Being Black In The Americas: Ms. Lauryn Hill On Racism straight from Prison

Ms. Lauryn Hill On Racism

The concept of reverse racism is flawed, if not absolutely ridiculous. Most, if not all of the negative responses from people of color toward white people, are reactions to the hatred, violence, cruelty and brutality that they were shown by white people for centuries. Much of the foundation of the modern world was built on the forced free labor of black peoples. The African Slave Trade, the institution of slavery, colonialism, its derivative systems, and the multiple holocausts throughout history, where whites used race as the defining reason to justify their oppression, conquest, and brutal treatment of non-white peoples, are how race became such a factor to begin with.

The initial claim by the oppressors, followed a moral imperative (so they said) that people outside of Occidental and European birth were in savage and cursed conditions, and that God justified the captivity of these people, and the rape and pillage of their lands. 

Ironically, these oppressors would try to discard this same God, who supposedly justified this brutality, in the name of Darwin, whose famous line ‘survival of the fittest’ was used to justify criminal behavior once the Bible could no longer be used as a hiding place for economic domination and evil intention. 

Spirituality and morality were replaced by capitalism, and with it a conscious shift of focus toward the exploitation of the vulnerable. 

In order to justify reverse racism one would have to first create an even playing field, undo the generations of torture, terror, and brutality, and then judge whether or not a non-white person is in fact a racist. This approach would require people to examine the need/addiction to feel superior to someone else for no justifiable reason, and the myriad policies: Spiritual, political and social, that it bore. True dominion is self evident and not the result of sabotaging another in order to achieve it. That would be an illegitimate as well as a fleeting position. The Universe, will eventually seek to right/balance itself.

Of course there are white people who live transcendent lives, not exploiting ill-gotten privilege or perpetuating the sins of their ancestors who used violence and deceit as a means to gain advantage over others. Humanity in proper order is obligated to acknowledge the Truth, whoever it comes from, be they Black, White or other. Righteous indignation is simply a response to long-standing evil.

Much of the world is still reeling from the abuses of Imperialist selfishness, misunderstanding, ignorance and greed. Black people remain in many ways a shattered community, disenfranchised, forcefully removed from context and still caged in, denied from making truly independent choices and experiencing existential freedom. Their natural homes, just like their natural selves, raped and pillaged of the resources and gifts God has given to them. Interpreted through someone else’s slanted lens and filter, they remain in many ways, misrepresented. Taxation without proper representation, might I remind you, was the very platform of protest that began the Revolutionary War, which gained this country its independence from England. Anger is not only the natural response to the abuse of power, but is also appropriate when there is no real acknowledgment of these abuses, or deep, meaningful and profound change.

If we took all of what we deem horrible regarding the criminal abuses that black people have committed over this country’s history, and add it all up, it still does not compare to the hundreds of years of terrorism, violent domination, theft, rape, abuse, captivity, and beyond that black people have suffered under the ideologies and systems of white supremacy, racism, and slave based paradigms. I say this only to say that abuse unresolved begets or creates abuse. How then does the chief offender become the judge? Might does not necessarily mean right. Right is right. People forcibly reduced to sub-human existences, so that they behave in sub-human ways, helps a system to justify itself or feel less guilty about its blood saturated foundation and gross crimes against humanity. People, like plants, grow where the light is. When you enclose a plant and limit its light source, it will bend itself toward the light, for the light is necessary for its survival. This same thing happens to people locked in communities where little light and little opportunity is allowed them, survival then forces them to twist and/or bend toward the only way of escape. 

There is good. And I both acknowledge and encourage the good. Instead of throwing out the Baby with the bath water, we do well to expose the intentionally poisoned water the Baby has been forced to soak in since its origin in these lands. America’s particular brand of hypocrisy is gross (double entendre). 

I shuddered during sentencing when I kept hearing the term ‘make the IRS whole’… make the IRS whole, knowing that I got into these very circumstances having to deal with the very energies of inequity and resistance that created and perpetuated these savage inequalities. The entire time, I thought, who has made black people whole?! Who has made recompense for stealing, imposing, lying, murdering, criminalizing the traumatized, taking them against their wills, destroying their homes, dividing their communities, ‘trying’ to steal their destinies, their time, stagnating their development, I could go on and on. Has America, or any of the nations of the world guilty of these atrocities, ever made black people or Africa whole or do they continue to sit on them, control them, manipulate them, cage them, rob them, brutalize them, subject them to rules that don’t apply to all? Use language, veiled coercion, and psychological torment like invisible fences to keep them locked into a pattern of limitation and therefore control by others. You have to remain  focused to cease from rage. 

The prosecutor, who was a woman, made a statement during sentencing about me not doing any charity work for a number of years during my ‘exile.’ A) Charity work is not a requirement, but something done because someone wants to. I was clearly doing charitable works way before other people were even thinking about it. And B) Even the judge had to comment that she, meaning I, was both having and raising children during this period. As if that was not challenging enough to do. She sounded like the echo of the grotesque slave master, who expected women to give birth while in the field, scoop the Baby up, and then continue to work. Disgusting. 

When you are beaten and penalized for being independent, or truly self reliant, then you develop a dysfunctional relationship with self-reliance, and a fear of true independence. When you are beaten or threatened with death for trying to read a book, then you develop a dysfunctional relationship with education. When families are broken up by force and threat of violence, then the family structure becomes dysfunctional. When men who would naturally defend their women and families are threatened with castration and death, then this natural response also becomes dysfunctional. When looking at the oppressor is punishable by violence, then examination of him and his system becomes a difficult and taboo thing to do, despite every bone in your body demanding it. When questioning or opposing oppression is punishable by death, imprisonment, or economic assassination, then opposing systemic wrong in any or all of its meta manifestations is a terrifying concept. Anyone forced to live so incredibly diametrically opposed to that which is natural to themselves, will end up in crisis if they don’t successfully find a way to improve or transcend these circumstances! All of which require healing. It is only by the Grace of God and the resilience of the people that things haven’t been worse.

