Kathleen Parker has a warped way of looking at things.
Stepping out from his usual duties of drawing meaningless red lines in the Syrian sand, the president splashed red paint across the American landscape:
“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
In so saying, he essentially gave permission for all to identify themselves by race with the victim or the accused.
We know that Trayvon Martin aroused George Zimmerman’s suspicions, at least in part, because he was black. We can argue about whether that was a reasonable basis for suspicion or not. But other black teenagers had committed crimes recently in the neighborhood, which is why Zimmerman set up the Neighborhood Watch program in the first place. And the problem was that every time Zimmerman called the cops to announce black teenagers had arrived in his neighborhood “the assholes always got away” before the cops could arrive. So, this one time, that was not going to happen. Not on Zimmerman’s watch.
What the president meant when he said that his son, if he had one, would look like Trayvon, was that it was a personal concern to him that a young black boy could be profiled, pursued, and gunned down on the street, when all he was doing was trying to walk home in the rain. He wasn’t giving permission to white people to side with Zimmerman.
That’s insane.
And he wasn’t telling black people what to think, either. Imagine if someone was superglueing red hats on people that they couldn’t get off. Imagine that there were people going around and shooting anyone with a red hat. Now, imagine how you would feel if your son was one of the people who had had a red hat superglued to their head. Do you think you might be concerned for their safety? What if the police decided that you could argue self-defense and kill anyone in a red hat who dared ask you why you were following them? Do you think the red hat people would need the president to tell them what to think about that?
But, really, the idea that the president gave permission to white people to take Zimmerman’s side is just fucking bizarre. Zimmerman doesn’t look white. His mother is Peruvian. But even if he did look white, how does the president saying he’s uncomfortable with a situation where people are getting killed for looking like him somehow give white people permission to support people who kill people who look like him?
Alright, so you say I am begging the question. You argue that the president was dismissing Zimmerman’s self-defense argument. But, even if he was, that doesn’t give every white person permission to disagree with him because he’s black.
Logic, how does it work?
Link to the Parker article that BooMan referred to.
Racism is a house of mirrors. Most people who harbor racist feelings seem unwilling to cop to them, or unable (if their racism is unconscious). That’s one reason it’s still so difficult to talk about racism in America. People like Kathleen Parker won’t acknowledge their’s and instead try and talk around and around it, until it becomes this bizarre abstract concept.
That’s why she can seriously compare her experience of being followed “to the second floor of a boutique in Georgetown” with Trayvon Martin’s death. She’s blind to the alternate reality that black people in this country live in and have lived in for 400-odd years.
But you simply CANNOT remove racism from its historical context and expect to have a serious conversation about it. Racism doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Which means that even if no one living today is personally responsible for, say slavery, we did inherit political and social systems partially built on slavery. So we’re responsible for ameliorating those systems to bring them more in line with core American values like liberty, equality, and opportunity.
That’s what affirmative action is about. That’s what the Minority Business Development Agencyis about. That’s what the Fair Sentencing Act is about. That’s why Voter ID laws are a problem, not a solution. That’s why fixing our criminal justice system is an imperative.
These may be the most appalling lines of all in Parker’s article:
Conservatives like Parker would like to believe that the exception – when you’re profiled, it’s about “you”, not your race – is the rule. But anyone who is remotely serious about grappling with American history will recognize that it’s the other way around.
Racism is America’s great shame. We have to accept that shame and take full responsibility for what has happened in this country over the centuries before we can “end” the “conversation-about-race”, as Parker would like. This conversation will never end until it’s been fully had.
Oops. Thanks. I added the link.
Teh stupid has been at 12 for a good long while.
Peak wingnut was a lie, because it’s an infinitely renewable resource that will only be exhausted when all the wingnuts have expired – that is to say, never.
Anti-intellectual, anti-logic, anti-math, anti-compassion, anti-progress – these people have exceeded, exponentially, the rebellion of The Wild One. Instead of the establishment they rebel against reality and common sense.
Mildred: Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?
Johnny: Whadda you got?
Well, we got science, we got a black president in a white house, we got compassion for families being bankrupted by medical bills, we got unemployed people, we got students with huge loans and no careers, we got minority people who believe they have the right to vote, etc.
Agin it all I is.
this was a racist screed by a racist writer.
not the first piece of racist shyt she’s written.
One might think, that with new ownership, if one were smart, a columnist would want to put forth his/her best effort into each and every column.
Ok, never mine.
I just saw the flaw in my logic.
That’s her best stuff, by her standards.
The stuff you thought was adequate were mistakes by her standards.
The President was performing his role as consoler-in-chief of American families during a publicly known crisis. That assertion was one of compassion. And it is close to objectively true that if Barack Obama had a son, he would resemble Trayvon Martin. I found that statement to be a witness of his feelings.
Haters gonna hate and they’re gonna use these sorts of attacks as expressions of not excuses of their hate. And this sort of loopiness to bring Trayvon Martin up in the timeframe of whatever the President decides about Syria is mind-boggling. That the Village tolerates it and considers it as “serious opinion” says a lot about what is messed up in DC.
And just because the right pretends to not understand the point Obama was making doesn’t mean he wasn’t making it. His point was clearly that if he had a son, Zimmerman could have baselessly profiled him too, and it would be his son dead and not Tracy Martin’s. In fact, it could have been any random black teenager that met Zimmerman’s gun muzzle that night. That is so blatantly true that the only way you can deny it is to pretend that Zimmerman wasn’t profiling Trayvon because of his skin color, and let’s face it, that’s exactly what Zimmerman’s fanbois tell themselves. But I doubt that in their hearts they believe it.
Parker’s remarks are not worthy of a response. It’s such obvious insincere tripe from a pathetic excuse for a columnist who is simply looking for reasons to take shots at the president. Such people deserve only disdain; not the respect implicit in a response.
Kathleen Parker is a fucking idiot.