thedailywhat:

This Is All Kinds Of Wrong of the Day: The Trayvon Martin gun-range target was bad enough. Then a bunch of white kids had to go and launch multiple #Trayvoning Facebook groups (that have since been removed).

Trayvoning is like Tebowing, except totally the opposite — white kids pose as a gunshot victim, wearing a hoodie, and holding Skittles and an iced tea, which is what Martin had on him when George Zimmerman shot him to death in February.

Facebook group members said they were merely combating “racism against whites”: “White people are becoming more and more oppressed.”

[hypervocal]

I’ve had it with these motherfucking racists on this motherfucking planet

thepoliticalfreakshow:

Remember when George Zimmerman sought donations from his website? You know, the one that looked like it was designed in the mid-’90s, and that proudly featured a photo from a vandalized black community center? Turns out Zimmerman raised $200,000.

Zimmerman’s lawyer Mark O’Mara appeared on Anderson Cooper 360, where he said that he just learned about the money on Wednesday and will inform a judge Friday. Zimmerman has shut his site down — he’s been barred from engaging in any social media — but O’Mara said he will start a new defense fund for his client.

O’Mara admitted that if the judge had known about the $200,000 Zimmerman raised, Zimmerman’s bail might have been set higher than $150,000. The defendant, who faces second-degree murder charges for shooting Trayvon Martin, was released from jail earlier this week after paying 10 percent of the bail.

I’m not the least bit surprised by this.

(via reagan-was-a-horrible-president)

As We Watch the Trayvon Martin Case, All of Us Should Know Marissa Alexander « Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner-(The Blog)

There’s a petition you can sign here (US citizens only). Marissa’s case will be on Anderson Cooper 360, 8pm & 10pm tomorrow (Monday, April 23).

(via iamthecrime)

(via wingedrabbit)

magnolius:

A Tale Of Two Hoodies - a controversial painting by artist/activist Michael D’Antuono. 

Inspired by the Trayvon Martin case, this painting symbolizes the travesty of racially profiling innocent children and how present day prejudices affect policy.

(via theeducatedfieldnegro)

afternoonsnoozebutton:

(partypropagandaprofessional)

(via dibin)

meshicaurbanity:

stfublancpeople:

RACISM IN AMERICA IS DEAD, BARACK IS PRESIDENT!

click image for link to article

Just when you think this is just some sick photoshopped joke- it isn’t. And apparently  this scum had to plan this out: 

Morosi says there’s evidence the road sign was broken into.The signs are usually password protected, but he says someone with computer knowledge would be able to figure out how to change the sign. In fact, there are step-by-step instructions online to show anyone how to do it.

“Obviously they knew what they were doing in terms of erasing the original message, putting a new message on and then having that message run,” said Morosi.

Post-racial society? Yeah, right. 

(via frijoliz)

socialismartnature:

Don’t even know what kind of commentary to put on this, as it’s just so absurdly appalling …

I’ll just say that, unfortunately, white supremacy of this sort is no stranger to America. In fact, Hitler even cites America in “Mein Kampf” as one of the nations of the world that had made the most ‘progress’ in legally recognizing and codifying the inferiority of the non-white races (i.e., Jim Crow) …

===

In the realm of right-wing philosophy, climate change is a Hollywood invention, tax cuts create jobs, Obama is a secret Muslim Socialist and, fresh out of the Fox News bubble, neo-nazis are apparently in the same category as say your Rosa Parks and W.E.B. Du Bois.

It seems a Fox Orlando affiliate described Neo-Nazis as “a civil rights group” during a tv broadcast and online, thus begging the question: What in hell is going on in Florida? Are the oranges being pumped full of turpentine or something??

The Neo-Nazi group, which apparently is still relevant in 2012, appears to have been running regular armed patrols of the town in which Trayvon Martin was shot. Apparently,George Zimmerman did such a knock up job that a group of stupid and armed haters of everything with metal weapons of death feel that they have to step in and make things right for all the trigger happy neighborhood watchmen out there.

Holy fucking shit.

(via dibin)

socialismartnature:

(Photo) KKK/Neo-Nazis “patrolling” white neighborhoods in Sanford, FL — the city where Trayvon Martin was murdered by a still-at-large racist. 

It wouldn’t surprise me if these white supremacist groups in Sanford have active connections with the local police (who have evinced a pattern of crass racism over the years in their own right).