Much of my music, if not all of it, is about Love, a therapeutic resolve created in response to the lack of messages encouraging people like me toward free moral agency. Helping to ameliorate this condition has never been addressed through the political arena alone. It is a sacrificial work that doesn’t simply happen between the hours of 9 to 5 or Monday through Friday, but when inspiration leads us to avail ourselves for the Truth that needs to be said. Unlike the system too often contrarily demonstrates, we believe that people can be and should be helped, and that trauma should not be criminalized but acknowledged, healed and dealt with. This takes awareness, sensitivity and a level of freedom in my opinion the system lacks. And if we don’t know or understand how to do it, then we humbly refer to a higher authority.

We have no desire to create humanoids, turn people into machines, or dumb them down so that they remain dependent longer than necessary to an antiquated system in denial of its many inadequacies and need to evolve. Instead we seek to educate and shed light on the snares, traps, and enticements that people set up in the name of business that are intended only to catch the sleeping and/or uninformed. 

Why would a system, ‘well intentioned’, wait until breakdown or incarceration to consider rehabilitation, after generations of institutionally inflicted trauma and abuse on a people? To me it is obvious that the accumulation of generational trauma and abuse have created the very behaviors the system tries to punish, by providing no sufficient outlets for the victims of institutional terror. Clearly, the institution seeks to hide its own criminal history at the expense and wholeness of the abused, who ‘acting out’ from years of abuse and mistreatment, reflect the very aggression that they were exposed to. ~Ms. Lauryn Hill

Neurotic Society is a song about people not being, or not being able to be, who and what they truly are, due to the current social construct. I am not targeting any particular group of people, but rather targeting everyone in our society who hides behind neurotic behavior, rather than deal with it.
The world we live in now is, in many ways, an abhorrent distortion, an accumulation of generations and generations of response to negative stimuli. Many don’t even have a concept of what normal is, by virtue of having lived afraid, ashamed, as victims of abuse, or inadequately handled for so long. I believe in coming up from under that fear and allowing the psyche/soul to truly heal. I understand that healing is a process, but I also believe that it is our responsibility to seriously care for ourselves, so that we can extend that level of concern for others and positively affect our environment.
I want what is best for Humanity. Humanity, aligned with the Spiritual principles, that help each individual conquer fear, and transcend limited circumstance. I believe in healing and dealing with the traumatizing events of our lives, both in this lifetime, as well as those passed down to us, or inherited, so we can live as fully as possible.
The whole world suffers from a lack of honest dialogue. Character and integrity have suffered at the hands of political correctness and corporate agenda, while our society moves further and further towards unhealthiness and breakdown. I oppose these trends.
Everyone has a right to their own beliefs. Although I do not necessarily agree with what everyone says or does, I do believe in everyone’s right to protest.
The overarching message of my music is to get up and stop compromising! And hopefully it will stimulate and motivate the changes that our society needs.
Artists are constantly under media and public scrutiny. This is not a one-way street. Those of us with the charge of putting out faithful vibrations, have a responsibility to report what we see, and to write about what we know. I have seen some of the best and also some of the worst representations of human behavior. The same way that I exalt that which is high, is the same way I expose that which is abusive, in order to motivate and remind if not all of us, than as many as possible, of the Higher Calling.

Trayvon Martin Killing & Zimmerman verdict: Black Humanity on Trial in America, Again

The Killing and Trial of Trayvon Martin

Black Humanity on Trial in America, Again

by HORACE CAMPBELL

“Let us banish from our minds the thought that this is an unfortunate victim of injustice. The very concept of injustice rests upon the premise of equal claims.”

– Richard Wright

The above quote from the author Richard Wright is a reminder that the consequences of enslavement are still very much a part of the cultural, social and political makeup of the United States of America. From time to time in the history of society there are incidents or series of incidents that brings together the central contradictions of a society. The acquittal of George Zimmerman in the case of the killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, was one such incident that brought out the entire history of racism, racial profiling, white vigilantism and the realities that black people and their allies have to organize to change the system. There is hardly a decent person inside the United States who was not moved by this verdict that was handed down on July 13, 2013. Throughout the trial and following the verdict, it became clear that the US system put on trial the unarmed teenager, Trayvon Martin, who was murdered by an armed stalker.

The trial dehumanized Trayvon Martin, put his friend Rachel Jeantel up for ridicule and turned the killer George Zimmerman into a victim. George Zimmerman was portrayed as someone merely defending himself, and was found not guilty of murder and manslaughter. Juror B37 stated that she and others on the jury believed that Zimmerman had a right to stand his ground. In the common law, a self defense argument generally states that if you are threatened with imminent bodily harm or death, you have a right to defend yourself. Significantly, it had the requirement that if one has the opportunity to retreat from that threat, you must do so. Stand Your Ground laws, removes that requirement. In other words, don’t retreat; take the other person’s life. What kind of legal system justifies laws such as the Stand Your Ground law that was used as part of the deliberative guidelines by the jury that acquitted Zimmerman? The application of this law in the jury deliberation buys into the Zimmerman story in which he stated that he resorted to shooting unarmed Trayvon Martin by way of self-defense against his perceived fear of harm from the fight he had started with a teenager that was minding his own business.

There have been numerous commentaries on this case which now stands out as the most recent example of the fact that blacks have no claim to equality before the law in the United States. Throughout the world, people are asking: “what kind of society has a system where a George Zimmerman can walk free?”

In seeking to answer this question, one would discover that this social system of racial terror was never meant to serve the needs of persons such as Trayvon Martin. Florida is a state of the Old Confederacy that fought against the freedom of blacks. It was and remains one of the states where the ideas of white supremacy are stamped in almost every aspect of life and the citizens of that state carry the memories of the dehumanization and lynching of blacks in that society. In many ways, the killing of Trayvon and the verdict of not guilty was a reminder to many who may have been living in a dream that the United States is a post-racial society.

