{"id":895,"date":"2013-09-03T19:42:37","date_gmt":"2013-09-03T19:42:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rashidmod.com\/?p=895"},"modified":"2014-05-06T23:19:08","modified_gmt":"2014-05-06T23:19:08","slug":"the-concurrent-tragedy-of-the-trayvon-martin-case-and-our-political-confusions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/?p=895","title":{"rendered":"The Concurrent Tragedy of the Trayvon Martin Case and Our Political Confusions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Who\u2019s to Blame?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Following what could only be called a high ratings show trial, Latino neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman was acquitted by an all-female jury in the killing of unarmed New Afrikan\/Black teenager Trayvon Martin.\u00a0 Almost instantly, masses of outraged Black people and sympathizers took to the streets in protest.\u00a0 All felt \u201cbetrayed\u201d by a so-called justice system that has never served them to begin with.<\/p>\n

What they didn\u2019t understand is, from the beginning, the establishment\u2019s entire response to Trayvon\u2019s killing was a staged performance aimed to contain and \u201cchannel\u201d public anger, to deflect the system\u2019s own responsibility in manufacturing the very culture that led to Trayvon\u2019s murder and that of multitudes of our youth at the hands of cops and vigilantes, and to protect the status quo.<\/p>\n

Trayvon, like many of our youth, was targeted and killed based upon prevailing slanders and criminal stereotypes of young New Afrikan males, projected by the government working hand-in-hand with the mainstream entertainment and \u201cnews\u201d media: outlets which the masses of New Afrikan and common people neither own nor control.<\/p>\n

Zimmerman, without doubt under such influences, felt an overzealous urge to \u201cprotect\u201d his gated community from the menace of a hooded young Black male walking about, who was likely (in Zimmerman\u2019s media-hyped mind) up to some criminal mischief.\u00a0 Trayvon (thus racially profiled), had to be \u201ckept in his place,\u201d which, in the minds of folks of elevated social status, means out of their living space.\u00a0 So Zimmerman ended up pushing Trayvon out of this life altogether.<\/p>\n

Trayvon\u2019s death triggered waves of protest from a long-suffering people, enraged at yet another example of poor Black life being of no value and persecuted in Amerika.\u00a0 Where yet another of our youth was profiled and gunned down in cold blood by cops and their imitators.\u00a0 Justice was demanded against<\/em> the system, which has always dealt us injustice and which by criminalizing our youth to the broader public was rightly to blame for Trayvon\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

The Troupe Comes to Town<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In stepped career camera shark and Black capitalist windbag Al Sharpton, who, loyal to the system as ever, moved to contain mass protest and steer it into the system\u2019s own \u201csafe\u201d channels of resolution: the courts.\u00a0 Thus was applied the same tried and true tactic a panicked John F. Kennedy implemented in 1963 against an unwitting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to gain official control of the March on Washington, which was originally organized by masses of poor Blacks who planned to lay siege on the U.S. Capital and not leave<\/em>, in protest against the same sorts of abuses, including widespread murders of Black youth by police and vigilantes, from which we are still<\/span> suffering today.<\/p>\n

True to his politics, Sharpton weaseled his way into becoming the spokesman for Trayvon\u2019s distraught family, and through the all-too-accommodating mainstream media, counseled the riled-up masses to look to the courts for justice.\u00a0 The same courts that alongside the murderous police are disposing of masses of our young males in the world\u2019s largest, brutal, and profit-oriented prison system . . . a system widely recognized as the \u201cNew Jim Crow.\u201d ((Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness<\/span>. ))<\/p>\n

Recall it was against the \u201cold\u201d Jim Crow system that the old Civil Rights Movement was fought.\u00a0 Indeed, the U.S. government killed King because he woke up and realized that it was the system itself at the source of everyone\u2019s suffering, and he thus broke with the old Civil Rights program of looking to the same system as a savior. ((William F. Pepper, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King<\/span>.))\u00a0 This is why types like Sharpton, who remain loyal to the old pro-capitalist Civil Rights program, have us seeking justice from the forces of government behind today\u2019s Jim Crow.<\/p>\n

Only a terribly confused people would fall for such a trick as this (again!), which is like directing a coop of chickens to put their fate into the hands of a den of foxes.<\/p>\n

Then, right on cue, the system trotted out from backstage yet another insider and token dark face (the Florida Attorney General), who promised to deliver just the sort of justice that ol\u2019 Uncle (Tom) Al was crowing for.\u00a0 But of course it was all a show, an old script with actors new and old played out to yet again lasso and hogtie public outrage and protest in the face of yet another Black tragedy until things simmered down, so the system could go on about its usual business\u2014until the next tragedy provoked another round of angry mass protest.<\/p>\n

Be Careful What You Ask For<\/strong><\/h3>\n

So after much hemming and hawing, the next scene was staged: criminal charges were issued against Zimmerman and a show trial was underway.<\/p>\n

But as Mumia Abu-Jamal observed in his July 8th commentary predicting, \u201cThe Coming Acquittal,\u201d each of the prosecution\u2019s witnesses were \u201cflipped,\u201d becoming witnesses for Zimmerman, as the prosecuting attorney himself proved completely incompetent in handling the case and definitely unsuited to win a conviction.<\/p>\n

