Why Conservatives Are Smearing Trayvon Martin’s Reputation

[Ian David]

Last edited Tue Mar 27, 2012, 12:48 PM - Edit history (1)

Why Conservatives Are Smearing Trayvon Martin’s Reputation
by Michelle Goldberg Mar 27, 2012 4:45 AM EDT

Conservatives are focusing on Trayvon’s tweets, appearance, school suspension over marijuana traces, and the hoodie he was wearing to blame him for his own death—and to show that his killing had nothing to do with racism.

First, there was the discussion of what Trayvon Martin was wearing. “I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was,” Geraldo Rivera said on Fox & Friends last week, later suggesting that the sweatshirt made him look like a “wannabe gangster.” Then conservative bloggers started digging through Martin’s Facebook page for information that might raise doubts about his character. It turns out that one of Martin’s friends had written, under a happy birthday message, “damn were you at nigga needa plant;” according to Dan Riehl at Riehl World View, “Some may interpret that as Martin having somehow been involved in selling [marijuana].”

<snip>

I’m far from the first to notice the similarities between the way people talk about Martin and the way they talk about rape victims, whose clothes and histories are often subject to scrutiny no matter how cut-and-dried the case seems. Like a rape victim, Martin’s past is being excavated for evidence that he might have provoked the harm done to him. It hardly matters that even if Martin had gotten high every day, it would have had zero relevance; it’s not as if marijuana use is linked to violence. Nor that it’s not unusual for a teenager to come across as obnoxious on Twitter. People were looking for some tenuous justification for treating him as complicit in his own death, and now they’ve found it. (For the record, I was also suspended from high school, though in my case for smoking cigarettes. I trust that should a stranger shoot me in the street, no one will treat this as a mitigating factor.)

<snip>

But as of right now, some things are not in dispute. Martin was unarmed save for a pack of Skittles and an ice tea. Zimmerman, who repeatedly called the cops when he saw young black men in his gated community, trailed Martin after the police advised him not to. He called Martin either a “coon” or a “goon.” Martin had no documented history of violence. Zimmerman, on the other hand, was previously accused of hitting his ex-fiancé; in response, he said that she was the aggressor, which means he doesn’t deny that there was a physical fight.

More:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/26/why-conservatives-are-smearing-trayvon-martin-s-reputation.html

[DearAbby]

1. Another interesting article

Trayvon Martin had it coming, or so we will soon be led to believe. The surely unattractive details of his short life as a black man in America will tumble forward—his troubles in school, the weed baggie that got him suspended, the altercation in which police and George Zimmerman claim he was the aggressor. He was a maladjusted, Negro man-child, so ferocious he could kill an armed man with his bare hands. He had to die.

Yesterday, local law enforcement offered a preview of this old, familiar narrative when someone leaked Zimmerman’s account of the night to the Orlando Sentinel. According to the Sentinel, Zimmerman had given up his hunt of Martin and was returning to his SUV when the 17-year-old caught him by surprise. Do you have a problem, Martin is said to have asked, before answering for himself, “Well, you do now.” He reportedly began pummelling Zimmerman, leading the armed man to shoot and kill.

Sadly, it’s necessary to point out that there isn’t an imaginable scenario in which an armed man can shoot an unarmed child to death and it be okay. But set that obvious fact to the side. Trayvon Martin did in fact have it coming. He was born black and male in the United States and was thus marked for death. The cruelness of our economy and of our criminal justice system isn’t reserved for men or for black people. But there is a particularly gendered and particularly racist way in which black men are set upon in this country, most acutely those who don’t have the resources to push back. And it has a very long, still relevant history.



More and well worth the read. http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/03/you_got_a_problem_well_now_you_do.html