As a resident of this society, we immediately cast our minds back to the previous experiences of the killings of black persons such as Emmet Till, Amadou Diallo, Oscar Grant and the thousands of black lives that are uselessly snuffed out needlessly.

In this analysis we seek to draw on the current conjuncture and how the experience of Trayvon Martin was acting as a wakeup call to galvanize a new movement for human dignity.

Memory of Racism and Dehumanizing Justice System in US and Florida

The Zimmerman case invokes the memory of rabid racist history in the US, and Florida in particular. This history is characterized by the killing of blacks by whites with impunity, white vigilantism (in which any white man has the right to stop, interrogate, and violate the humanity of any black person), and a legal system that was built to protect whites and their property against black people.

When Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, it took mass mobilizations and protests to get the local authorities to arrest and prosecute this killer who had walked free for over one month after committing this crime. This kind of indifference by authorities to the wasting of black life is not new in Florida. In 1923 Rosewood, a black town in Florida, was terrorized, burned down and abandoned after white massacre of blacks. And yet no one was arrested or held accountable. A white woman in adjoining city of Sumner had accused a black man of assaulting her, following which white vigilantes lynched a black man from Rosewood. The defensive actions taken by Rosewood residents against further attacks led to a mass manhunt and massacre of blacks resulting in the abandonment of this black town, for which no arrest was made.

While the justice system ensured that there were no arrests and proper prosecution of crimes such as that committed in Rosewood against blacks, these same black people were almost immediately assumed guilty and terrorized by the slightest accusations from whites. In Groveland, Florida, the accusation by a white woman Norma Padgett, who claimed that she and her husband had been attacked by four black men in 1949, resulted in extrajudicial killings in the hands of Florida authorities – now notoriously known as the Groveland Shooting.

The same city of Sanford where Zimmerman killed Trayvon was one of the two Florida cities (the other being Jacksonville) that doubled down on racist segregation laws to mobilize against African American baseball icon Jackie Robinson in the 1940s. The action of the people of these cities ensured that Robinson’s team, the Dodgers, moved their spring training away to another location, the City Island Ball Park in 1947. Today, many young persons who haven’t read about this legacy of Sanford, Florida, can get an idea of its racist legacy from the movie, “42,” about the experience of Jackie Robinson in racist America.

The accosting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman reminded all citizens of the United States of the Fugitive Slave Laws that gave whites the right to stop free blacks to verify their status. From 1793, the US Congress had passed Fugitive Slave Acts and were codified on September 18, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850. It declared that all runaway slaves were, upon capture, to be returned to their masters. Any white person could stop a black person. This was the white vigilante tradition that George Zimmerman was following.

The Humanity of Blacks and Rights in America

The argument that has been paraded by supporters of Zimmerman, including his defense team and one of the jurors (B-37) is that he had killed Trayvon Martin in self-defense. They even claim that Trayvon Martin caused or contributed largely to his own death. It is not surprising to me that this argument disregards the right of unarmed Trayvon Martin to defend himself against an armed stranger that followed and accosted him in the dark. The larger question here is whether blacks are indeed considered equal to white under the law. This question of equality before the law has been at the core of the struggle for human dignity by blacks in America.

Many observers around the world should now grapple with the historical reality that in many parts of the United States, blacks are not really considered full citizens. From the time of enslavement, black people were considered sub human. This view of black people as sub species had been enshrined in the US constitution when blacks were designated as 3/5 of a person. It required a major war, the American Civil War (1861-1865), for the black people in the United States to be considered as citizens. Before this major war, there had been legal and political struggles such as the Dredd Scott case where the Supreme Court of the United States declared that “no black, free or slave, could claim U.S. citizenship.”

Last month the Supreme Court of the United States rolled back the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In every sphere of life, black and oppressed people are finding out that they have to develop new forms of struggles to change the social system. After a Civil War, the civil rights movement and the election of a President of African descent, the progressives are finding out that the removal of racism will require system change. Since a black man became the president of the United States, conservative forces have been hard at work in many states of their stronghold, devising ways to chip away the voting rights from blacks and other oppressed such as Latinos.

After the major struggles against slavery, Jim Crow and the civil rights rebellions, there had been complacency among sections of the two dominant political parties in the United States that the country was in a post-racial moment. In fact, the media specifically did not use the term racism but instead use the concept “race” to disguise and cover up the intensified racism and brutality against African Americans. This cover up did not hide the realities that in every sphere of life blacks were oppressed. The school-to-prison pipeline placed the black and brown population in a for-profit prison system where 70 per cent of those behind bars are black and brown. The killings of black people by racists and police have not abated. Whether it was the killing of Amadou Diallo, Oscar Grant or Trayvon Martin, black people are routinely and arbitrarily killed in the United States.

The acquittal of George Zimmerman has opened the eyes of millions of people to the conditions of the black and brown citizens. In an effort to create divisions between oppressed blacks and oppressed Latinos, the media has been touting the fact that George Zimmerman is Latino. But this has not disguised his profiling and racist intent in the murder of Trayvon Martin. All classes of blacks have now jumped in to demand that the Justice Department bring a civil suit against George Zimmerman.

Eric Holder, -the first African American Attorney General of the United States, in his address to the annual convention of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) on July 16 spoke about his own experiences of racial profiling reminding the audience that these practiced were still at large. He said in part,

“Years ago, some of these same issues drove my father to sit down with me to have a conversation – which is no doubt familiar to many of you – about how as a young black man I should interact with the police, what to say, and how to conduct myself if I was ever stopped or confronted in a way I thought was unwarranted.  I’m sure my father felt certain – at the time – that my parents’ generation would be the last that had to worry about such things for their children.”

