. It got more retweets than anything I’ve ever put out there – by a landslide. I followed that up with some of those incidents above and people even tweeted those.

The thing is, I tweet and blog about these things all the time. In fact, almost everything in this post I have put out before. Nobody pays any attention. It seems people only care about this stuff if the NRA says it is a good idea. So thanks, NRA. Perhaps if you had a press conference every day to suggest that we inundate schools with police, arrest all the students of color, and torture kids for not being perfectly socialized automatons then people would notice. Maybe they’d even want to do something about it.

I had no intention of writing anything about the school shooting in Connecticut. Maybe Pablo Neruda could have found words to talk about something like that, but it is beyond my capacity.

I understand the desire for people to ask how it could happen and how we can prevent it from happening again. But there is a fine line between asking why and using a tragedy to push your pet policy positions or promote your philosophy. It isn’t a line I want to walk.

But then I read this piece on Jezebel and I just can’t let it go.

Some incredibly brave woman wrote about being the mother of a child with serious mental health problems. If you haven’t read I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother yet, do it now.

Try to imagine what it would be like to be that mother. Imagine trying to cope with your kid’s behavior. Imagine the terror every time you hear about a serial killer or mass murderer. Imagine having to wonder – Will I have to put him in prison? Will my kid kill himself? Will he kill me? Will he kill somebody else? What if my only option to stop him from killing me or someone else is to kill him? You know that thought has to have gone through her mind.

If that child ever does anything horrible, the first thing anyone will ask is where the parents were. No. Scratch that. They will ask where the mother was. They will want to assess blame. They will want to dissect every action that woman has taken. They will want to know why nobody was warned.

Well, we have been warned. And we have been pleaded with. That mother put all her anguish out for the world to see. But instead of thinking about how hard that was, how hard it must be to live like that, some compassion-challenged asshat at Jezebel called the woman’s torment a distraction.

A fucking distraction.

According to Laura Beck, we are supposed to leave mental health diagnosis to the experts. But someone whose last posts included World’s Best Airport Pianist and Alison Brie Loves to Rap, Danny Pudi Loves to Beat Box is fully qualified to declare that mental health care needs to take a back seat to gun control. And if that means using someone else’s tragedy and shitting all over a woman’s cry for help. Fuck em.

No. Laura. Fuck you.

I rarely blog anything truly personal, at least not the details. It is so difficult to dig up the most painful things that happen to you and lay them out for the world. And there are too many Lauras out there who can’t even see what it is that they are shitting on.

So when I read something like I am Adam Lanza’s Mother, the only thing I am thinking about is what it would be like to experience that. I’m thinking how fucking hard it would be to share it and how hard it would be to not share it. And I’m thinking – Whatever you do, lady, don’t read the comments!

So, Laura Beck, how about this. How about you take the most awful thing that has ever happened to you in your life and write about it. How about you dredge up all the pain and splay it out for the internets to use and to tear apart and to tell you how your pain is completely besides the point. Maybe then you might find some tiny bit of compassion in there somewhere?

No? Well then stick to writing about airport pianists.

This weekend I got into an argument about music. The person I was arguing with was blasting gangsta rap for glorifying behavior that was ruining their own communities. He even went so far as to say that the music, and everything it stood for, was causing racism.

I went a little apoplectic.

I may not be a huge fan of music that is often violent, materialistic, and misogynist. But I’m not going to blame a musician for white flight, urban decay, omnipresent policing, mass incarceration, the drug war, shitty schools, racist employers… I’m not going to hold a musician responsible for racism because a white supremacist uses them as an excuse. And I am sure as hell not going to accept that kind of blaming coming from someone at the top of the privilege food chain – which he was.

I thought of writing about how racist and classist that shit is. I thought of writing about how difficult it is to balance individual responsibility with structural oppression. But what I really want to write about is having an outlet.

We live in a world that is completely fucked up and filled with pain. Yet we aren’t allowed to express how fucked up it is. We have no strategies for coping with pain. We don’t even want to hear about people’s pain, much less help them deal with it. We don’t want to know what goes on in people’s homes and neighborhoods if it isn’t shiny, happy, and uplifting. And if you have thoughts that fall outside the spectrum of what is socially acceptable, you better hide them or else.

