Jonah Goldberg wonders if there is a bubble surrounding elite blacks that leads them to be more concerned about white racism than black-on-black crime. It’s a potentially interesting question, but before we can get to that we have to pause and ponder why Goldberg is posing the question in the first place. The answer is that the right-wing is responding to the uproar over the Trayvon Martin case with confusion about why it is being treated as such a big deal. In their view, black kids are being murdered all over this country every day, largely by other black kids, and we rarely if ever see any stories about those victims. In their view, this indicates that the only thing driving the Trayvon Martin controversy is that the shooter was initially reported to be white, even though he is half-Peruvian.
This is the wrong way to think about this controversy. This case involves several layers of injustice. Most obviously, we know who pulled the trigger. Find me a case of black-on-black crime where the shooter has been identified and confessed but has not been arrested. If you find a case like that, then we can talk about why that case is not receiving any attention. But in the absence of such a case, black-on-black crimes are oranges to Trayvon Martin’s apple. Beyond the lack of an arrest, we have the way the police treated the investigation. They appear to have engaged in some witness tampering. They drug tested the corpse, but not the shooter. They made no effort to learn whether the victim lived in the neighborhood or to locate his parents. They didn’t use his cell phone to aid them. They didn’t collect key evidence, like the shooter’s clothing. They defended their decision not to prosecute by referencing the Stand Your Ground law that doesn’t seem to apply. They overruled the lead investigator who doubted the veracity of the shooter’s account and wanted to charge him with manslaughter. And they leaked damaging information about the victim that has no relevancy to the case. I probably haven’t covered every way in which this investigation was screwed up, but I think I’ve covered the biggest issues.
No one has suggested that Trayvon Martin was doing anything wrong. And he’s dead. Can a black boy be killed with impunity in this country?
Finally, this case is important because of how it happened and how the circumstances make black people feel about their level of security in our country. The boy was identified as suspicious on the basis of his race. The shooter had a pattern of asking people to look out for black boys. He referred to Martin as “these assholes” and as a “fucking goon” or “fucking coon.” Perhaps because Martin was talking on a cell phone through an ear piece he appeared to be acting peculiarly, but considering the racial animus of the shooter’s comments on the 911 call, it’s clear that his main suspicion was based on Martin’s appearance alone. People in the black community are accustomed to being treated with suspicion, but that doesn’t make it okay to assume every black kid you see is an asshole and a goon. For a man to make that determination and then go confront a black kid and wind up shooting and killing him, and then to face no legal consequences…?
Are we supposed to just shrug that off?
And, you know, it’s possible that the shooter started a fight that he wound up losing. Maybe he was getting his ass kicked. Maybe his head was being pounded into the sidewalk. Maybe he felt like his life was in danger. Maybe Trayvon was reaching for his gun. It’s possible that he really acted in self-defense in order to save his own life.
It would have been helpful if the police had treated the case as a homicide investigation instead of leaving evidence uncollected and cherry-picking statements from the witnesses. It would have been helpful if they had treated Trayvon Martin as a victim of homicide, looked at his phone and called his parents. But they didn’t do any of that.
What Goldberg is missing is that the outrage in this case has as much to do with how the police behaved as it does with the death of Trayvon Martin.
As for his larger question about black elites, he may very well be right that black teenagers in our ghettoes are more concerned about being the victim of black-on-black crime than they are with white racism, while black columnists for the New York Times have the opposite priority of fears. The problem with that observation is that it explains very little and it has absolutely nothing to do with the Trayvon Martin case.
http://video.adultswim.com/the-boondocks/all-out-revolt.html
Ms. Vonhausen: “If they’re so innocent, why won’t they talk to the police? Doesn’t sound like innocent behavior to me…”
Uncle Ruckus: “Yeah, why, why?”
lots of white people muttering in surprise “Why won’t they talk to the police!?! I LOVE talking to the police!”