Eric Holder is now being pushed by the anger of a new energized and mobilized social justice community. The day before he spoke to the NAACP, Holder had made forceful statements about the case in his address to the influential African-American sorority Delta Sigma Theta. Holder was addressing the sorority’s national convention in its centennial celebration. This organization was founded one hundred years ago in the midst of segregation and lynching as a movement for civil rights. Founded by educated black women at Howard University, Delta Sigma Theta is the largest single organization of African-American women in the United States. Since the sixties, these women have moved into the middle and upper echelons of society and the members of Delta Sigma Theta represent a who’s who of African-American politicians, educators and activists. Many of these women consider themselves successful, but the acquittal of George Zimmerman reminded them that this system will never provide equality for black people. It is this reality that forces women of sororities such as Delta Sigma Theta to continue to be involved in the struggles for civil rights. Except that in this period of capitalist crisis, the struggles for civil rights are no longer simply about voting and equal access to housing, education and employment. Sixty years ago, the United States could have promoted the fiction that the legal struggles were separate from the struggles for a new social system, but the economic crisis since 2007 has clarified the bare realities of the class and racial polarizations so that even the “democratic” façade of the United States now stands exposed.

Dividing the Oppressed

During the trial of George Zimmerman, it was Trayvon Martin who turned out to be on trial and Zimmerman was portrayed as a victim. Trayvon’s mode of dress, wearing a hood was presented as a form of ‘deviance.’ During the trial, the lawyer for Zimmerman made a lot of to do about Trayvon. His school record was brought up. While all sorts of drug tests were conducted on an unarmed dead victim of profiling, the vigilante who killed Trayvon was neither tested for drugs or alcohol.  It was revealed during the court proceedings that Trayvon had marijuana in his system and was thus characterized as a thug. In a strange twist of historical irony, one day after the verdict, the “Glee” TV star, Cory Monteith, died of an overdose of heroin and alcohol, but the media did not portray him as a drug addict but sympathized about “how his story was tragic.”

At the same time the media has been hard at workportraying Zimmerman as a Latino while conservatives have weighed in to argue that the passions evoked by this case has overshadowed the rampant crime inside the oppressed communities. The conservatives have labeled this oppression black-on-black crime. The term “black-on-black” crime has become popular in the playbook of those who want to deflect attention from the historical context of terror and dehumanization that undergird race crimes and brutality meted out on black and brown people by whites and law enforcement in America. They are quick to draw attention to crimes in some black communities. In my own home town, one of my colleagues in the Political Science Department of Syracuse University, Professor Laurence Thomas  wrote an op-ed for the local newspaper on this theme of black-on-black crime.

Well, it is true that crime anywhere in the society is not desirable, and that more needs to be done to address them. But the term black-on-black crime is a misnomer that is not intended to tackle the root causes of these crimes, but concocted as an excuse to downplay the gravity of racist crimes. The same people who use this term would not use “white-on-white crime” to describe the killing sprees in schools, theatres, and malls in America, of which the perpetrators and majority of the victims are Caucasians. Instead, efforts such as gun control and the availability of resources meant to address these crimes – whether those prevalent in white or black communities – are frustrated by the merchants of the military industrial complex and the prison industrial complex who benefit from the deformed system.

Black Oppression and the Capitalist Crisis

The capitalist crisis has been felt disproportionately by the black and brown peoples in the United States. The Wall Street moguls have used this crisis to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich and to disenfranchise the poor. The city of Detroit, a predominantly black city is the most recent high profile case of a city where black citizens are being disenfranchised; where a republican governor has placed the city under an emergency manager. In reality, the task of the emergency manager is to shift responsibility for capitalism’s crisis away from bankers, CEOs and hedge-fund managers and onto the backs of the most vulnerable. In the case of Detroit, that means poor and working-class African Americans who make up the vast majority of the city’s population.

Oppression was always severe for the African descendants in the US but since 2008, there has been an intensification of black subjugation and mass incarceration.  With unemployment in the black community way over 25 per cent, there have been increased racial attacks with a spiraling of violence and police brutality, emboldened dope dealers (destruction of public schools, governmental attacks on voting rights laws, etc.).

In New York City the establishment promote a stop-and-frisk policy by which a police officer who reasonably suspects a person has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a felony or a penal law misdemeanor, stops and questions that person, and, if the officer reasonably suspects he or she is in danger of physical injury, frisks the person stopped for weapons.  Of the more than 700,000 persons stopped every year, more than 90 per cent are blacks and browns.

System Change Necessary for Justice

When the verdict came out on Saturday evening, July 13, the establishment worked hard to pacify the rage among decent people by pointing out that the courts had spoken. As soon as the verdict was made known there were spontaneous demonstrations all over the country. Young and old, black, white and brown, men and women, gays and straights spoke out against this blatant dehumanization of Trayvon Martin. African American churches immediately became spaces for ‘prayer’ vigils and other historical forms of meetings for mobilization. Significantly, despite the efforts to divide blacks from Latinos, in Washington Heights, a predominantly Dominican neighborhood of New York City, there was an organized protest. From San Francisco to Washington and from Los Angeles to Atlanta, the people came out to demonstrate while the conservatives used the media to pour invective on blacks. In every media, whether print, TV, social media or blogs there is an unprecedented outpouring of opinions.

Robin D. G. Kelley in an excellent article, “The U.S. v. Trayvon Martin,” summed up the views on many progressives when he wrote,

“The point is that justice was always going to elude Trayvon Martin, not because the system failed, but because it worked.  Martin died and Zimmerman walked because our entire political and legal foundations were built on an ideology of settler colonialism—an ideology in which the protection of white property rights was always sacrosanct; predators and threats to those privileges were almost always black, brown, and red; and where the very purpose of police power was to discipline, monitor, and contain populations rendered a threat to white property and privilege.  This has been the legal standard for African Americans and other racial groups in the U.S. long before ALEC or the NRA came into being.”

The killing of Trayvon Martin, the acquittal of the killer Zimmermann, and the vigorous defense of the verdict by sections of the US society who claim that “the jury has spoken” and that “the due process of the law/justice” was applied, underscore the fact that this case was not about Florida or Zimmerman. It was about the US justice system and the societal ideation system of liberalism built on the duality and contradictions of “human vs. sub-human,” “white supremacy vs. black/brown inferiority,” “full rights of citizenship vs. selective rights.”