I was filled with rage when I was a teen. And I had a lot less to be raging about than some people. There were times when I had incredibly violent thoughts. There were times when the targets of my anger were wildly off the mark. The only coping mechanisms I ever learned were denial, sarcasm, booze, and flight. I learned to internalize the rage. I drank it, smoked it, snorted it, and walled it off. And I walled off a lot of other emotions with that rage too.

And that’s the way a lot of people like it.

People don’t want to know about your anger, righteous or not. Just take a Xanax and numb it so nobody has to see it. Don’t say anything inappropriate. Don’t wear your heart on your sleeve  Don’t cry in public. Don’t yell. Don’t make a scene. Don’t be destructive. Don’t be embarrassing. Don’t be perverted. Don’t admit that some things might not be fixable. Don’t show people things that they don’t want to see.

And whatever you do, make sure whatever coping mechanisms you have don’t get in the way of you being a good worker bee. Cause if you can’t manage to find and put up with a degrading 9 – 5 that pays your rent and rehab bills, we don’t want to know you.

I may hate violence, but I understand rage. I may hate materialism, but I understand the desire to have things when you’ve had to struggle. I understand that it is hard to live in a society where you gain status through violence and money without internalizing it. And I really understand how difficult it is to even acknowledge a maelstrom of emotions, much less channel them into something constructive. I understand that sometimes you just need to scream some shit out and have some person somewhere acknowledge that what you see is real and it is fucked up.

I’m not saying that cultural products don’t matter. They influence the way we look at the world. We should criticize them. But we can’t blame them for our social ills. Sometimes the most offensive things can start useful discussions. Sometimes a person just needs an outlet to express their emotions, horrible as they may be. If singing about something keeps you from doing it, that’s a good thing. If singing about something makes someone else think they should do it, the problem isn’t the song but the fact that the other person didn’t have an outlet themselves.

We are never going to have a world where nobody thinks terrible thoughts, hates irrationally,  or is just unable to deal with their pain. I don’t think any of us will be alive to see a world without poverty, violence, and oppression. Maybe if we gave people a little more space to express their fuckedupedness, instead of pretending like people pop out of the womb with all the answers and have perfect understanding at age 18, we could minimize the harm we do to ourselves and others.

But instead of trying to understand where the rage comes from and why so many people identify with it, we just tell people to shut up.

Make a claim that one snort of cocaine makes you irredeemably insane and people will line up behind laws that lock cocaine users up for life. But read that 73% of incarcerated women have mental health issues and many of those same people will find it a compelling argument against mass incarceration. (Private prison companies, of course, just see it as another opportunity to make money.)

Why?

There is a really interesting article about pedophiles on Wandervogel Diary. The thing that struck me the most was this.

Studies have consistently shown that pedophilia is associated with anomic states (war, famine, epidemics) and with major life crises (failure, relocation, infidelity of spouse, separation, divorce, unemployment, bankruptcy, illness, death of the offender’s nearest and dearest).

Few things cause a social panic quite like pedophilia. I don’t think most people ask where it comes from. It is seen as some individual aberration. If anyone wonders what went wrong, they probably blame it on porn or a lack of religious morality.  Which is ironic given that porn may actually prevent sex offenses and religiosity increase them.

If war is associated with pedophilia, then pedophilia is not an individual aberration. It is a societal disease. We are creating pedophiles in the same way we are creating self-medicating soldiers. And when we put people in prison for doing cocaine, especially if they end up in solitary, we may actually end up creating someone who won’t be able to function in society.

Perhaps at some level we realize that these are all monsters of our own making, that the things we do out of fear end up creating exactly what we are afraid of.

There is more I want to say about this. But I’m cutting myself off because I really want you to read this post on the scapegoating of “crazy”.  Love to hear your thoughts.

When I first started delving into the drug war and criminal injustice system, I saw it as a process of dehumanization that I couldn’t ignore. While I had friends who were caught up in the system, as one of the least targeted people, the only connection I saw to my personal life was what I had learned as the grandkid of holocaust refugees.

People ask how atrocities could happen and a whole society be blind to them. While I don’t want to make comparisons between concentration camps and prisons, it isn’t hard for me to see how a whole country could have shut their eyes. People are tortured, raped, and murdered behind bars in this country now and most of us don’t even notice.

But the more I learned about how this particular dehumanization works, the more I realized the special role that I play in it. I’m the victim that excuses the violence.