Most of the reports I’ve read which document extremist right-wing hate groups in the South (for instance, see the work of the Southern Poverty Law Center), note that some of the largest appeal for these far-right groups is among cops, prosecution attorneys, prison guards, etc. (besides the obvious “lumpen-proletarian”, poor, “trailer-park” whites).

This is why I say that the Civil War didn’t go far enough, especially given that the post-war ”Radical Reconstruction” period was quickly abandoned as the result of a compromise between wealthy Northern industrial capitalists and the Southern plantation-owning aristocrats.

One can actually trace a more or less straight line between the defeat of Reconstruction, the advent of the Black Codes in the 1880s and 1890s, the rise of Jim Crow segregration, and through to the present (taking a brief — though nonetheless important — detour during the 50s/60s civil rights movement).

Any antiracists in the area who want to do patrols of their own?

(via socialuprooting)

lol fuck that guy

The Paralysis of “White Privilege”

Sherry Wolf

There’s a troubling YouTube video, “I AM NOT TRAYVON MARTIN,” making the rounds on Facebook that was posted by a young white woman attacking white antiracists who wear “I am Trayvon Martin” t-shirts. Because the 3-minute video expresses so much of what’s paralyzing and wrong-headed about the “white privilege” argument popular among some left activists, it’s worth a comment.

Essentially, her argument amounts to this: 1) social-justice minded white people (all described as middle class) should not and cannot identify with victims of racism like Trayvon; 2) white people, including antiracists, can only identify with homicidal racist maniacs like George Zimmerman; 3) people of color are multifaceted individuals capable of independent thought and action; white people are an undifferentiated mass of privileged racists who must constantly resist the urge to oppress racial minorities — no matter what they do, say or think they think, all whites are racists and benefit from racism.

This is a rather bleak picture of race and class in America. It is also a completely inaccurate description of and response to a rising tide of multiracial unity in the face of Trayvon Martin’s killing, and Troy Davis’s execution before it.

I haven’t the time here to flesh out all my disagreements, but here are my big three.

One, wearing an “I am Trayvon Martin” t-shirt, or chanting it, is an act of solidarity with victims of racism, not an assertion that everyone faces the same oppression. Trayvon’s own mother  has called for multiracial crowds of protesters to identify with Trayvon and the fact that thousands have done so is a testament to a growing disgust with racist police, courts and actions.

Wearing these t-shirts and chanting that you are anybody other than who you actually are is a collective means of expressing outrage at the system, sympathy with victims of injustice and unity with others who feel the same way. It’s why it became so popular among abolitionists to wear “I am Troy Davis” t-shirts in the run-up to that innocent Black man’s execution in September 2011, and why his sister Martina Correia insisted everyone wear one. Visual solidarity is powerful.

The video woman argues that white people wearing these t’s must think that they are making Trayvon into a white, middle class person — presumably like themselves — in order to render him sympathetic in the eyes of racists.

Isn’t it possible, even likely, that people protesting racism wearing these t-shirts actually oppose racism and don’t seek to justify it? If not, then everything we do is called into question as possibly its opposite; nothing we do matters, nothing we say or argue has any validity, but must be suspect as meaning its complete opposite. This is possible, I suppose, but it’s a also a recipe for doing nothing, saying nothing, challenging nothing — paralysis.

Two, arguing, as the video woman does, that white people could only wear “I am George Zimmerman” t-shirts exposes the essentially reactionary core of this argument. Like Zimmerman, who is Latino, white people have been indoctrinated in racism and though video woman, according to her account, has managed to escape the worst of its clutches through great parenting, education and critical thinking, she along with all other whites are condemned to only identify with oppressors, never the oppressed. In fact, to identify with the oppressed, she argues, is an act of immaturity. Au contraire!

Racism, according to this thinking, is not the result of a ruling class’s need to structure oppression in order to gain profits and spread crappy ideas that divide the working class majority from itself. The social construction of racism by those in power centuries ago in order to justify slavery is absent in this analysis.

Instead, racism is conceived as a sort of ideological cancer of no clear origin that metastasizes in all white people, regardless of what they do, think or say. And like a dystopic nightmare, there’s no way out.

Third, according to her “white privilege” argument, there are no distinctions between whites in positions of power and the majority without. In fact, there’s no accounting for how a Black president could preside over a racist system in which a Latino man has killed a Black man and was let off by a mostly white police force led by a Black police chief.

She refers to “the system,” but has no class outlook in which to analyze how the system works and in whose interests. Because if all white people benefit— which includes the majority of people on food stamps, on unemployment and living in poverty in the United States — then these benefits are rather illusory, aren’t they?