Stage Trial, Y\u2019All<\/strong><\/h3>\n

And so, with the cast of actors having played their designated roles, Zimmerman was acquitted . . . and folks were riled up again.\u00a0 But this time the system had a ready retort designed to make further protest look absurd.\u00a0 It responded, \u201cBut we gave you and Trayvon\u2019s family what you asked for\u2014a criminal prosecution.\u00a0 It\u2019s not our<\/em> fault that a jury of your<\/em> peers acquitted.\u00a0 That\u2019s the system of justice at work!\u201d\u00a0 So rather than recognizing the entire farce for what it was, folks felt deflated and moped about in disbelief that \u201cthe jury really let him off!\u201d<\/p>\n

Redirecting the Rage\u2014to Divide and Rule<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Alongside all this was also the divide, agitate, and rule tactic, where the system\u2014in ways open and subtle\u2014played up Black versus Latino antagonisms to channel much of the mass anger away from itself and play the oppressed masses against themselves.\u00a0 Because we don\u2019t understand that the capitalist system and its political conniving are at the root of all our mounting tragedies and suffering, many fall victim to its using tragedies like Trayvon\u2019s killing and Zimmerman\u2019s acquittal to drive a wedge between its victims, like New Afrikans and Latino\/as.\u00a0 Groups that it is rightly terrified of uniting as politically conscious allies in struggle to tear down this rotten system, to empower all<\/em> working class, poor, and others who are disadvantaged., oppressed, and exploited by this system and its super-rich owners.\u00a0 We must not allow such divide and conquer schemes to work.<\/p>\n

As George Jackson once observed, it is the system itself that manufactures a thousand different categories of contradictions and divisions among the people, so that its small group of wealthy owners can continue to rule.\u00a0 Our ignorance is their weapon against us.<\/p>\n

Zimmerman wanted to be a cop because that\u2019s the role of \u201cheroes\u201d glamorized by the status quo since the pigs are their protectors, not ours.\u00a0 He felt a need to keep poor Black people in line because that is one of the principal functions of the pigs in service to the status quo.\u00a0 And he killed Trayvon because violent terror is how the pigs keep the oppressed masses at the lowest levels in line.\u00a0 And this system of terror is justified and projected as the inalienable and unchallengeable right and entitlement of pigs to use, by the criminalization of the oppressed.<\/p>\n

So we see routine pig murders of our youth dismissed by the system as \u201cjustifiable homicide.\u201d\u00a0 And this is why Zimmerman had to be protected from punishment by that very system (since he was playing the role of a cop as against the member of a criminalized group who was in the wrong place<\/em>).\u00a0 But Zimmerman had to be protected indirectly and in such a way as to pretend that the system was responsive to the people\u2019s cry for justice for the murder of yet another innocent New Afrikan by a cop (or a cop wanna-be).<\/p>\n

They couldn\u2019t just ignore irate Black folks taking to the streets, since they remember\u2014even if we don\u2019t\u2014that almost every major urban uprising of New Afrikans was provoked by incidents of police murders or beatings of our people, from the 1960\u2019s urban revolts, to the uprising in Los Angeles in the early 1990\u2019s, from the 2002 revolt in Benton Harbor, Michigan to the 2005 Toledo, Ohio uprising, etc.\u00a0 And in the wake of many of these revolts came conscious political awakening and organizing that genuinely threatened the system from below.<\/p>\n

So, as they say in litigation, the end result was \u201ca convenient convergent of outcomes\u201d that were win-win for the establishment and lose-lose for the People.<\/p>\n

We lost in that yet another of our innocent young lives was stolen through the institutionalized and culturally rationalized terror of the system used to keep us in check since slavery days, and in that we not only won no justice yet again, but we also still have not learned the lesson that this system cannot be \u201cfixed\u201d and it means us no good.\u00a0 The system won in that it quelled and diverted our outrage into nonthreatening (to itself) channels including against other sectors of the oppressed, and it continues with its usual business of playing and profiting off us all.<\/p>\n

The Capitalist System is the Enemy<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The system is the problem.\u00a0 Black cops brutalize and murder Black youth just as viciously as any white cop.\u00a0 As do Latino\/as.\u00a0 In fact, under the openly racist system of South Afrikan Apartheid, it was commonly Afrikan soldiers and police who, working for the racist regime, committed many of the most brutal atrocities against their own people.\u00a0 Divide and conquer.\u00a0 Capitalism survives by playing Black against Black, against white, against Latino\/a, etc.; women against men, old against young, ad nauseam\u2014it\u2019s the same old Willie Lynch game of dividing the oppressed against themselves that insulates the wealthy oppressors from the united resistance of their victims.<\/p>\n

It works only because we are politically confused, and therefore believe such political tricks as the system\u2019s placing a few token dark faces in high places is a real gain for the masses of oppressed nationalities and people of color.\u00a0 We don\u2019t see the reality that these are instead old and well-established political tactics of mass control.<\/p>\n

Until we wake up and recognize that this capitalist imperialist system is at the root of all<\/em> our problems, we\u2019ll keep suffering tragic losses and being manipulated by political opportunists and their sleight of hand and empty rhetoric.\u00a0 We must recognize and remedy the fact that the greatest weapon the system has against us is our own ignorance.<\/p>\n

Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win!
\nAll Power to the People!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Who\u2019s to Blame? Following what could only be called a high ratings show trial, Latino neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman was acquitted by an all-female jury in the killing of unarmed New Afrikan\/Black teenager Trayvon Martin.\u00a0 Almost instantly, masses of outraged Black people and sympathizers took to the streets in protest.\u00a0 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[6],"class_list":["post-895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-party-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=895"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/895\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1019,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/895\/revisions\/1019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}