Sunday, April 1, 2012

The Trayvon Martin "Lynching"

Make no doubt about it, Trayvon Martin's murder (let's stop calling it a "death") was a lynching.  Once lynching's went out of fashion because they were "frowned upon", folks had to find a nicer, cleaner way to kill blacks.  You can't really call a lynching a "self-defense".  You can't really defend a lynching and say it was an "accident".  But the intention is the same.  Kill the black man or woman, publicly murder the black child, and intimidate an entire neighborhood or population; instilling fear is the goal, guided by racist motivations, desire to have power, and desire to have control.


Trayvon Martin was defenseless.  He was a child murdered by an adult.  The adult decided Trayvon was "suspicious" and hunted him down, motivated by the fact that "those assholes always get away with it."  Then he murdered Trayvon in public when all he was guilty of was walking while black.

He may not have been hung up in a tree, but he was essentially lynched.  No surprise knowing Florida's history of lynching blacks.


Anna Brown, a homeless woman from St. Louis, was also "lynched".  


KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Anna Brown was homeless and had so much pain in her legs that she couldn’t walk.
When Brown, 29, refused to leave the emergency room at St. Mary’s Health Center in Richmond Heights, Mo., a suburb near inner St. Louis, the police thought she was on drugs and arrested her for trespassing. She’d already been examined, and a doctor said she was healthy enough to go to jail.
The police carried her into a jail cell by her arms and ankles, her body slackened. There were a couple of beds in the cell, but they left her on the concrete floor. A couple of officers stood by the door as she writhed and moaned, and then they walked away. “They thought she was a drug seeker,” an officer said later.
She had stopped moving within 15 minutes and was pronounced dead a short time later.

 The hospital claims they "acted appropriately".  It was much easier to think that she was a drug dealer, a hooker, or just trying to game the system; those sneaky blacks.  Easier to just take her to jail, ignore her, and then let her die.  How safe would you feel going to the hospital, knowing that others of your community would end up dead there?

But what about the police?  They wouldn't lynch a black man or woman, would they?  Often times, it was the police who were the ones arresting "suspects"... I mean "assholes"... who were suspected of committing crimes against whites.  Wouldn't want them to get away with it.  Justice by lynching; justice by ignoring them health care.  This was a murder, plain and simple.


Kenneth Chamberlain, a 68 year old marine veteran, was also "lynched", this time by the police in his own home.

Kenneth Chamberlain Junior has called for the prosecution of the officers who killed his father. After the meeting, he criticized police for refusing to release the name of the officer who fired the fatal shots. The police had responded to a false alarm from Chamberlain’s medical alert pendant. The officers broke down Chamberlain’s door, tasered him, and then shot him dead. 
Kenneth Chamberlain, Jr.: "You hear him asking them why are they doing this to him. He says, ’I’m a 68-year-old man with a heart condition. Why are you doing this to me? I know what you’re going to do: you’re going to come in here, and you’re going to kill me.’ You also hear him pleading with the officers again, over and over. And at one point, that’s when the expletive is used by one of the police officers." 
Amy Goodman: "What did they say?" 
Kenneth Chamberlain, Jr.: "Where they say, 'I don’t give a F.' And then they use the N-word. And then, as I said, ultimately, they bust down the door."
A 68 year old man, shot to death in his own apartment.  They may not have strung him up in public, but they sure as hell made his death public.  They decided his heart condition, combined with his being black, was enough reason to kill him, all the while using racial slurs.  And again, this murder, this assassination, was carried out by the police.

**********

With Barack Obama being elected president, and with the civil rights movement in our past, apparently we are in a post race world (*cough* bullshit *cough*).  Racism is alive and kicking its ugly head in violent, frightening ways.



And we want to talk about how American's aren't racist anymore since they elected a Black president?  We want to talk about how racism is dead?  How about the dead Trayvon Martin?  Anna Brown?  Kenneth Chamberlain?

They may not have been hung by a mob, but the end results were the same.  And the mob is defending George Zimmerman; the mob is defending the hospital staff; the mob is defending the police.

A new century, and the same old tired shit.