Of course, on nearly every economic and social gauge, white people on average in this society have it better than Blacks on average. But to assert, as this argument does, that all white people benefit from racism because they don’t experience the same kind of oppression is false and actually lets the real architects and beneficiaries of racism off the hook.

Employers, politicians, landlords, mortgage lenders and others in positions of power have set up these structures and keep them alive to benefit themselves and their class. Most working class people have no say in these matters and the persistence of a racial divide in the U.S. continues to be one of the greatest obstacles to unified resistance to austerity and joblessness to this day. The fact that many whites accept racist ideas is hardly a privilege or to their own advantage.

The Black historian and NAACP founder WEB DuBois captured this dynamic perfectly:

The race element was emphasized in order that property-holders could get the support of the majority of white laborers and make it more possible to exploit Negro labor. But the race philosophy came as a new and terrible thing to make labor unity or labor class-consciousness impossible. So long as the Southern white laborers could be induced to prefer poverty to equality with the Negro, just so long was a labor movement in the South made impossible.

The video ends with an argument for whites — again, all conceived of as middle class in the midst of the worst depression since the worst depression — to jettison racist ideas and use their “privilege” to fight the system. While I certainly agree with challenging racism, the video ideologically disarms any antiracist white person from actually joining the struggle — whites better not show up to Trayvon marches wearing “I am George Zimmerman” t-shirts!

This video reflects a politically confused way of talking about race as if it were simply about bad ideas in people’s heads and not conscious structures of oppression kept in place by the 1% in the interests of the 1%.

Worse, it’s often counter-productive because by reducing racism to bad ideas and telling all whites they’re beneficiaries, the privilege argument demands ordinary white people relinquish privileges that they do not have, rather than unite to win what’s been stolen from all of us.

Perhaps the most telling thing about this “white privilege” argument is that many radicals have had their sights for justice set so low that it has come to be thought of as a privilege not to be gunned down in the night on a snack errand while wearing a hoodie because of the color of your skin. Isn’t that simply a human right?

In a week of leaked high school disciplinary records, police reports and police station surveillance video in the war over public perception of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, more details have emerged about Zimmerman’s history of violence.

Zimmerman, the 28-year-old Sanford, Fla., neighborhood watch volunteer who shot the unarmed 17-year-old Martin to death last month, was fired from a job securing illegal house parties for “being too aggressive,” according to the New York Daily News, which quoted a former colleague of Zimmerman’s. According to the co-worker, Zimmerman worked for two agencies that provided security for house parties from 2001 to 2005.

“Usually he was just a cool guy,” said the former co-worker, who the newspaper didn’t name. “But it was like Jekyll and Hyde. When dude snapped, he snapped.” The Daily News said Zimmerman earned $50 to $100 a night for the parties. He was fired for being too aggressive with patrons.

“He had a temper and he became a liability,” the newspaper quoted the former co-worker as saying. “One time this woman was acting a little out of control. She was drunk. George lost his cool and totally overreacted,” he said. “It was weird, because he was such a cool guy, but he got all nuts. He picked her up and threw her. It was pure rage. She twisted her ankle. Everyone was flipping out.”

The new portrayal of Zimmerman comes as distinctly different images of both Martin and Zimmerman are being floated by people on both sides of the Martin killing. Zimmerman told police he shot Martin Feb. 26 in self defense after being jumped from behind. He has not been charged.

Photos of a fresh-faced, smiling Martin in a Hollister T-shirt helped attract sympathy to his parents’ call for justice, as did a 2005 police mug shot of a scowling, overweight Zimmerman photographed after being charged with assaulting a police officer.

This week, stories challenging both portraits emerged. Photos of Martin with removable gold tooth caps and revelations that he was suspended from his Miami high school three times, including once for possessing an empty baggy that school officials said contained marijuana residue, became ammunition for conservative websites and and people sympathetic to Zimmerman.

Law enforcement in Sanford also leaked a police report to the Orlando Sentinel, offering details of Zimmerman’s account of the killing for the first time.

The report said Zimmerman told police that Martin attacked him from behind, punched him in the nose, wrestled him to the ground and violently bashed his head on a sidewalk. It was then, Zimmerman told the police, that he pulled out his 9mm handgun and shot Martin in the chest.