Globally, people are asking what’s next. Some are pointing to legal avenues, calling on the Attorney General of the United States to take action. As of Wednesday July 17, one million people have signed an NAACP petition asking the Department of Justice to pursue federal and civil rights charges against George Zimmerman. The strategy of the NAACP is to pressure the Attorney General to investigate whether Zimmerman’s actions constitute a hate crime under federal law. The Justice Department had closely monitored the case since March, and only put their investigation on hold to respect the state’s trial. Since the verdict and the overwhelming response, Attorney General Eric Holder has agreed to re-open his investigation. However, it would be a major error to focus on legal actions only.

A system change is what will be required to undo this contradiction of the dehumanization of black people inside this social system. Progressive forces and decent human beings must make this the focus of the next phase of the historical struggle to be human in America.

Horace Campbell is Professor of African American Studies and Political Science, Syracuse University. He is the author of Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya, Monthly Review Press, 2013. 

Zimmerman Trial: The Latest on Controversy Surrounding Zimmerman Trial Juror B37

On Monday, Juror B37 from the George Zimmerman trial sat down with Anderson Cooper onAC360 to talk about her experience with the case, and more of the interview aired Tuesday. Sitting in the dark so that her face wasn't visible, the juror opened up about her personal opinions, saying she felt "sure" that it was Zimmerman's voice crying for help in the 911 call. Throughout the interview, she spoke freely about the jury's verdict, her perceptions of Zimmerman, and who she's left feeling sorry for in the wake of the trial. Following Juror B37's interview with Cooper, four of the other jurors in the Zimmerman trial released a statement in response to her comments: "We, the undersigned jurors, understand there is a great deal of interest in this case. But we ask you to remember that we are not public officials and we did not invite this type of attention into our lives."

Earlier on Monday, it was reported that Juror B37 would be writing a book about the trial, but since then, she's released a statement that reveals she will no longer be pursuing a book deal: "The relationship with the agent ceased the moment I realized what had been occurring in the world during the weeks of my sequestration." She added, "My prayers are with Trayvon's parents for their loss, as they have always been. I now wish for me and my family to recover from being selected for this jury and return to a normal life. God bless."

See what Juror B37 said in the postverdict interview:

• On Zimmerman's actions: "He was justified in shooting Trayvon Martin."
• On feeling confident in the verdict: "I'm 101 percent that he was — that he should have done what he did, except for the things he did before."
• On Zimmerman's intentions: "I think George Zimmerman is a man whose heart was in the right place, but just got displaced by the vandalism in the neighborhoods and wanting to catch these people so badly that he went above and beyond what he really should have done."
• On Zimmerman being armed: "I think he has every right to carry a gun."
• On her view of the incident: "I think the roles changed. I think George got in a little bit too deep, which he shouldn't have been there. But Trayvon [Martin] decided that he wasn't going to let him scare him, and I think Trayvon got mad and attacked him."
• On whether she finds Zimmerman guilty: "I think he's guilty of not using good judgment."
• On feeling emotional about the case: "I feel sorry for both of them. I feel sorry for Trayvon and the situation he was in, and I feel sorry for George for the situation he got himself in."
• On witness Rachel Jeantel: "[I think she] felt inadequate toward everyone because of her education and her communication skills. I just felt sadness for her."
• On if she'd like Zimmerman to be her neighborhood watch: "If he didn't go too far . . . He just didn't stop at the limitations he should have stopped at."

Obama speaks on race (Full Remarks)

Full Remarks: Obama speaks on race

Posted by

CNN Political Unit

(CNN) - President Barack Obama made a previously unscheduled appearance Friday at the White House to make comments about the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial. Below in a transcript of his remarks.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, I wanted to come out here, first of all, to tell you that Jay is prepared for all your questions, and is very much looking forward to the session.

Second thing is, I want to let you know that over the next couple of weeks, there are going to obviously be a whole range of issues - immigration, economics, et cetera. We'll try to arrange a fuller press conference to address your questions.

The reason I actually wanted to come out today is not to take questions, but to speak to an issue that's obviously gotten a lot of attention over the course of the last week, the issue of the Trayvon Martin ruling.

I gave a preliminary statement right after the ruling on Sunday, but watching the debate over the course of the last week, I thought it might be useful for me to expand on my thoughts a little bit.

First of all, I want to make sure that once again I send my thought and prayers, as well as Michelle's, to the family of Trayvon Martin, and to remark on the incredible grace and dignity with which they've dealt with the entire situation. I can only imagine what they're going through and it's remarkable how they've handled it.

The second thing I want to say is to reiterate what I said on Sunday, which is there are going to be a lot of arguments about the legal - the legal issues in the case. I'll let all the legal analysts and talking heads address those issues.

The judge conducted the trial in a professional manner. The prosecution and the defense made their arguments. The juries (sic) were properly instructed that in a - in a case such as this, reasonable doubt was relevant. And they rendered a verdict.

And once the jury's spoken, that's how our system works.

But I did want to just talk a little bit about context and how people have responded to it and how people are feeling.

You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me, 35 years ago.

And when you think about why, in the African-American community at least, there's a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it's important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a - and a history that - that doesn't go away.

There are very few African-American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.

There are probably very few African-American men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me - at least before I was a senator.

There are very few African-Americans who haven't had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.
That happens often.

And, you know, I - I don't want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida.

And it's inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.

The African-American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws, everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case.

Now, this isn't to say that the African-American community is naive about the fact that African-American young men are disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system, that they're disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence. It's not to make excuses for that fact.

Although, black folks do interpret the reasons for that in a historical context. They understand that, some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country. And that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difficult history.

And so, the fact that sometimes that's unacknowledged adds to the frustration. And the fact that a lot of Africa-American boys are painted with a broad brush and the excuses given, "Well, there are these statistics out there that show that African-American boys are more violent," using that as an excuse to then see sons treated differently causes pain.