If you have never read Ida B. Wells on lynchings, you need to. Despite the fact that the majority of black men who were lynched were not even accused of rape, the defenders of lynchings always used the rape of white women as their cover for murder – or as one Southern newspaper put it “the barbarism which preys upon weak and defenseless women.”

How ironic that white men used the rape of white women as their excuse. How many of us in the colonized world are a product of the rape of black and indigenous women by white men – what the Mexicans like to refer to as La Gran Chingada (the great rape)? But women of color are not generally the victims of our national narrative. They are mostly invisible.

As a white woman it is my job to be a victim to excuse the bloodthirst. The boxes people have tried to cram  me into my whole life – weakness, dependency, purity – are really just about playing that role. If you refuse to be defenseless. If you refuse to be appropriately dependent. If you refuse to be fallen. Then there is hell to pay. It isn’t just about control of women and their sexuality. It is that our role as victims is key in a narrative that holds up the authoritarian system.

If there are no victims and no villains then what need do we have for heroes? Our heroes are, of course, violent. Usually, they wear a uniform. Sometimes they might take it off for a night to do their lynchings undercover. But whether it is a cop or a soldier or a vigilante, we accept the armed and violent hero only because we believe in the helpless victim.

The racialized and genderized victim/villain/hero narrative undergirds everything. It is part of the lynchings of 100 years ago. It was there when we were accusing Chinese men of defiling white women to get opium laws passed. It is built into the criminal injustice system that targets men of color. It is part of every war that we fight, the way we use women as an excuse to bomb countries.

And what does it do to the people who are trying to live up to their role as hero by picking up those guns? In order to fit into that hero/man box you have to become a killer. You have to be broken down until whatever it is in you that recognizes another person’s humanity is gone. There is no coming back from that, certainly not for the thousands of soldiers who come back and kill themselves. Not likely for the prison guards either.

I’m not trying to infer equivalency between the experiences of someone sitting in solitary confinement and what is going through the head of the person who put them there. I’m not saying that a white woman’s fight to get out of the victim box can be compared to being lynched. The full weight of the system does not hit us all evenly.

Nor am I saying that people are never victimized, that some of the people in prison have not done horrible things. But most of those people have also been victims. We can all be victimized, villainous, or heroic. The system needs to wedge us into narrow categories in order to feed itself. It needs to provide a narrative that makes it seem like the armed thug’s job is something besides protecting the power and privilege of a handful of people.

We need to understand the connections. If we don’t, we will inevitably end up fighting against one part of the narrative while upholding another.

White women who fight the violence against them in a way that supports, rather than challenges, the racist criminal injustice system will never make life better for women. Black men who fight the criminal injustice system but hold a view that tries to put black women on the same purity pedestal that white women are chained to will never make life better for black people. Anti-authoritarians who don’t understand the role that racism and sexism play in upholding the state will never see it smashed.

For me, understanding the connections means being a really terrible victim. It means refusing the accept the villainization of men – especially men of color. It means refusing to accept the heroization of people with guns – even the ones I may have some sympathy for. It means focusing on the criminal injustice system and the war machine and any other victim/villain/hero narrative that keeps this state alive.

Because if we break those narratives we all get out of our boxes, real and metaphorical. We break the fear. We stop so much of the torture and violence and suffering.

No more victims. No more villains. No more heroes.

It seems that Virgin airlines has a policy that unaccompanied children cannot sit next to men on their airplanes. An Australian man, who was assigned a seat next to two boys he did not know, was asked to switch seats with a woman. Pissed off about being treated like a presumed predator, he blogged about it and complained to the airline that their policy was sexist.

Francois Tremblay thinks this guy is being an entitled douche and that is ridiculous to call this sexism. Meghan Murphy compares this man’s one moment of discomfort with the daily bullshit that women have to go through to avoid being harassed or worse. I get what they are saying, but the policy is still wrong. And the privilege that this guy is showing isn’t the one they think it is.

Gender essentialism is our enemy. It is not o.k. to base policies on gender essentialist notions, regardless of who is negatively affected. I know what you are thinking. But Mel, men are the ones who commit most violence. As Murphy cites in her article, 90% of child sex offenders are men. Ok. But do you know what else that very same article states? 70 – 90% of child sex offenders are known to the child.

In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, most child abusers are parents. And about half of the perpetrators of abuse and neglect are women. Granted, women are more often caregivers. And there is no telling what bullshit some states are calling neglect. But the fact remains that it would be more logical for the airline to separate kids from their parents if they really wanted to stop abuse.