Surveillance video from the Sanford police station recorded the night of the shooting, first broadcast by ABC News on Wednesday, showed a clean-shaven and fit-looking Zimmerman being ushered in to the station without visible abrasions, bruises or bloodstains on his clothes, all of which may fail to support his account of a violent death struggle. In addition, the funeral director who handled Martin’s body reported there were no cuts or other marks on the teen’s hands that would suggest violent fisticuffs.

In the days after the shooting, Martin’s family said police officers told them Zimmerman had a clean record. But a cursory search of county records showed a 2005 arrest on charges of resisting arrest and assaulting a law enforcement officer. The charges were later dropped.

Also in 2005, Zimmerman was involved in a bitter domestic violence incident with his ex-fiancee, Veronica Zuazo. In that case, Zuazo filed for a restraining order against Zimmerman, who she said snatched her cell phone from her hand and pushed her during an argument. The next day, both filed court petitions accusing the other of violence.

According to the Miami Herald, Zuazo said that three years earlier, Zimmerman attacked her while the two were driving to a counseling session. Zuazo said she popped her gum in his face and he repeatedly smacked her in the face. In January 2002, she added, Zimmerman became enraged that she had come home late. They wrestled and he threw her on the bed, smacking her, according to the newspaper.

In September 2003, Zimmerman called police and reported that another motorist spat on him, according to reports, Zimmerman followed the man in his car until the police arrived. Daniel Osmun, the other driver, told police that Zimmerman was tailgating and that he spit his gum out the window “out of frustration.”

Osum said that Zimmerman then pulled alongside of him, and the two argued. In a police report of the incident, Osum said “at one point, he thought Mr. Zimmerman was going to attack him.” No charges were filed against either man.

Zimmerman was the self-appointed captain of the neighborhood watch at the Retreat at Twin Lakes, a gated community where Martin was visiting his father and his father’s girlfriend when he was killed. Zimmerman noticed Martin, who was walking home from a store, and called 911 to report the youth as “suspicious.” (Zimmerman had called 911 46 times in recent years.) According to 911 recordings the night of the killing, Zimmerman followed Martin against a dispatcher’s recommendation. The police initially said that at one point Martin noticed he was being followed, turned to ask what Zimmerman wanted, and a physical altercation ensued.

Zimmerman was questioned and released by police, who said they lacked evidence to contradict his self-defense claim. The State Attorney’s Office is considering whether to file charges. A grand jury is scheduled to be called on April 10.

Some of Zimmerman’s neighbors said he had a history of being overly aggressive and followed people whom he thought appeared suspicious back to their homes.

At an emergency homeowner’s association meeting on March 1, days after the killing, “one man was escorted out because he openly expressed his frustration because he had previously contacted the Sanford Police Department about Zimmerman approaching him and even coming to his home,” a resident who spoke on the condition of anonymity told HuffPost. “It was also made known that there had been several complaints about George Zimmerman and his tactics” in his neighborhood watch role.

The former co-worker quoted by the Daily News said he had not recently been in touch with Zimmerman, but his latest troubles came as a shock nonetheless.

“He definitely loved being in charge. He loved the power,” he said. “Still, I could never see him killing someone. Never.”

Yeah anyone who’s siding with Zimmerman at this point either doesn’t know all the facts, or is a racist.

(via cultureofresistance)

(via socialistscum-deactivated201209)

afternoonsnoozebutton:

ipomoeaandthestarstealers:

Seattle police officer D. Cookie Bouldin protests at a rally for Trayvon Martin on March 25.

Boss.

Socialist Worker: The racism that connects these murders

FOLLOWING THE news these days is like witnessing a parade of horrors. As soon as you regain your composure after being disturbed by an incident of racist violence, another comes into view.

Each day is bringing new details about the murder of Trayvon Martin, the Black teenager killed by racist vigilante George Zimmerman, whose body was drug-tested and classified as a “John Doe” by Sanford, Fla., police, as his parents desperately searched for their missing son. The same police department has allowed Zimmerman to go about his business without arrest.

On March 14, a few weeks after Trayvon’s murder, police in Del City, Okla., killed Dane Scott Jr., an 18-year-old Black man, after pulling him over for a traffic stop. Scott—who the cops say was armed when they killed him, although no weapon has been produced—was shot in the back by police. He is among the latest African Americans killed by police this year, in a long list that includes Ramarley Graham in New York City, and Stephon Watts and Rekia Boyd in Chicago.

Then came the murder of Shaima Alawadi on March 21, one week after Dane Scott Jr. died.

