Cruelty (TaNehisi Coates on the Trayvon Martin smear)

[swag]

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/03/cruelty/255283/

As noted below, the attack on the memory of Trayvon Martin began with the exposure of his twitter feed, proceeded apace to the selective posting of pictures, moved with great energy to the faking of pictures, and has now found its natural terminus in unbridled white supremacy:

In addition to the Facebook messages, Klanklannon posted a list of usernames and passwords for Martin's social media and email accounts as proof of his exploits. All of the passwords had been changed to racist slurs. (Gmail: "niggerniggernigger" Twitter: "coontrayvonnigger&quot

No one should be surprised by this. Nercomancy never ends well.

Among the many reasons I hoped Barack Obama would not weigh in on Martin's death, was the sense that for racists--closeted and otherwise--it would represent an escalation. By making the obvious plain--that the president is black, and that the days of small town justice are at an end--I thought he would invite the full brunt of racist bile to be heaped, not upon the president, but upon the parents of Trayvon Martin. What I forgot was that racists need no reason to justify themselves. They are what they their actions say they are.

. . .

It is cruelty to sneer at the unguarded thoughts of dead children. But it is the specific cruelty of racism that prevents so many from ever seeing Martin as a child.




. . . more at link.

[spin]

1. If you read the Facebook pages of teenagers the same age as Martin ...

you might well come to the conclusion that his comments were entirely normal.