But we would never do such a thing. Because one of the things that perpetuates child abuse is the idea that parents can do whatever they want to their children. “I brought you into this world. I can take you out of it.” It seems we are more likely to have irrational policies on airplanes than to intervene when we see a parent abusing their child – verbally or physically.

And do you know what else perpetuates rape and sexual abuse? The idea that rapists are strangers who crawl into your window and hold a gun to your head does. It is the reason why so many rapists think they are not rapists – despite the fact that they have no concept of consent and no problem using coercion, violence, drugs… Cause I mean hey, it was a girl I was on a date with so it can’t be rape.

This Australian guy is showing his privilege. But the privilege that he is showing isn’t that he is not in constant fear of being harassed. It is that he is a white guy, an emergency service worker no less, and accustomed to being cast in the role of hero. If he were black or Arab then being cast as the evil predator wouldn’t have come as much of a shock. It is standard operating procedure.

What if he had been black? What if he was Arab or Muslim? What if he was trans? How would those kids (and the rest of the people on that airplane) have processed that move? And how did two boys, who will soon grow up to be men, process the idea that in a few years they will be too scary to sit next to children?

We can’t end sexism by being gender essentialist. We can’t end racism by ignoring how race affects the way people are perceived. We aren’t going to raise healthy men by demonstrating to boys that they must be avoided when they grow up. We aren’t going to end abuse – sexual or otherwise – by focusing on the few incidents that are perpetrated by strangers and allowing people to operate under the convenient illusion that abusing the people that you know, and maybe even love, doesn’t really count.

By now you have no doubt heard that Daniel Tosh suggested it would be funny if a woman in his audience was gang raped and the internets are ablaze with talk of rape culture. I wasn’t planning on weighing in on this. Frankly, I just wasn’t that interested in the controversy. But since a friend of mine asked for my thoughts, here they are.

If Dave Chappelle can make slavery funny and Mel Brooks can make The Holocaust funny, then anything can be funny – even rape. In fact, since rape was a huge part of both, they kinda did. Comedians can be, not just the most incisive social critics, but true artists. An artist is someone who is able to turn something painful and ugly into something beautiful, thought provoking or challenging.

Tosh is no artist.

The problem isn’t so much the subject matter, but the fact that so much of our popular culture is designed for people who do not want to think and who have enough privilege not to have to. Sometimes it is asshats who entertain people by trying to be as offensive as possible. Sometimes it is What Not to Wear. We all need a little escapism, but that shouldn’t mean a constant stream of distractions to feed willful ignorance.

But to be honest, I am not much more impressed with the backlash against Tosh. Something always gnaws at me when I read articles about rape culture. It is that they so rarely make any connections between the rape of women by men and other forms of violence.

We live in a violent, authoritarian culture. The lower you are on the hierarchy, the more likely you are to experience violence. And if you want to gain status in our society, you do it by perpetrating violence. If you are a woman, black, brown, gay, trans, poor…abusing you is the means by which other people climb the ladder.

Every person who supports war, prisons, policing, and violent bonding rituals contributes to a culture of violence. Every person who admires someone because of their ability to perpetrate violence – whether it is a cop, a soldier, a street thug, or a movie hero – is contributing to the culture of violence that enforces our social hierarchies.

I am not saying that people should not talk about the specific ways that oppression manifests itself. It is a huge mistake to try to gloss over those differences in order to come together. When people say that we should just focus on how we are all oppressed as “the working class” or some other supposedly all-encompassing label, I always cringe a little. Efforts for unity without specificity always serve to do the opposite of what is intended. They erase people’s experiences and so end up dividing us more.

But neither can we speak about the specifics without making the connections. Rape won’t end if we speak about rape culture without connecting it to all the other manifestations of violence and subjugation. If we can learn to speak about how the systems affect us (making sure that the most targeted and erased people are front and center) and with an understanding of how things are connected, then we might start to get somewhere.

In response to my Trayvon post, one of the commenters denied that police and prison guards killed black kids and brought up how many black people were killed by other black people. I responded to the comment, but I think there is a bit more to say.

Within the black communities that are most affected by violence, there is a lot of discussion about black people killing each other and how to stop it. But poor black people don’t get attention from major media or get invited to Harvard symposiums to discuss race. When people do hold rallies or talks on the issue, there is no media. Few people outside those communities hear about it, much less show up.