I wonder if those fictional characters from the Woodcrest Neighborhood Watch are still wondering why black people don’t talk to the police…
And off-topic, but the First Lady is speaking at my alma mater one year after I graduated. Ugh. Maybe I should have waited one more year…
Here’s the thing. Instead of opining on what we think he could’ve … fucking asked us. Most we’ll tell you we can talk and chew gum at the same time. Meaning, we can be concerned about black-on-black crime and police malfeasance at the same time. And if you don’t think black people, liberal elite or not, have not made inroads into black-on-black crime, you obviously don’t understand the black community. Conservatives, who love to revel in our misery, have done little to nothing concerning this phenomenon except to remind people at every turn how dangerous we are to each others health. The number of black activists, black community organizers and black social critics are legion. Conservatives have little to no credibility to lecture us on black-on-black crime and our response to it.
Conservative influence on the legal system has impacted black life in several relevant ways tho. I wish Goldberg would explore that. Their views on parole, probation, crack sentencing, arrest parameters, felony voting rights have all helped to incarcerate record numbers of black people at an alarming rate. Not blaming them entirely for this but there is little doubt that decades ago we started locking people up longer, quicker and for smaller infractions. We also started executing more people at the state level, disproptionately black. This came from a debate won by conservatives on the merit of punishment vs rehabiliatation in our legal system. It is in this vein that conservatives have little to no credibility, for my tastes, to lecture me on my response. Because of you and your arguments, a black man can be arrested in his own house for arguing with a cop or can be shot and killed while handcuffed pleading for his life. But I’m not supposed to be pissed about Trayvon’s killer walking scot free?
I feel like whenever the media narrative becomes sympathetic to black men or black life there is always a conservative that pops up to remind us how unsympathetic we are. They kill their own people, they say. Look at the number of rapes they commit. Look at their abortion rates. It seems that is their mission in life. Don’t feel too sorry for them. They deserve what they get. Goldberg did this same song and dance with Skip Gates. Basically he said if he had shut his mouth, he wouldn’t have been arrested. No discussion of whether it was right or wrong. It was tails he deserved it. Heads don’t blame the cop.
I wish they would just be more honest about that. And I wish more people would analyze how much of a bad faith partner they are in discussions like this.
you are on point
Excellent piece of analysis and writing. When power structures that are supposed to be invisible are exposed, the reaction is always the same: why are people talking about the power structure?
So when Roman Catholic priests abuse children, the reaction was that it happens all the time outside the church as well. Of course it does. But not everyone has the resources to engage in a large scale cover up of such crimes on a global scale. And it says something about the legitimacy of that power structure when it is used in that way.
Black kids also kill other black kids all the time. That may tell us something about the politics of deprivation but it doesn’t threaten the power structure. So it doesn’t get much coverage in elite media. But when cops get criticised for doing their job (protecting the power structure) and ignoring other crimes this exposes the power structure and then the white elite gets all concerned.
Whites in South Africa under apartheid used to complain all the time that Apartheid got a worse press than idi Amin and yet he killed many more in a short space of time. But we were not directly complicit in Idi Amin’s crimes (except that colonialism created the monster). But we were being asked to treat Apartheid as a legitimate regime in the same as European or US governments were. This we could not do.
The USA today reminds me v. much of South Africa during the transition from apartheid. Whites complaining about blacks getting an easier ride, blacks getting jobs which used to be the preserve of whites, cops suddenly being expected to investigate white on black crime when that wasn’t the way things used to be. Can’t they just get back to the main function which is to protect whites and allow black on black crime to fester?
Investigate crime against blacks? What is the world coming to? Why all the fuss? It must be the black elite who are getting our jobs who are stirring things up again.
The tea party movement is like the white minority in South Africa outraged that the Government isn’t doing their bidding any more. They are losing their automatic right to the best property and jobs. They are losing their majority control of the levers of state power – the police, judiciary, local Government, the Federal Government. The New Deal was fine when it was mainly for poor whites, but now it is minorities who are benefiting from entitlements which used to be a largely white preserve.
When people focus on entitlements it is usually because they feel themselves to be losing what they thought was theirs by right. It may take another 30 years, but apartheid will soon be over in the USA as well.
Excellent analysis.
But good parts of the US have looked like apartheid-transition South Africa for almost fifty years. Our Johannesburgs and Durbans had their apartheid settlements at their core and not on their outskirts; that’s the main difference that I see. The other difference is that our counterpart of the whites in South Africa poses itself as the majority, not an embattled minority.
why are white Long Islanders concerned about banks and their mortgages instead of worrying about white ppl in Appalachia?