I think the African-American community is also not naive in understanding that, statistically, somebody like Trayvon Martin was probably, statistically, more likely to be shot by a peer than he was
by somebody else.

So - so folks understand the challenges that exist for African-American boys. But they get frustrated, I think, if they feel that there's no context for it, or - and that context is being denied. And - and that all contributes, I think, to a sense that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different.

Now, the question, for me, at least, and - and I think for a lot of folks is, "Where do we take this? How - how do we learn some lessons from this and move in a positive direction?"

You know, I think it's understandable that there have been demonstrations and vigils and protests and some of that is just going to have to work its way through as long as it remains nonviolent. If I see any violence, then I will remind folks that that dishonors what happened to Trayvon Martin and his family.

But beyond protests or vigils, the question is: Are there some concrete things that we might be able to do? I know that Eric Holder is reviewing what happened down there, but I think it's important for people to have some clear expectations here. Traditionally, these are issues of state and local government. The criminal code and law enforcement is traditionally done at the state and local levels, not at the federal levels.

That doesn't mean, though, that as a nation, we can't do some things that I think would be productive. So let me just give a couple of specifics that I'm still bouncing around with my staff, you know, so we're not rolling out some five-point plan, but some areas where I think all of us could potentially focus.

Number one, precisely because law enforcement is often determined at the state and local level, I think it would be productive for the Justice Department, governors, mayors to work with law enforcement about training at the state and local levels in order to reduce the kind of mistrust in the system that sometimes currently exists.

You know, when I was in Illinois, I passed racial profiling legislation, and it actually did just two simple things. One, it collected data on traffic stops and the race of the person who was stopped, but the other things was it resourced us training police departments across the state on how to think about potential racial bias, and ways to further professionalize what they were doing.

And, initially, the police departments across the state were resistant, but actually they came to recognize that if it was done in a fair, straightforward way that, it would allow them to do their jobs better and communities would have more confidence in them, and in turn be more helpful in - in applying the law. And, obviously, law enforcement's got a very tough job.

So that's one area where I think there are a lot of resources and best practices that could be brought to bear, if state and local governments are receptive, and I think a lot of them would be. And let's figure out, are there ways for us to push out that kind of training.

Along the same lines, I think it would be useful for us to examine some state and - and local laws to see if it - if they are designed in such a way that they may encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations and tragedies that we saw in the Florida case, rather than diffuse potential altercations.

I know that there's been commentary about the fact that the "Stand Your Ground" laws in Florida were not used as a defense in the case.

On the other hand, if we're sending a message as a society in our communities that someone who is armed potentially has the right to use those firearms, even if there's a way for them to exit from a situation, is that really going to be contributing to the kind of peace and security and order that we'd like to see?

And for those who - who resist that idea, that we should think about something like these Stand Your Ground laws, I just ask people to consider, if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car, because he felt threatened? And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, then it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.

Number three - and this is a long-term project - we need to spend some time in thinking about how do we bolster and reinforce our African-American boys? And this is something that Michelle and I talk a lot about. There are a lot of kids out there who need help, who are getting a lot of negative reinforcement. And is there more that we can do to give them the sense that their country cares about them, and values them, and is willing to invest in them?

You know, I'm not naive about the prospects of some grand new federal program. I'm not sure that that's what we're talking about here. But I - I do recognize that, as president, I've got some convening power. And there are a lot of good programs that are being done across the country on this front. And for us to be able to gather together business leaders and local elected officials and clergy and celebrities and athletes and figure out, how are we doing a better job helping young African-American men feel that they're a full part of this society and that - and that they've got pathways and avenues to succeed? You know, I think that would be a pretty good outcome from what was, obviously, a tragic situation. And we're going to spend some time working on that and thinking about that.

And then, finally, I think it's going to be important for all of us to do some soul-searching. You know, there's been talk about, should we convene a conversation on race? I haven't seen that be particularly productive when, you know, politicians try to organize conversations. They end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked into the positions they already have.

On the other hand, in families and churches and workplaces, there's a possibility that people are a little bit more honest and at least you ask yourself your own questions about, am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can? Am I judging people as much as I can based on not the color of their skin, but the content of their character? That would, I think, be an appropriate exercise in the wake of this tragedy.

And let me just leave you with - with the final thought that, as difficult and challenging as this whole episode has been for a lot of people, I don't want us to lose sight that things are getting better. Each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes when it comes to race. It doesn't mean we're in a post-racial society. It doesn't mean that racism is eliminated.

But, you know, when I talk to Malia and Sasha and I listen to their friends and I see them interact, they're better than we are. They're better than we were on these issues. And that's true in every community that I've visited all across the country. And so, you know, we have to be vigilant. And we have to work on these issues. And those of us in authority should be doing everything we can to encourage the better angels of our - nature as opposed to using these episodes to heighten divisions.

But we should also have confidence that kids these days, I think, have more sense than we did back then and certainly more than our parents did or our grandparents did, and that along this long and difficult journey, you know, we're becoming a more perfect union, not a perfect union, but a more perfect union.

All right?

Thank you, guys.

George Zimmerman & Trayvon Martin: No Innocence Left to Kill: Racism, Injustice and Explaining America to My Daughter by Tim Wise

Tim Wise on CNN, 7/14/13: Race, Trayvon Martin and the Zimmerman Trial

July 17, 2013

Here’s my interview with Don Lemon from the day after the Zimmerman verdict, discussing the role of race in the case and public reaction to it. Note one correction: in the interview I note the way that many people have tried to rationalize Zimmerman’s fear of Martin on the basis of Martin being particularly tall and imposing, and point out that in fact he was not. In the interview I claim the coroner’s report listed Martin as 5’10″ rather than the 6’2″ or even 6’4″ that some others have claimed. In fact, the coroner’s report lists Martin as 5’11.” Still, hardly the oversized monster many have made him out to be, and thus the point remains.