Maybe it appears to some like nobody talks about it, but anybody who thinks that black people are ignoring black on black violence is clearly not speaking to any black people, or even just reading ColorLines (where that graphic came from).

But a lot of white people who don’t want to be perceived as racist do avoid the issue. Which means the only white people who talk about it are white supremacists who want to blame some kind of inherent defect – biological or cultural – for violence in black communities. Which, of course, makes it that much more impossible to talk about.

So we have too few real conversations about why things are the way they are and what can be done about it. It just turns into a racist shit show or an argument about personal responsibility versus oppression.

I don’t want to rehash everything I wrote in Who is Responsible. I’ll just reiterate that personal responsibility, social circumstances, and structures of domination are not mutually exclusive.

I’d also like to make one other related observation. I’ve been looking at drug war stuff for eight or nine years now. And I have found that a lot of my best information about police/state abuse comes from libertarians who have a real beef with authority and an obsessive penchant for documenting its abuses. Unfortunately, they all too often have done no work to understand how all the isms, including racism, are used by the authorities they hate.

I have also observed that the kind of information that drug war warriors and libertarians document doesn’t seem to reach people outside of their circles. So while I have seen many posts about Trayvon, I have seen almost no posts about the guy who was killed because a social services person thinks they smelled weed during their visit.

If only more anti-racists would become anti-authoritarian. If only more anti-authoritarians would become anti-racist. Then we might really start to get somewhere.

A lot of people, especially in mainstream media, have been talking about the “stand your ground” law. Darren Hutchinson wrote an excellent post about how “stand your ground” has nothing to do with the Trayvon Martin case. Definitely read the whole thing, but the short of it is this.

In some states, self-defense is not available if the defendant had the ability to “retreat” from the harm. In other words, if the defendant could have escaped the danger without using violence, then the use of force is not justifiable. These states impose a duty to retreat in order to discourage the unnecessary use of force.

In 2005, Florida amended its law to remove the duty to retreat provision. So long as the person claiming self-defense had a legal right to be in a particular location, that individual can stand his or her ground and remain there without any duty to retreat from the threat

So why are people talking about lobbying to reinstate the duty to retreat in the context of this case? Doesn’t that imply that the shooter was possibly acting in self defense? An armed man followed an unarmed kid under the pretext of there having been some robberies in the neighborhood? Even if you believe the kid might possibly (eyebrow raised) have punched the shooter who was creepily following him, that just boggles the mind.

Did Martin have a TV in his hoodie pocket?  What if he had stolen the world’s tiniest TV? Is theft now a capital offense? Zimmerman didn’t even see the kid do anything, much less have reason to fear for his life. Is every bar brawl where somebody punches somebody now a self defense claim for murder? Not even the people behind the law change think it applies in this case, cynical as their statements may be.

Let me repeat. ZIMMERMAN WAS FOLLOWING HIM!!! I’m sorry to yell, but really.

This case isn’t just tragic and infuriating, it is absurd. And we should be focusing on the absurdity that any kind of self defense claim was accepted by the police. Seems to me that talking about the  ”stand your ground” provision as though it applies is almost helping the defense.

We should be focusing on the murder and on the police and prosecutors who let someone walk away from it. Why are so few people discussing all the citizens of Sanford that have come forward about how local police have handled their cases? Why aren’t we discussing a pattern of Sanford police letting people connected with the police department get away with murder? Why is there so little discussion about how Zimmerman may have walked away from previous charges because his father is a judge? I mean the guy had an altercation with a cop and got no charges. Who the hell does that ever happen to?

The law is applied differently to people who are poor or black or otherwise marginalized.

“I can tell you that if it was the other way around, someone would be in jail by now,” Ulysees Cunningham said Wednesday.

No shit.

Florida is a cesspool of thug cops and corrupt officials. One of my earliest memories growing up in Florida is of the Liberty City riot that broke out after a bunch of white cops got away with beating a black man to death. The cops tried to cover it up. The truth came out. They went to trial and then they walked away.

Nothing much has changed. Seven black men were shot and killed by Miami police in the course of eight months. As of last July, there were 63 police shootings in Miami (25 resulting in death) that remained under perpetual “investigation” while nothing happened to the officers. Growing up in Florida, I can tell you that I didn’t know many young males that were not regularly harassed by cops. If you were black, it was far worse and far more often, but Florida cops are real fucking thugs.