Why are white Long Islanders concerned about banks and their mortgages instead of worrying about white people in Appalachia?
‘Cuz the white Appalachian people don’t live nearby is why. Transport about 20 busloads of poor white West Virginians to the outskirts of Great Neck, Long Island. Set up a shoddy trailer camp for them; make them work menial jobs and go to lousy schools and see how long it takes for the inter-societal shit to hit the fan. This is all about poverty, and “poverty” is all about the super rich. Redistribute the money in this country…and in the world as well…in some rational manner and poverty disappears. When poverty disappears kids like Trayvon Martin and Lynddie England (the Appalachian girl who woke up one day and found herself torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib) won’t have that “Oh shit!!! I am so fucked!!!” moment that almost every poverty-level child experiences somewhere around 10 or 11 years of age.
But…and this is a big, big “but”…so far no society on earth has found a redistribution plan that works long-term. It’s been tried in large and small situations, from massive countries right on down to little cooperatives and communes. Eventually they all break down in the face of human greed, acquisitiveness and sheer stupidity.
So it goes.
Explain black folks to Jonah Greenberg? I don’t know the man, but I’m guessing that he would learn really quickly if you took away about 98% of his possessions, position and power in the world and then dropped him into say a one room apartment in a poor, racially mixed neighborhood with the proviso that he had to stay in that situation for an entire year or be immediately executed. The learning curve would be steep and perhaps painful, but he’d be a different person at the end of it if he survived the experience. Bet on it.
Of course…that’s not going to happen, so he ain’t gonna learn shit.
So that goes as well.
AG
P.S. You do know that this Goldberg character is the son of Lucianne Goldberg, the almost certain intelligence asset who was an important part of the Clinton/Lewinsky honeytrap scheme, right? Whaddaya expect with that kind of bloodline? Mother Teresa? Gandhi? Please.
OT but this one’s for you AG:
No doubt a half-measure?
I suggested this years ago, but it will never happen.
The addiction’s too strong.
So it goes.
AG
Well Jonah seems intent on posturing this as a black failure; and he’s willing to bring in every issue of violence that ever involved a black on black in order to distract and take the bullseye off the shooter white man and on the shoulders of the entire black community.
Jonah again fails to recognize what and who is legitimate in the story he writes about.
For the sake of the environment (more bandwidth = more electricity use = more coal burning = more CO2), please don’t waste bandwidth on Jonah Goldberg.
He only has his job because his mother succeeded in getting Bill Clinton impeached. At best, he is merely another operative of the Bush family.
do you really think this piece is about Jonah? Really?
Then you didn’t need to supply the link or attribute the attitude. It is a pervasive meme anytime there is outrage about the racist bias of police investigations.
He’s not even worth being a foil.
In any case, his longer piece is worse than his shorter one.
Good God, “worse” doesn’t even begin to cover it. What’s chilling to me is that Goldberg is actually struggling to understand why this is such a big deal. The idea that this is all about race is a huge, puffy strawman anyway. Goldberg should try reading Ta-Nehisi Coates, for instance, rather than just cherry picking quotes to make liberals look bad.
But come on, Jonah, a sweet-faced and totally innocent teenager was shot dead for no reason by some paranoid asshole, and the police did nothing about it. That’s what we human beings call an outrage and a tragedy, regardless of the race of the victim or the shooter. When you see a bunch of outraged liberals and automatically line up on the other side, you risk making yourself a monster.
Wait, what? I’m responding to a thread saying we shouldn’t even be talking about this anyway? Weird. At any rate, I do think the column is worth examining as a specimen of a certain pathology.
Black columnists might have the opposite fear because their greatest danger is being mistaken for a black teenager by a white bigot. Or considering the Cambridge case that caused the beer summit, be considered a burglar in your own house by a white cop. There is personal reality in both those perceptions.
I bet this is the first time Goldberg has actually written about Black-On-Black violence. It’s nothing knew to Black folks, from top to bottom.
It’s not an EITHER/OR proposition.
Here’s the thing..
I can be upset and angry about Black -on-Black violence.
