By Mona Charen
Monday, July 16, 2013
The day after the George Zimmerman verdict was announced,
I was at the supermarket. As always, Americans of all races went about their
business. An elderly Asian lady got help from a tall Caucasian kid reaching an
item on an upper shelf. A black cashier shared a joke with a white customer. A
manager who might be Hispanic helped a patron of indeterminate ethnicity with a
return. All was calm and composed. Let's call that supermarket America.
There's another America that exists on the TV, radio and
the cell phone screen. There, the race baiters, provocateurs, rumormongers, and
ratings-mad self-promoters hold court. It's the dark underside of the nation.
Let's call it Id America. Those little computers we all carry in our pockets
are in some respects the wonder of the age, but there's a dark underside to the
wired era. In addition to the profusion and normalization of pornography, the
Internet has also served as a vehicle for political pornography. When an
emotional story like the Martin/Zimmerman tragedy presents itself for
exploitation, the complexities and nuances are buried in an avalanche of
deliberate racial incitement. The Internet serves more to inflame than to
inform. Rumor is in the saddle and it rides America.
According to Snopes.com, one widely credited story that
made the rounds suggested that George Zimmerman's legal bills were being paid
by Koch Industries. A much-forwarded email read in part, "The company ...
is paying for Zimmerman's legal fees because they feel he had legal right to
bear arms and shoot Trayvon. ... We are asking that ... people not buy any of
the following items ... Angel Soft toilet paper, Brawny paper towels, Mardi
Gras napkins and towels, Quilted Northern toilet paper, Soft and gentile [sic]
toilet paper."
Whatever the merits of avoiding "gentile"
toilet paper, which probably isn't kosher under any circumstances, the rumor
was false. Koch had nothing to do with Zimmerman's defense.
But the tone of the email, the assertion that a
conservative company believes Zimmerman had the "right" to shoot
Trayvon Martin, was consistent with much of the commentary to be found on
MSNBC, CNN, and dozens of websites throughout this episode.
It was wall-to-wall incitement. NBC may be facing a
defamation suit for selectively editing a 911 tape to imply that Zimmerman was
racially profiling Martin. An MSNBC host called Zimmerman a
"murderer." Commentators like Tavis Smiley summed up the case:
"Trayvon Martin was a child who was racially profiled and gunned
down."
On the other side, a photo purporting to be a more recent
shot of Trayvon Martin made the rounds. It showed a muscular 6'2" black
youth lifting his middle fingers to the camera. But it wasn't Trayvon Martin.
Tavis Smiley insists that "race will get you killed
in America." Advocates for a guilty verdict sport t-shirts saying
"Enough in Enough." In the alternate universe that the commentators
and hustlers like Al Sharpton invent, America is in the grip of an epidemic of
violent crimes committed against young black men by white people. That just
isn't true. According to the FBI, most blacks are killed by other blacks. The
same goes for whites. Blacks are less likely to be killed by whites than whites
are to be killed by blacks, but, for the most part, murderers kill fellow
members of their melanin class.
In supermarket America, no one wants to see anyone's
innocent child killed. Among normal Americans there is a common sense
understanding that, based on what we know, it looks like both Martin and
Zimmerman (both of whom have had brushes with the law in their pasts) showed
poor judgment. That a jury could not say that Zimmerman, his face and head
bloodied, acted "beyond a reasonable doubt" in a "depraved"
state of "ill will, hatred, or spite" was an understatement. There
was abundant evidence that he was defending himself in the course of a fight.
Was he too rash? It's possible, but that wasn't for the jury to say. They were
asked only whether his conduct could not by any stretch be considered
self-defense.
It's a terrible tragedy that Martin's life was cut short.
It's also a tragedy that our race-baiting provocateurs never tire of waving the
bloody shirt in hopes of stirring even more interracial violence and bitterness.
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