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?