The mother of five was viciously beaten into unconsciousness with a tire iron in her home in El Cajon, Calif. She died five days later after being removed from life support. According to Shaima’s daughter, who discovered her mother’s body, the killer left a note near Shaima, an Iraqi Muslim who wore a hijab, which read in part, “Go back to your country, you terrorist.”

Yet police said in a statement, “Evidence thus far leads us to believe this is an isolated incident.”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

SPEAKING ABOUT the murder of Trayvon Martin, President Barack Obama said that we would all have to do some soul-searching to ask how such a killing could happen. But an honest look at racism in the U.S. reveals that these killings are neither isolated, nor complicated, nor surprising.

Trayvon, Shaima and others are the latest victims of a deeply bigoted society, and their killings are the bitter fruits of the most recent trends in institutional racism.

Racist violence has been a feature of U.S. society since the founding of the country. Both before and well after 1776, establishing the U.S. involved settling a land that already had inhabitants—the indigenous of America were subjected to a racist genocide. The enslaved Black population endured tremendous violence. And wave after wave of immigrants to the U.S. has been met by racist brutality.

In other words, racist violence in the U.S. is as old as the country itself.

One particular form that racism has taken recently is the criminalization of Blacks and Muslims.

The past 40 years has seen the mass incarceration of Black people on a level unheard-of in the U.S. or internationally. According to anti-racist legal scholar and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Michelle Alexander, there are more Black people currently incarcerated in the U.S. than there were Blacks in prisons in South Africa at the height of apartheid.

A central part of the effort to lock up so many Black people has been ideological. Through government policies, policing and the media, “Black” has become associated with “thug.”

The same institutions are responsible, particularly since the September 11 terror attacks and the launching of the “war on terror,” for making “Muslim” synonymous with “terrorist.” Untold numbers of Muslims and Arabs have been detained, interrogated and deported since 2001.

The mainstream media and the political elite have been enthusiastic partners in whipping up a racist frenzy about the supposed Muslim terrorist threat. They are the ones who should take Obama’s words about soul-searching to heart—the policymakers in the Obama administration (and Bush’s, and every administration before that), and the media executives whose TV news channels nightly portray Blacks as criminals and whose newspapers promote fear of Arabs and Muslims and celebrate the invasions of their countries of origin.

Another contributing factor to the climate of racism today has been the behavior of the right wing during the 2008 election campaign and after.

As it became clear that their bid for the presidency was a losing one, the 2008 Republican ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin increasingly invoked racism to attack Barack Obama and mobilize the hard-core right wing of the party.

McCain rallies became notorious as places where Nazis were welcome and calls for the murder of Obamawere tolerated. Meanwhile, right-wing media personalities like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity preached a doomsday scenario if a Black man actually became president. On the night Obama was elected, racists burned a Black church to the ground in Springfield, Mass.—one of many on a list of hate crimes that coincided with Obama’s election.

Yet the Obama administration has been virtually silent about the rise of hate crimes and the climate of open racism tolerated in American politics. All of these things set the stage for the latest racist killings.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

IT’S IRONIC that African Americans on the one hand and Arabs and Muslims on the other are cast as the violent threats to an otherwise peaceful American society. It’s obvious to anyone paying attention that these groups are subjected to violence.

Among the tragic aspects of Shaima’s murder this month is the fact that she and her family emigrated here from Iraq, a country made barely habitable by two—count them, two—U.S. invasions in the last quarter century and an occupation that falls on the list of crimes against humanity in world history.

Together, these killings are revealing a nightmare of a society, with racist violence as a feature of daily life.

That racism must be rooted out. As disturbing as the news has been over the past few weeks, the antiracist solidarity that is growing in response to these crimes is very heartening. There have been rallies and marches across the country demanding justice for Trayvon Martin, and people everywhere are using social media to communicate about the killings and show solidarity with victims of racism.

There is nothing new about the police murder of unarmed Black people or hate crimes against Blacks, Arabs and Muslims. What is inspiring today is that many people are drawing a line with these recent incidents—and deciding that they will not go unchallenged.

Justice for Trayvon and Shaima will require far more than the arrest and prosecution of their killers. We have a whole set of racist institutions to take on and destroy. As anti-racists, we need to take these killings as a call to action and this moment as an opportunity to revive a tradition of relentlessly fighting oppression.

If racism is a central feature of U.S. history, struggle against it has been as well. We must rebuild, deepen and strengthen that struggle.

(via wilwheaton)