To the best of my knowledge, the “stand your ground” provision does not compel police and prosecutors to let somebody go if there are no other witnesses. It may be true that self defense claims have increased since the law was enacted. And the Garcia case that Ta-Nehisi Coates mentions on his blog is disturbing as hell. But I personally would be careful to assume that is typical.

Changes in the law around the obligation to retreat actually came about in part in response to battered women who killed their abusers.

And 100 years later, courts and legislatures faced a new problem: What to do with women who said they were victims of domestic violence and had killed their husbands to save themselves? Did you have a right not to retreat if the person coming after you lived under the same roof? At first, the answer was no, to the fury of feminists. Then in 1999, the Florida Supreme Court said a woman who shot and killed her husband during a violent fight at home could successfully call on the Castle Doctrine to argue self-defense. “It is now widely recognized that domestic violence attacks are often repeated over time, and escape from the home is rarely possible without the threat of great personal violence or death,” the court wrote.

What if we were talking about obligation to retreat in the context of one of the women who was in prison for murdering her abuser and finally pardoned by the Ohio governor? What if it was somebody faced with a bunch of armed Neo-Nazis stopping them on the street? What if Martin had been able to wrestle the gun away from Zimmerman and shoot him? Would you want the prosecutors to claim that he should have run away? We’re talking Florida here. The state would have killed Martin for sure.

Let’s not lose sight of the fact that it is how laws are selectively enforced that is at the root of the horrors that are our criminal (in)justice system.

One last thing.

Growing up in a very liberal, urban household, I was under the impression that it was only white supremacists stocking up for a race war that wanted guns. In the last fifteen years, I have met a whole lot of gun loving people who distrust/hate authority (especially cops) far more than they dislike people of other races and ethnicities.

I’m not saying that said people are free from racism. Racism is in the air and water in this country. I’m saying that I was often mistaken in what I imagined peoples primary motivations to be.  I was often mistaken about where their anger and rage was focused. Not always mistaken. But often enough.

Florida is an extremely libertarian state. Even the liberals lean libertarian. Focusing on a provision of the self defense law doesn’t only seem to help the defense. It also distracts attention from the massively corrupt and abusive authorities in the state (especially police and prosecutors). And it decreases any chance people in Florida might have to build the seemingly unlikely alliances that might actually have the power to change things.

Let me be clear that I do not think focusing on police abuse and corruption should be instead of focusing on racism. Racism needs to be front and center. But we also need to be focusing on classism, privilege, power, and the abuses of power that are epidemic in the criminal (in)justice system.

It would not be easy to make those alliances. And it is asking a lot of people to try. But what other way is there?

_____________

* If anyone has good data on the cases that have used “stand your ground” as part of the defense, send them along.

Last week I wrote about how I think that the Rush Limbaugh shit storm was in large part because of who the target was, how people perceived her, and what they thought their role towards her should be.  Now I’m thinking about how much attention the Trayvon Martin murder has gotten and why.

Black kids are killed all the time. They are killed on the streets. They are killed by cops. They are killed by prison guards. Why did this one cause such an uproar while the others end in silence?

There is this idea that racism is only personal prejudice - extreme personal prejudice. George Zimmerman confirms that view of racism for us. Racists are those southern, white, redneck, low-class, militia, KKK types. And in this case, we even have a German name for added umph. You can practically see the Hollywood script being written.

When some southern vigilante kills a black kid, everyone can be up in arms without questioning our society and all the institutions in it. Not so when it is a cop or a prison guard. When an “authority” does it, we either have to accept it or question authority. Not so when racism is not personal prejudice but systemic, institutionalized, economic and social subjugation. Then the fault is not some redneck. Then the fault is ours.

It is true that some people are making the connections, but how many? How long will that last? And why does it have to take a kid murdered by a stereotype to make people pay attention? Weren’t all those other dead kids human too?

Probably not. At least not in the minds of a lot of people.

Not surprisingly, the dehumanization of Trayvon has begun. Somewhere along the line we have accepted that a person who smoked pot once or did one stupid thing in their life deserves to suffer for all eternity, or even die for their arguable imperfections. Only in a truly sick society would any of the accusations – true or not – matter at all.

Be upset that some kid was shot down in the street. But be more upset that so many people accept a society that glosses over its racism by focusing only on people like Zimmerman. Be more upset about the millions of people who languish or die in prisons because we have accepted dehumanization as a way of life.