No Innocence Left to Kill: Racism, Injustice and Explaining America to My Daughter

Posted on July 14, 2013

You remember, forever and forever, that moment when you first discover the cruelties and injustices of the world, and having been ill-prepared for them, your heart breaks open.

I mean really discover them, and for yourself; not because someone else told you to see the elephant standing, gigantic and unrelenting in the middle of your room, but because you saw him, and now you know he’s there, and will never go away until you attack him, and with a vengeance.

Last night, and I am writing it down so that I will not forget — because I already know she will not — my oldest daughter, who attained the age of 12 only eleven days ago, became an American. Not in the legal sense. She was already that, born here, and — as a white child in a nation set up for people just like her — fully entitled to all the rights and privileges thereof, without much question or drama. But now she is American in the fullest and most horrible sense of that word, by which I mean she has been truly introduced to the workings of the system of which she is both a part, and, at the same time, merely an inheritor. A system that fails — with a near-unanimity almost incomprehensible to behold — to render justice to black peoples, the family of Trayvon Martin being only the latest battered by the machinations of American justice, but with all certainty not the last.

To watch her crumble, eyes swollen with tears too salty, too voluminous for her daddy to wipe away? Well now that is but the latest of my heartbreaks; to have to hold her, and tell her that everything will be OK, and to hear her respond, “No it won’t be!” Because see, even though she learned last night about injustice and even more than she knew before about the racial fault lines that divide her nation, she is still a bit too young to fully comprehend the notion of the marathon, as opposed to the sprint; to understand that this is a very long race, indeed that even 26.2 miles is but a crawl in the long distance struggle for justice. And that if she is as bothered by what she sees as it appears, well now she will have to put on some incredibly strong running shoes, because this, my dear, is the work.

This is why daddy does what he does. Now you know.

And yes, I am fully aware that there are still those who would admonish me for even suggesting this case was about race. Not just the defenders of George Zimmerman, with whom I shall deal in a moment, but even the state, whose prosecutors de-racialized this case to a point that frankly was as troubling as anything the defense tried to do. Maybe more. I mean, the defense’s job is to represent their client, and I cannot fault them for having done so successfully. But the prosecution’s job is to make it clear to the jury what the defendant did and preferably why he did it. By agreeing to a fundamentally colorblind, “this isn’t about race,” narrative, they gave away the best part of their arsenal before the war had really started.

Because anyone who still believes that this case had nothing to do with race — or worse, that it was simply a tragedy, the racial meaning of which was concocted by those whom they love to term “race hustlers” — are suffering from a delusion so profound as to call into question their capacities for rational thought. And yet still, let us try to reason with them for a second, as if they were capable of hearing it. Let’s do that for the sake of rational thought itself, as a thing we still believe in; and for our country, which some of us still believe — against all evidence — is capable of doing justice and living up to its promises. In short, let’s give this one more shot.

Those who deny the racial angle to the killing of Trayvon Martin can only do so by a willful ignorance, a carefully cultivated denial of every logical, obvious piece of evidence before them, and by erasing from their minds — if indeed they ever had anything in there to erase — the entire history of American criminal justice, the criminal suspicion regularly attached to black men, and the inevitable results whenever black men pay for these suspicions with their lives. They must choose to leave the dots unconnected between, for instance, Martin on the one hand, and then on the other, Amadou Diallo or Sean Bell or Patrick Dorismond, or any of a number of other black men whose names — were I to list them — would take up page after page, and whose names wouldn’t mean shit to most white people even if I did list them, and that is the problem.

Oh sure, I’ve heard it all before. George Zimmerman didn’t follow Trayvon Martin because Martin was black; he followed him because he thought he might be a criminal. Yes precious, I get that. But whatyou don’t get — and by not getting it while still managing to somehow hold down a job and feedyourself, scare the shit out of me — is far more important. Namely, if the presumption of criminality that Zimmerman attached to Martin was so attached because the latter was black — and would not have been similarly attached to him had he been white — then the charge of racial bias and profiling is entirely appropriate.

And surely we cannot deny that the presumption of criminality was dependent on this dead child’s race can we? Before you answer, please note that even the defense did not deny this. Indeed, Zimmerman’s attorneys acknowledged in court that their client’s concerns about Martin were connected directly to the fact that previous break-ins in the neighborhood had been committed by young black males.

This is why it matters that George Zimmerman justified his following of Martin because as he put it, “these fucking punks” always get away. In other words, Zimmerman saw Martin as just another “fucking punk” up to no good, similar to those who had committed previous break-ins in the community. But why? What behavior did Martin display that would have suggested he was criminally inclined? Zimmerman’s team could produce nothing to indicate anything particularly suspicious about Martin’s actions that night. According to Zimmerman, Martin was walking in the rain, “looking around,” or “looking around at the houses.” But not looking in windows, or jiggling doorknobs or porch screens, or anything that might have suggested a possible burglar. At no point was any evidence presented by the defense to justify their client’s suspicions. All we know is that Zimmerman saw Martin and concluded that he was just like those other criminals. And to the extent there was nothing in Martin’s actions — talking on the telephone and walking slowly home from the store — that would have indicated he was another of those “fucking punks,” the only possible explanation as to why George Zimmerman would have seen him that way is because Martin, as a young black male was presumed to be a likely criminal, and for no other reason, ultimately, but color.

Which is to say, Trayvon Martin is dead because he is black and because George Zimmerman can’t differentiate — and didn’t see the need to — between criminal and non-criminal black people. Which is to say, George Zimmerman is a racist. Because if you cannot differentiate between black criminals and just plain kids, and don’t even see the need to try, apparently, you are a racist. I don’t care what your Peruvian mother says, or her white husband who married the Peruvian mother, or your brother, or your black friends, or the black girl you took to prom, or the black kids you mentored. If you see a black child and assume “criminal,” despite no behavioral evidence at all to suggest such a conclusion, you are a racist. No exceptions. That goes for George Zimmerman and for anyone reading this.

