Sunday, July 14, 2013
Maybe it's better the Zimmerman acquittal generates a week of anger rather than the 24 hours of satisfaction if he'd been convicted. Proves nothing we didn't already know. As this trial went to jury, a woman in Florida was sentenced to twenty years for standing her ground against an abusive, violent husband violating his restraining order. She fired four shots into the wall & ceiling to back him off. Didn't even hurt the man, just scared the hell out of him. She has a 14-year old daughter. She is African-American.
In Newark NJ George Zimmerman is last type of person you have to worry about if you're Black. Because the Black-on-Black violence is appalling. You can be shot while ordering a slice of pizza, hanging out in the schoolyard on a summer evening, or walking to the corner store for a bag of Skittles. Your neighborhood may be infested with sociopath gangbangers. If it is not, they may drive through it anyway looking for a carjack opportunity or someone on their hit list. You may resemble the person on the hit list. If you protest against this injustice, the injustice of living in fear, without adequate police protection & economic opportunity, if you demand the punks leave your neighborhood, then you will surely live in fear for your life. If you go to a supposedly safe area, the strip mall across from the hospital complex on Bergen St., the manager of International House of Pancakes might be shot & killed just as you're sitting down to your meal of Rooty Tooty Fresh 'n' Fruity pancakes.
An irony of the Trayvon Martin tragedy is that he, as a young Black man, needed to be "street smart" in a safe, predominantly white neighborhood, one in which George Zimmerman never would have been stalking me, as long as I looked like I belonged there. & he had to be equally street smart in a poor African-American neighborhood, where his chances of being robbed & shot by another Black man were far greater.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
In Newark NJ George Zimmerman is last type of person you have to worry about if you're Black. Because the Black-on-Black violence is appalling. You can be shot while ordering a slice of pizza, hanging out in the schoolyard on a summer evening, or walking to the corner store for a bag of Skittles. Your neighborhood may be infested with sociopath gangbangers. If it is not, they may drive through it anyway looking for a carjack opportunity or someone on their hit list. You may resemble the person on the hit list. If you protest against this injustice, the injustice of living in fear, without adequate police protection & economic opportunity, if you demand the punks leave your neighborhood, then you will surely live in fear for your life. If you go to a supposedly safe area, the strip mall across from the hospital complex on Bergen St., the manager of International House of Pancakes might be shot & killed just as you're sitting down to your meal of Rooty Tooty Fresh 'n' Fruity pancakes.
An irony of the Trayvon Martin tragedy is that he, as a young Black man, needed to be "street smart" in a safe, predominantly white neighborhood, one in which George Zimmerman never would have been stalking me, as long as I looked like I belonged there. & he had to be equally street smart in a poor African-American neighborhood, where his chances of being robbed & shot by another Black man were far greater.