ANDDDDDDDD
I can be upset and angry about Trayvon Martin.
This isn’t even the usual ‘ shot in the back resisting arrest’ line that comes up from cops.
that’s the thing here.
Zimmerman is not a cop.
He’s some pathetic muthafucka who hunted and killed this Black BOY.
AND HE WAS NOT CHARGED.
THIS is the crux of the thing.
HE WAS NOT CHARGED.
Goldberg can go fuck himself.
No One is looking at the actions of the Sanford police department as being clearly and actively obstructionist in the Trayvon Martin murder case. Every voice commenting/reporting on this case stupidly parrots the silly line that the Sanford police really “botched up” the investigation. Unfortuantely the majority white media perspective is completely blind to the racialist intent as a motivation for the Sanford police department’s continued obstruction to and obfuscation of the actual facts in this murder case.
Simply put the Sanford Police Department’s chief investigator for the Trayvon Martin killing did not believe that the killing of a young male Negro was not something that warranted even the most elementary investigation. In the mind of the chief investigator the killing of any black person was of less interest than some white person’s dog being accidently run over in the street.
Except for the Internet and the few African American web sites who initially picked up the story; Trayvon’s unjust death would have simply faded away into obscurity like so many other killings of southern Negroes by southern white men over the past three centuries. However when the national spotlight suddenly lit up the Sanford Police, they had to scramble to cover up their racialist conduct. Their knee jerk reaction was to get busy creating an actual police file on Trayvon Martin. It appears to me as they made up new material to add to the “investigation” folder they are likewise leaking it out to the public via their “trusted” police reporter journalists. The purpose of the police department leaking so-called “confidential investigatory information” to the media is to give the appearance to the public that this information is the original information that was compiled and filed back on Feburary 26, 2012 in the immediate aftermath of Trayvon’s murder.
In this respect the Sanford police are attempting to construct documentation AFTER THE FACT to create the illusion that unfortunately a sloppy investigation was done, however in the last analysis despite its flaws the “investigation” was essentially correct in supporting the initial self defense claims of the killer of Trayvon Martin.
Among people who do not live and socialize in the deep south, the depth of racial hatred and animosity against African Americans in the south is not comprehended nor is its power fully appreciated as a daily motivator for bizarre white southern behavior quaintly known as “Southern Custom”. This is an American social phenomenon totally alien to someone like Jonah Goldberg, but well known by someone like Morris Dees.
It might be a social phenomenon alien to Goldberg but it is not alien to some urban neighborhoods outside the South.
I think yesterday was a turning point in the Trayvon Martin case for many reasons.
Reason 1 – the bullshyt of the police department trying to smear Trayvon in the media had serious blowback from folks.
hence, the `leaks’ from yesterday about the original police reports, including that the original officer wanted to charge Zimmerman with manslaughter, but was told to drop it by the states attorney, who, I will point out again, THIS IS THE REASON THAT HE WAS REMOVED FROM THIS CASE.
Trayvon’s parents in the halls of Congress. Don’t tell me that the federal government, i.e. the Justice Department, doesn’t have EVERYTHING to do with what’s been happening. The DOJ is being awfully quiet, but the folks down there in Sanford, with a federal probe just beginning up their behinds, are like, ` every man for himself’. THEY KNOW that something was done wrong, and, if the original report is to be believed, it was from `higher ups’. WTF is a states attorney doing involved in a random shooting -SO SOON. HOW COME the coverup came so complete.
I believe when it’s all said and done, we will find out that Zimmerman’s Daddy the Judge called the States Attorney, and he called the Police Chief, and they thought it would just `blow over’, and they could bullshyt their way through this.
Remember the line they gave the parents and the lawyers, and how they wouldn’t release anything…
UNTIL the DOJ came a knockin’.
Oh, this web is just beginning to be spun, and they’re gonna catch up all the evil in it.
Makes you wonder just who got that video into the hands of ABC, huh? Whether somebody in the Sanford PD is either trying to sabotage the higher-ups who screwed this case up or even, could it be? pissed at the injustice and trying to help it unravel?
Peruvian is not a race.
Much less half-Peruvian.
Nor, for that matter, are Latino and Hispanic.