And here’s the thing: even in the evidentiary light most favorable to George Zimmerman this would remain true. Because even if we believe, as the jury did, that Zimmerman acted in self-defense, there can be no question that were it not for George Zimmerman’s unfounded and racially-biased suspicions that evening, Trayvon Martin would be alive, and Zimmerman would be an entirely anonymous, pathetic wanna-be lawman, about whom no one would much care. It was he who initiated the drama that night. And even if you believe that Trayvon Martin attacked Zimmerman after being followed by him, that doesn’t change.

But apparently that moral and existential truth matters little to this jury or to the white reactionaries so quick to praise their decision. To them, the fact that Martin might well have had reason to fear Zimmerman that night, might have thought he was standing his ground, confronted by someone who himself was “up to no good” is irrelevant. They are saying that black people who fight back against someone they think is creepy and who is following them, and might intend to harm them, are more responsible for their deaths than those who ultimately kill them. What they have said, and make no mistake about it, is that any white person who wants to kill a black person can follow one, confront them, maybe even provoke them; and as soon as that black person perhaps takes a swing at them, or lunges at them, the white pursuer can pull their weapon, fire, and reasonably assume that they will get away with this act. I can start drama, and if you respond to the drama I created, you are to blame, not me.

But we know, if we are remotely awake, that this same logic would never be used to protect a black person accused of such an act. Let’s travel back to 1984 shall we, and hypothetically apply this logic to the Bernhard Goetz case in a little thought experiment so as to illustrate the point.

Goetz, as you’ll recall, was the white man who, afraid of young black men because he had been previously mugged, decided to shoot several such youth on a subway. They had not threatened him. They had asked him for money, and apparently teased him a bit. But at no point did they threaten him. Nonetheless, he drew his weapon and fired several rounds into them, even (according to his own initial account, later recanted), shooting a second time at one of the young men, after saying, “You don’t look so bad, here, have another.”

Goetz, predictably, was seen as a hero by the majority of the nation’s whites, if polls and anecdotal evidence are to be believed. He was a Dirty Harry-like vigilante, fighting back against crime, and more to the point, black crime. Ultimately he too would successfully plead self-defense and face conviction only on a minor weapons charge.

But let us pretend for a second that after Goetz pulled his weapon and began to fire at the young men on that subway, one of them had perhaps pulled his own firearm. Now as it turns out none of the boys had one, but let’s just pretend. And let’s say that one of them pulled a weapon precisely because, after all, he and his friends were being fired upon and so, fearing for his life, he opted to defend himself against this deranged gunman. And let’s pretend that the young man managed to hit Goetz, perhaps paralyzing him as Goetz did, in fact, to one of his victims. Does anyone seriously believe that that young black man would have been able to press a successful self-defense claim in court the way Goetz ultimately did? Or in the court of white public opinion the way Zimmerman has? If you would answer yes to this question you are either engaged in an act of self-delusion so profound as to defy imagination, or you are so deeply committed to fooling others as to make you truly dangerous.

But we are not fooled.

We don’t even have to travel back thirty years to the Goetz case to make the point, in fact. We can stay here, with this case. If everything about that night in Sanford had been the same, but Martin, fearing this stranger following him — the latter not identifying himself at any point as Neighborhood Watch — had pulled a weapon and shot George Zimmerman out of a genuine fear that he was going to be harmed (and even if Zimmerman had confronted him in a way so as to make that fear more than speculative), would the claim of self-defense have rung true for those who are so convinced by it in this case? Would this jury have likely concluded that Trayvon had had a right to defend himself against the perceived violent intentions of George Zimmerman?

Oh, and would it have taken so long for Martin to be arrested in the first place, had he been the shooter? Would he have been granted bail? Would he have been given the benefit of the doubt the way Zimmerman was by virtually every white conservative in America of note? And remember, those white folks were rushing to proclaim the shooting of Martin justified even before there had been any claim made by Zimmerman that Trayvon had attacked him. Before anyone had heard Zimmerman’s version of the story, much of white America, and virtually its entire right flank had already decided that Martin must have been up to no good because he wore a hoodie (in the rain, imagine), and was tall (actually according to the coroner he was 5’11″ not 6’2″ or 6’4″ as some have claimed), and that because of those previous break-ins, Zimmerman had every right to confront him.

No, Martin-as-shooter would never have benefitted from these public pronouncements of innocence the way Zimmerman did.

Because apparently black people don’t have a right to defend themselves. Which is why Marissa Alexander, a woman who had suffered violence at the hands of her husband (by his own admission in fact), was recently sentenced to 20 years in prison after firing a warning shot into a wall when she felt he was about to yet again harm her.

And so it continues. Year after year and case after case it continues, with black life viewed as expendable in the service of white fear, with black males in particular (but many a black female as well and plenty of Latino folk too) marked as problems to be solved, rather than as children to be nurtured. And tonight, their parents will hold them and try to assure them that everything is going to be OK, even as they will have to worry again tomorrow that their black or brown child may represent the physical embodiment of white anxiety, and pay the ultimate price for that fact, either at the hands of a random loser with a law enforcement jones, or an actual cop doing the bidding of the state. In short, they will hold their children and lie to them, at least a little — and to themselves — because who doesn’t want their child to believe that everything will be alright?

But in calmer moments these parents of color will also tell their children the truth. That in fact everything is not going to be OK, unless we make it so. That justice is not an act of wish fulfillment but the product of resistance. Because black parents know these things like they know their names, and as a matter of survival they make sure their children know them too.

And if their children have to know them, then mine must know them as well.

And now they do.

If their children are to be allowed no innocence free from these concerns, then so too must mine sacrifice some of their naiveté upon the altar of truth.

And now they have.

So to the keepers of white supremacy, I should offer this final word. You can think of it as a word of caution. My oldest daughter knows who you are and saw what you did. You have made a new enemy. One day, you might wish you hadn’t.