While billions of Earth’s people watch America’s attempt to synthesize white nationalism with so-called “democracy” through the Trayvon Martin killing, a seething rage bubbles throughout black America — and beyond.
America’s judicial system, which is historically burdened with caste, class and color, oriented against non-white people generally and black and brown people specifically, is actually on trial along with young Trayvon’s killer, 28-year-old George Zimmerman.
(Do Zimmerman’s driver’s license and other documents say he is white as most white Hispanics prefer? While his mother is from Peru, do her official documents say she is white? A retired judge, George Zimmerman’s father is a white American. What triggers are present in George’s life that form his attitudes toward black adult and teenage males? Doesn’t his previous arrests for violence prove that he has anger problems?)
Trayvon Martin’s killer has been granted a mere $150,000 bond, meaning that just $15,000 rendered him free until his trial, speculated to be delayed for a year or more. So almost two months after the crime before he was arrested and just days in jail, George Zimmerman again walks the Earth. OK. So that’s fair according to how American jurisprudence works, right?
Obviously, then, through-out the state of Florida and across the length and breadth of America, there have been, and are, case after case wherein a black man charged with second degree murder for killing a white man or teenager receives a similar reasonable bond, right?
Well, when you find those rare, if ever, instances where such occurs — there’s just got to be some, you think? — chalk it up to the same kind of luck as in winning a $200 million Powerball jackpot.
White America touts this country as “land of the free and home of the brave.” In black America, it is “land of the tree and home of the grave.” I first heard that as a little boy in Harlem. African Americans mistakenly call white nationalism “racism.” However, when whites respond that they are not “racists,” then the proof that they are is simply not there, irrespective of the data presented.
The reason for this seeming anomaly is based on the very notion of so-called “racism” which is a result of 18th century and 19th century pseudo-science or false science perpetrated by white American and European scientists and medical doctors. These people created a false classification of humans, with blacks (the creators of
the pyramids, etc.) as humankind’s least intelligent people.
However, when charged with white nationalism white people find themselves unable to escape historical reality.
Unfortunately, past and present black activists, politicians and scholars have yet to see the light. Therefore, the Anglo-Saxon priori has not been put on the defensive. As a result, individual freedom and equality, America’s central values, for the most part do not yet include American blacks.
Former U.S. Sen. Fred R. Harris (1964 -1973), Democrat from Oklahoma, put it this way in 1968: “The root cause of the black wrath that now threatens to destroy this nation is the unwillingness of white Americans to accept Negroes as fellow human beings.” Sen. Harris was a member of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders.
From the book that cannot be forgotten, Black Rage, by black psychiatrists William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs comes this message: “What is the problem? The white man has crushed all but the life from blacks from the time they came to these shores to this very day. What is the solution? Get off their backs. How? By simply doing it — now.”
Essentially, what has happened with the Trayvon Martin murder debacle reconfirms the premise of Black Rage which describes the psychological consequences of white oppression of blacks. At the end of the book, though, Grier and Cobbs had this to say: “No matter what repressive measures are invoked against the blacks, they will never swallow their rage and go back to blind hopelessness.”
American justice, that is the apparent lack thereof for all Americans, may be the Humpty Dumpty of America’s great fall.
Al Calloway is a longtime journalist who began his career with the Atlanta Inquirer during the early 1960s civil rights struggle.
He may be reached at Al_Calloway@verizon.net
Photo: Al Calloway
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